Comment by digitalhobbit

I think it's all up to you what you make of this situation. For context: I've been programming for well over 40 years, and I've worked as a software engineer (or eng manager) for close to 30 years. I've gone through cycles of coding a lot and cycles of focusing more on architecture, product, or the business side. And I loved coding when I first started. Making pixels appear on the monitor felt magical back then. But coding got old over time, and I've found myself drawn to higher level concerns, including business, product, engineering architecture trade-offs, etc.

Lately, I've found this new AI assisted coding world immensely empowering. In the last few weeks, I've built web apps (e.g. Astro), an agentic pipeline (Python, Pydantic AI), a proof of concept for a roguelike game (C++ with libtcod), and I'm now working on a cross-platform desktop app in Tauri 2 (Rust and TypeScript). And I'm learning a ton. Not necessarily low level language details - I'm increasingly trusting those to the LLM - but application architecture, product design, marketing, agentic engineering, etc. I've found this genuinely empowering and haven't felt this motivated about application development in decades.

I'd say zoom out a level and see if you can find the joy in learning some of the higher level concerns.