Comment by hax0ron3

I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast than by shipping great software slowly. I don't have a problem with that in principle. But it does mean that for me, the software development side of things has never had much soul and humanity to begin with. It was just being a glorified assembly line worker, with the sprints being the assembly line. Of course, others may have had very different experiences, but that has been mine.

For me, AIs have actually made the job more soulful, not less. For one thing, it lets me use the part of my mind that is good at human language, not just the part of my mind that is good at software. This makes the job feel a bit less one-dimensional in terms of what parts of me are engaged while doing it. For another, I find it liberating to no longer have to think much about boilerplate code or to spend time roaming around the Internet looking up documentation of various language syntax and API details, the vast majority of which are arbitrary rather than being based on any kind of mathematical beauty. For me it makes the job more soulful that I can think of the job on a higher level instead of having to spend effort on arbitrary and tedious details.

Of course there is still the question of "will the job even exist in a few years, at least for more than a relatively small number of people?". But that's a separate question. For now at least, I am finding that for me AIs have brought a lot more soul and humanity to the job than it ever had before.