Comment by akoboldfrying

Not sure if this will help, but nothing can take away the enjoyment of investing time in doing something "the hard way" for the sake of it unless you let it. Factories have been able to make good wooden tables efficiently since probably the 1950s, but there are still people who make their own with woodworking tools because they find it satisfying.

I think the biggest effect of AI here is that you can no longer make the inference from "that program looks impressive" to "the person who created it must be very skilful and/or invested a lot of effort in making it". So someone else seeing your work might not appreciate the level of effort and skill you put into it, or might even suspect you of lying if you say explicitly that you made it "by hand". I'm not going to say that we shouldn't care what others think; that's not realistic, most of us do want some recognition for things we've worked hard on. I think there will always be people interested in doing things the hard way, and among those people the "old" paths to recognition and respect still operate, it just gets harder because there has to be a lot of trust between them that no one's taken the easy way out (AI) and pretended otherwise.