Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

Many people who enjoyed building and coding things are going through this right now, myself included.

In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.

After a while, I found two things that have helped:

1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)

2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.

I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.

I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

There might be a lot going on, depending on what kind of programming tasks you use AI for, but here's one hunch: I think the current AI usage pattern disrupts our core sense-making mechanism on the code we create. It jumps from nothing to a full implementation too quickly and there's no gradual learning curve (impedance match) gently pulling us along, which makes the coding process highly disorienting.

https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...

First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional.

Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.

Programming was the thing that clicked for me most out of anything I've done in my life. That's not to say I was an exceptional programmer, probably a bit above average among professionals but not by much. However for some reason I am absolutely having the time of my life using AI tools to build all kinds of fun and useful (to me) things.

I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.

Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result.

Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.

It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.

I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.

It's the opposite for me, AI takes away the drudgery, and I want to build everything I can think of.

Choose between 1. You don't love what you're working on or 2. You don't enjoy working with AI. IMO those are the two primary problems, and both solvable in their own way (more or less).

Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever?

So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.

Actual doing is usually responsible for the long-term satisfaction people derive from work.

Cut that out and you're just managing an email inbox.

Suggestion from left field. Solve problems.

There are plenty of unsolved problems in this world. Rather than rant how seniors still live mostly analog lives because "tech is aimed at 20-somethings", the old saying goes, solving problems that don't make a quick buck and scale to insane (and as we see with Meta, unsustainable) sizes [0] but which meet needs is the definition of "value".

No trillion dollar IPO, just problems solved, and solved more easily (supposedly). Everyone's looking for the goose that lays golden eggs, (and spending trillions to do so) when there's a need for the edible variety. Metaphor; I'm not suggesting going into the egg business.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505036

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/mark-zuckerberg-shockin...

When using AI you're not the one doing the work, thus you don't feel the same satisfaction as crafting something yourself, nor does it incite any passion.

I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.

I don’t think it has anything to do with AI.

My thoughts:

1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest

2. Not special any more. I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I was doing something special. That might be egotistical but whatever. I felt like I didn’t have as much to say

Similarly I made games for decades. Then Unity and Unreal made it trivial. New games are posted hourly on itch.io and 1000 other sites. I no longer felt special making a game

If anything I think AI might contribute here. It used to feel special to code. Now, anyone can do it. Yes they are not perfect. But I’ve met non coders making really impressive apps. and, it will only get better at it.

That said, LLMs have made me pick up and complete 6 projects in the last 6 months. They removed the tedium and frustration of dealing with bad docs, version breaks, etc and let me build the things I wanted to build without getting stuck in the weeds

all of this is the long way of saying, whatever issue you’re having with motivation it’s got nothing to do with AI. It’s something else and you’re just using AI as an excuse because it’s the new thing

Your brain, your values. Only you can know why you ascribe less value to things that AI readily produces, but it is fundamentally a choice you get to make.

In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.

You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.

It should focus on dopamine and the habit of getting rewards without putting in much effort. We should identify activities that give instant gratification and gradually introduce activities that require more effort, helping users get comfortable with delayed rewards and build better habits over time.

It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement.

User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.

Because you perceive a readily available result to be worth less? Why do something whose value has gone down?

Try to increase the complexity of the work you're doing. It's not that AIs don't makes mistakes but they are able to pattern match to larger and larger pieces of the problem as more people use it and more iterations of the model are released. So your challenge is now in steering it in a way that these errors are minimised while reducing bloat.

Try to think of yourself as a professor who's trying to come up with a problem statement worth solving. The AI is your "lab" that will help you run experiments.

Interestingly enough, I went the other way round. AI made results readily available, but there was a combination of needing to fine-tune the process + adding corrections which I found a lot better than tinkering with code. I was never a craftsman, but I had interests in areas adjacent and not-so-adjacent, so AI freeing up my time made me able to link other things together.

I actually enjoy work more now.

Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty - witness video games.

The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist...

Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.

My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.

You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.

I don’t get it. The premise is flawed.

AI does not create world shattering products.

You haven’t made any big hits either (with or without AI).

What’s changed?

Use AI all you want, that isn’t going to bring your passion to life. It’s no different than using an IDE or React or GitHub.

The world is still starving for novel experiences and solutions to annoying problems and clunky workflows.

AI hasn’t changed that. It hasn’t delivered anything either. For that you need the lonely mind of a man

Almost everyone is now about to feel what Lee Sedol felt a decade ago.

We are all Lee Sedol.

how are we supposed to answer that? we don't know anything about you lol. you gotta give me more info, like, results for what? when you're coding? what are you working on? is it driven by yourself or is it for your job? help me help you.

Do things in physical space.

I don’t give a crap about passion, I need to pay rent.

Hypothetically if Google starts hiring paint dry watchers I’d do it for 200k a year

Why does cheating give you impostor syndrome?

You stopped creating value and started extracting it. You stopped thinking about how to best serve humanity and started thinking about how to use AI

Same tbh. I lost my motivation to do any work aside from my job for a while. Now I'm working on some stuff for my friends, heavy using AI and it's just...meh. Whatever feeling of craftsmanship and skill I had is gone, now it's mostly mechanical. And if this is the case, I feel like I might as well go do something more interesting / lucrative / beneficial to society.

[philosophical mode ON, please don't take too seriously/personally if you care to engage]

You may have seen the regular stream of youtube videos in your feed with the hook that reads something like "humans will be obsolete in two years" or "software development as a career is over".

I disagree, and furthermore, that's a psyop! Don't believe the hype!

You may have seen the endless stream of technical articles here complaining about the craft going out of coding and devs being reduced to AI slop pull request reviewers.

I scoff at these devs, have they no agency? I also choose to believe they are part of the psyop even if they are real people with real experiences because their articles get boosted with a purpose.

And what do I believe the purpose is? What is the psyop? I think it is many-pronged.

We developers are quite powerful in society, and it is useful to humble us from time to time. It is useful to keep us compliant. Having us accept a dire fate makes it easier to tamp down wage inflation (which helps pay the AI tab in the short term, BTW!).

Also, regarding cycles and generations, having AI pump out an ocean of tech debt creates busy work for future generations to unravel. This make-work aimed at maintaining and fixing things is useful in that it keeps people steadily employed and controls the rate of new development and technological advancement.

Sometimes I muse when I hear stories about AI vendors' ability to "turn up/down" the intelligence factor on coding agents. Is this a fine tuning of the slop error factor getting it just where they need it to be?

I observe in my career that getting developer tools paid for by corporations has been a bit like getting blood from a stone. Yet suddenly, corporate america is in a rush to put this super costly _subscription-based_ tool in my hands. What gives?

Yes, latest fad/bubble/craze. A few sillycon valley tech bros are trying to make a computer god superintelligence to worship and control, maybe, ugh I guess probably some of them.

But, from a metaphysical standpoint, one can argue there is a "spirit" to every age. This age's spirit seems obsessed with management. And, there are high level leaders who are obsessed with managing the human population with ever-increasing fidelity. So of course AI will be the latest finance/technology/information system that is released along those lines.

It's your choice how to proceed, as with all things use your free will. I will observe you do everyone you know and all of your descendants the most good if you constantly strive to have the highest aims.

In my opinion, 'slop' creates an unacceptable crisis. Slop will continue the wheel of wasted energy and potential that we are in now. To break this cycle, developers need to be obsessed with controlled code, zero bugs, and human-led software design.

What does any of that mean in practice? How? The answers come from our community, from thought leaders and taste makers. We need to develop industry standards to judge one another by and then hold one another accountable.

As to you personally and your passion problem, I get it. I am feeling the same. I hope you have a small personal project, maybe never to be shared, that you can at least retreat to when your energy is low.

I recently stayed up late and upgraded the build system on mine, just some busy work I knew I needed to get done and which let me ply some new devops techniques I learned. It felt really good to be reminded that I could be productive and clever even in a low energy situation. And my week improved after that.