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A developer reflects on how pressure to adopt AI tools threatened the joy they found in writing code. After stepping back, they reframe their role around three new sources of satisfaction: solving real problems for real people, mastering AI craftsmanship (prompting, context-setting, constraints), and owning quality by catching AI mistakes through planning and code review. The conclusion is that meaningful work didn't disappear—it shifted from writing code to building product outcomes.

AI Made Me Hate My Job… Then I Found New Joy

Fabian Letsch

I stumbled across this a few weeks ago, changed my whole outlook on AI: <a href="https://o16g.com/manifesto/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Outcome Engineering</a>
Once you switch your mindset from “writing code” to “producing great outcomes” you see the arrival of AI in a whole new light.

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&quot;People Don’t Pay for Code. They Pay for Outcomes.&quot;
</blockquote>
This is actually a good way to put it. AI just gives us code but never the novelty of thinking for a solution for a modern problem. That task is still up to us developers.

I resonate with this. I think the term “vibe coding” is ready to go away finally, but I definitely think AI assisted coding has brought me more joy, because I’ve learned that they are essentially “delegation tools”, and being able to delegate work to “someone else” has been invaluable. It also has taught me that the skill of <a href="https://confident-coding.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">troubleshooting and debugging</a> is going to be increasingly ever more important as time goes by. These tools can assist with that, too, but its a mindset, and one that compliments the flowstate of AI coding quite well.

Q&amp;A people, that’s the end of all of this…

Yes, but in this way we teach the machine to write correct and good code.