I had to move a logo a few pixels on a site I was tweaking.
A year ago that meant a whole little parade. Open the browser inspect panel, click the element, nudge the value, refresh until it looked right in context. Open VS Code, hunt the same file and selector, change the line, save. Commit, push, or upload again so the live page matched what I had just checked. For one small visual fix, the chain is long if you write it out.
There was friction in that chain. There was also a rhythm I used to like. Browser, editor, deploy, see the page settle. Tiny proof that I still knew where things lived.
These days I mostly run site tweaks through an agent: a chat tool that can open files, edit them, and ship the change for me. I describe what I want, sometimes drop a screenshot, and leave it running. The agent walks the whole parade while I keep something else open in another window.
The logo moved. The site updated. I got time back. And I noticed, again, that the old click of satisfaction was missing. Not anger. Not guilt. Just quiet. Is there any joy left in this, or only efficiency?
Gold that you cannot eat
Around the same time I read Steve Fenton’s piece on The New Stack. He uses an old Greek story to talk about AI and software, and the story is worth telling properly.
King Midas did a favor for the god Dionysus. As a reward, he got one wish. Midas asked that everything he touched would turn to gold. At first it was a party trick. A twig became bullion. A stone glittered. Even the roses in the garden turned to perfect metal flowers.
Then he sat down to eat. The bread hardened in his hands. The wine became heavy the moment it touched his lips. His daughter ran to hug him and turned to gold on contact. The gift was real. It just could not feed him anymore.
Fenton maps that onto products. When anyone with a subscription can turn “I want a button that does X” into working code, shipping a mountain of features stops being a strategy. If the whole offer is wishes turned into screens, you are standing on the same gold table. Read his essay if you want that argument unpacked. It is sharp.
What hit me harder is the personal version.
The old loop was not always fun. Some days it was annoying. Still it was mine: inspect, file, deploy, check. Small obstacles in a row. Sweat is too strong a word for nudging a logo, but there was effort, and effort is part of what made the finish feel like a finish.
Hand the full loop to an agent and the outcome is gold. Fast. Correct enough. Flat.
Here is what I keep asking myself. If you do not suffer a little, if you do not sweat through the steps, can you still get the dopamine hit of “I did this,” even for something tiny? I do not think the joy was mostly in the logo sitting two pixels to the left. It was in the way you got there. Remove the way. Remove the obstacles you had to push through. What is left? You still get the golden result. It just does not feed you.
Researchers have a name for one long-term risk: automation complacency, meaning if you stop walking the path yourself, the path gets fuzzy in your head. Fair. Right now I am stuck on the shorter feeling. Something that used to feel like play now often feels like supervision. Did the parade happen correctly? Hard to celebrate when you were not on the route.
Why everyone sees this differently
That logo quiet in my chest is real for me. It is also not the whole story, and that is why these conversations get tense so fast.
I used to be a web developer. Then I became a project manager. Then I drifted into AI and data work and started my own business. I still wear all of those hats in memory, if not on my business card every Monday. The same agent workflow feels different depending which hat I put on.
As a coder, the painful version is easy to name. If AI can run more and more of the coding loop, and the joy was in writing code, prompts are a thin substitute. I can make them precise. I can make them useful. Excited the same way? Often, no. That is a loss, not a mood.
As a PM, the last ten years were mostly remote teams. Create a ticket, someone picks it up, work shows up for review. That rhythm is familiar. Small spec, AI executes, I check the result, move on. Honestly, from that hat, I struggle to see a huge gap between “developer in another timezone” and “agent in another panel.” The logo job stung in the coder memory, not in the PM reflex.
As a founder, both feelings show up in the same week. Things I would never have had hours to build now exist because an agent had hours. And then the doubt: is it still worth building anything if the middle is this cheap, this fast, this easy to copy? I do not have a clean answer. I live in the oscillation.
Then there are the people who never mourned coding because they never lived there. I understand the vibe coders who ship iOS apps without ever having been “developers” in the old sense. For them the joy is creation. The app in the store. The demo that works. They are not pretending prompts feel like typing a kernel module. They did not lose a craft they spent a decade sharpening.
People who coded for a living are processing something else. You can see the whole spectrum in public reactions, from quiet grief to angry denial to forced cheer. None of that is fake. It is the same weather hitting different houses.
That is why I find it hard to argue about whether AI kills the joy in a profession. Someone who says yes can be right. Someone who says it opened doors they never thought they could walk through can also be right. We talk as if we mean one shared experience. We rarely do.
So is it gone or just moved?
My answer is not a single yes or no. It depends what you use AI for, how you use it, and whether it replaced something you genuinely enjoyed or only the parts you were happy to leave behind. The trade is personal, and we do not always notice what we signed away.
For me, the joy moved off the manual steps of creation and landed somewhere else. Not always higher, not always nobler, just different. I get more of it now from building something bigger than a pixel nudge, from experimenting with tech I would not have dared to touch when every hour had to pay rent, from learning while the thing is half-built instead of after a course I never finished. Writing these posts is part of it too. And sometimes the joy is not in the hours with AI at all. It is in the hours I get back: family, less grind, still shipping more than when every logo fix ate an evening. The agent saved me a boring half hour on that tweak. I do not want to pretend I miss every minute of it. I do miss the rhythm sometimes. Both can be true without canceling each other.
I do not have a rule yet for when to hand off a step and when to walk the long route on purpose. The logo stayed moved. So did the evening I did not spend in the editor. I am still noticing which part of that trade I would make again, and which part I would take back if I could do it without pretending the clock runs backward.