Why I don’t feel the excitement when coding now, unlike before because of AI?

A little ironic that the header image was generated using AI, but oh well...

Before, when I create a game, I would go to countless YouTube tutorials. Then getting yelled on countless forums because of my poor phrasing (thanks to my Filipino-English) and to my duplicate noob problems like “How to move your character in 2D platformer in Unity3D?”, especially on StackOverflow. Or Google this and that, and then getting deeper into the rabbit hole until I lost track of time.

Thanks to my passion in game development, I came across this beauty of Software Design Patterns, it’s like coding with make-up and cosmetics – making your code prim-and-prop for the other coders to read or decipher. Thanks to this thousand-page book of Unity, it introduced me to these new design patterns: Singleton Pattern, Factory Design Pattern, Observer Pattern, Object Pooling and many more. The beauty of learning them after countless errors, hours of debugging, and copy-pasting from who-knows-whom GitHub repos I’ve been led to. And the amount of effort I’ve exerted just to learn them and adding those to my game were truly exciting.

Now, thanks to AI, I’ll just tell it what to do, and it will generate the codes that I need. Sure, I can set it to just guide me instead of giving me the whole codebase, but when you’re on your work, and your boss says it must be done tomorrow, you bet your ass you will lean on AI (whether you like it or not), and pray it gets approved and be done with it. The beauty of programming is now dead. There’s no elegance in generating and becoming a code-monkey, or in today’s word, a vibe-coder, just to get paid with a minimum wage, especially in the Philippines, alongside the thousand-peso deductions because of government’s taxes and sketchy benefits.