“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I know I’ve posted some upbeat content about AI before, celebrating its potential and encouraging teams to embrace these tools. And honestly, I still believe in that future. But today I want to share something more personal, more nuanced — the one thing that currently worries me most about using AI for software development: lack of joy.
It’s easy to talk about productivity gains, competitive advantages, and how AI will reshape our industry. We’ve had those conversations. What’s harder to discuss is what might be lost along the way – something intangible but vital to many of us who chose this profession not just for the paycheck, but because we genuinely love the craft of programming.
It’s 8:47 AM, fresh coffee steams on the table, and my headphones cocoon me in the perfect playlist. I go to Asana, where I know exactly what I need to do that day. I open Neovim and code starts flowing through me. I’ve lost the sense of time; I’m completely present in the moment.
That, my friends, is what I used to describe as a happy work day. I’m sure that some of you will resonate.
Those days I’d emerge tired but fulfilled. Something about the direct connection between thought and creation — where my fingers were simply the conduit for translating ideas into working software — felt almost transcendent. The struggle to solve problems, the small victories along the way, and the satisfaction of building something from nothing… these weren’t just aspects of the job; they were the reason I fell in love with programming in the first place.
This experience I’m describing is what psychologists call “flow” — a mental state where you’re fully immersed in an activity, energized by deep focus and complete involvement. First described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the psychologist I quoted at the beginning), flow is that sweet spot where challenge meets skill, where the task at hand is neither too easy (causing boredom) nor too difficult (causing anxiety). It’s a state strongly associated with creativity, productivity, and most importantly — happiness. For software developers, it’s that magical zone where problems become puzzles rather than obstacles, where hours pass like minutes, and where the boundary between you and your code seems to dissolve.
Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that… But even when I do get technical, I usually just open Cursor and prompt my way out of 90% of it. It’s way more productive, but more passive as well.
Instead of that deep immersion where I’d craft each function, I’m now more like a curator? I describe what I want, evaluate what the AI gives me, tweak the prompts, and iterate. It’s efficient, yes. Revolutionary, even. But something essential feels missing — that state of flow where time vanishes and you’re completely absorbed in creation. If this becomes the dominant workflow across teams, do we risk an industry full of highly productive yet strangely detached developers?
So that’s what I’m worried about, and honestly, I have no idea what to think of it. On one hand, it’s clear to me that people using AI tools are more productive. On the other hand, I worry about long-term happiness and joy in their craft when they’re simply hitting tab to generate code rather than writing it themselves.
When we outsource the parts of programming that used to demand our complete focus and creativity, do we also outsource the opportunity for satisfaction? Can we find the same fulfillment in prompt engineering that we once found in problem-solving through code?
Perhaps what we need is a new understanding of where happiness can exist in this AI-augmented world. Maybe the joy doesn’t have to disappear completely — it just shifts. Instead of finding delight in writing the perfect algorithm, perhaps we’ll discover satisfaction in the higher-level thinking about system design, in the creative process of describing exactly what we want to build, or in the human aspects of software development that AI can’t touch.
I don’t have all the answers. But maybe, just maybe, we need to be intentional about preserving (some) spaces in our work where flow can still happen — where we still code by hand sometimes, not because it’s efficient, but because it make us happy.
After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for?
