AI is making every side project feel like meaningless slop

The mental toll of the current AI shift is hitting hard. New software releases don't trigger that same excitement anymore because we know they're just wrappers or generated features. Even diving into new CS concepts feels futile when an LLM can explain it, implement it, and optimize it in three seconds. The traditional grind—studying for interviews or polishing a portfolio—feels like preparing for a race that's already been won by a machine. Why spend months mastering a framework when the job itself might be obsolete in a year?

I've noticed this especially with side projects. It used to be that building something from scratch was a badge of honor. Now, it feels like adding another grain of sand to a mountain of AI-generated noise. If a random person on the street can generate a functional app in ten minutes using a basic AI workflow, where is the actual value in the craft?

It's exactly like enabling cheats in a video game. Sure, you have infinite health and gold, and you can blast through the levels, but the actual joy of the game vanishes. The struggle, the failure, and the eventual breakthrough were the points of the experience. When you remove the friction, you remove the meaning.

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to find a new "hard mode" for development. Maybe the shift needs to move away from the "how" (coding) and more toward the "what" (deep system architecture or solving problems that don't have a dataset yet). But right now, it feels like the purpose and the intrinsic joy of building things have been stripped away, leaving us with a world of efficient, soulless output.

If we're moving toward a world of autonomous LLM agents doing the heavy lifting, we have to redefine what "skill" even means. Is it just prompt engineering now? Or is there some deeper level of engineering that AI can't touch? I'm struggling to find that line.