The 'EASY BUTTON' ruined everything...

A few months ago I wrote a post about missing coding. It got a reaction. People messaged me saying they felt the same thing but didn't want to say it out loud because it sounds ungrateful. You're shipping more than ever, you're productive, you're building things at a pace that was unthinkable two years ago. Complaining about that feels like complaining about winning the lottery.

But I'm going to complain about it anyway, because 20 shipped projects later the feeling has only gotten worse. I ship things and feel nothing. I build things and don't care about them. I used to love the things I made. Now I'm indifferent to them, and I think I understand why.

The easy button killed the struggle, and the struggle was the point

There's a particular high that comes from wrestling with a problem for hours or days and then cracking it. The bugs that used to keep me thinking in the shower, the architecture decisions I'd sketch on napkins at lunch, the satisfaction of finally getting a stubborn piece of logic to behave after two days of swearing at it. That was the work. That was also the reward.

Now I describe what I want. The model writes it. I review it. I ship it. I move on to the next one. The output is the same or better. The experience of producing it is completely different. It's like the difference between cooking a meal from scratch and ordering delivery. The food on the table might be identical. The feeling is not.

The easy button is a real drug. You press it and something appears. It works. You press it again. More stuff. But somewhere around project 12 or 13 I noticed I wasn't solving problems anymore. I was describing problems and watching them get solved. And those are two fundamentally different activities, with fundamentally different emotional payoffs.

Psychology has a name for this (several, actually)

I kept thinking this was just me being nostalgic or dramatic, so I went looking for whether the feeling had any basis in research. Turns out it does, and the evidence is annoyingly clear.

Flow state

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called 'flow' - the state of complete absorption in an activity where you lose track of time, your sense of self quiets down, and the work becomes its own reward. His research found that flow requires a specific balance: the challenge of the task has to match your skill level. Too easy and you're bored. Too hard and you're anxious. Right in the middle and you enter a state that triggers a neurochemical cascade - dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins - that makes the experience intrinsically rewarding.

AI coding tools obliterate that balance. The challenge drops to near zero while your 'skill' (prompting) isn't really a skill in the Csikszentmihalyi sense - it doesn't grow in complexity the way debugging or architecture does. There's no flow because there's no friction. You're permanently parked in the 'too easy' zone, which Csikszentmihalyi's model explicitly predicts will produce boredom and disengagement. That's exactly what I'm feeling.

The IKEA effect

In 2012, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely published a paper called 'The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love' in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. The finding was simple: people place disproportionately higher value on things they helped build, even when the objective quality is identical to something pre-made. Participants who assembled IKEA furniture valued it more than identical pre-assembled pieces. Origami folders valued their own clumsy creations nearly as much as expert-made ones.

The catch - and this is the part that hit home - was that the effect only works when you successfully complete the task yourself. If the creation is destroyed or the task is left unfinished, the extra valuation disappears. It's not about the output. It's about the effort you invested in producing it.

When AI writes the code for me, I haven't invested effort. I've invested a prompt. The IKEA effect predicts I'll value the result less, and that's exactly what happens. I look at projects I shipped with minimal struggle and feel like they could belong to anyone. They probably could.

Self-determination theory

Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory, first formalized in 1985, identifies three psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy (feeling in control of your choices), competence (feeling effective and skilled), and relatedness (feeling connected to others).

AI-assisted coding takes a direct hit at competence. When the model does the heavy lifting, you're not exercising skill in a meaningful way. You're not growing. You're not getting better at anything except describing what you want, which is a weirdly passive skill that doesn't compound the way real engineering knowledge does. The theory predicts that when competence needs aren't met, intrinsic motivation drops and work satisfaction follows. Again, that matches the experience perfectly.

I'm not the only one feeling this

OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor said on the Cheeky Pint podcast that stepping away from writing code has been 'emotionally difficult.' He described coding as something that used to be a core part of his identity and craftsmanship, and admitted he's actively trying to detach the emotional importance he placed on personally writing code. That's the chairman of OpenAI talking about grieving the loss of hands-on building.

The developer communities are even more blunt about it.

Reddit threads on r/experienceddevs and r/programming are full of engineers describing what one poster called 'dead butt syndrome' - a slow-onset realization that their ability to code from scratch is atrophying because they've leaned on AI for so long. Others describe a loss of pride in shipping, noting that the satisfaction of solving a complex bug or building a feature from nothing is disappearing when a prompt can produce the same result in minutes. One developer wrote that GitHub Copilot's constant suggestion stream felt 'like a social media feed' that transformed coding from a relaxing, meditative activity into something stressful and distracting.

There's also a growing anxiety about the Dunning-Kruger trap: developers who accept AI-generated code might believe they understand it without actually grasping the underlying mechanics. Over time, this erodes the foundational knowledge that allows you to debug problems, make architectural decisions, and evaluate whether the generated code is actually correct. You become dependent on a tool you can't verify.

So what does this mean?

I don't think AI coding tools are going away. They shouldn't. They're genuinely useful and the productivity gains are real. I'm not arguing we should all go back to vim and manual memory management out of principle.

But I think we need to be honest about what we're trading away. We're trading struggle for speed, and struggle was never just an obstacle. It was the mechanism by which we developed skill, built emotional attachment to our work, and derived satisfaction from our careers. Remove it and you get more output but less meaning. More projects shipped but less reason to care about any of them.

I think this plays out in two directions.

Coding as a hands-on craft probably migrates into niche territory. Small communities of developers who still build by hand, the way classic dungeon crawlers still have a devoted following while Unreal Engine renders photorealistic worlds in minutes, the way vinyl records survive alongside Spotify's 600 million users. The old way survives because for some people the point was never just the output - it was the process of making it. The struggle. The growth. The feeling of earning what you shipped.

And for everyone else, a new kind of engineering emerges. One that's less about syntax and implementation, more about taste, judgment, and curation. Knowing what to build, why, and whether the thing the model produced is the right thing - not just a thing that compiles. This is where I think the profession lands for most people. Whether it's as fulfilling as building things with your own hands, I honestly don't know yet. But labor leads to love, Csikszentmihalyi's flow requires challenge, and competence needs real skill to exercise. If the new version of engineering doesn't provide those things, people will quietly disengage from it the same way I have.

I'm shipping faster than ever and enjoying it less than ever. And based on the conversations I've been having, I don't think I'm the only one pretending that's fine.