[sktrdie]

You still care about end result though: in your case, the end result being the puzzled you solved.

AI can make that process still enjoyable. For instance I had to build a very intricate cache handler for Next.js from scratch that worked in a very specific way by serializing JSON in chunks (instead of JSON.parse it all in memory). I knew the theory, but the API details and the other annoyances always made it daunting for me.

With AI I was able to thinker more about the theory of the problem and less about the technical implementation which made the process much more fun and doable.

Perhaps we're just climbing the ladder of abstraction: in the early days people were building their own garbage collection mechanisms, their own binary search algorithms, etc. Once we started using libraries, we had to find the fun in some higher level.

Perhaps in the future the fun will be about solving puzzles within the realm of requirement definitions and all the intricacies that stem from that.