[Stehfyn]

Personally, this is an experience I thought about first before writing my comment. I think in the days pre-AI coding assists, I believe you describe the intrinsically human experience that's requisite to write code by hand. The wonder, the joy, the frustration, the confusion, the elation--the discovery. These days, the things I wonder about lie deeper and deeper behind more and more lines of code, through journey's that provide less and less joy, and thusly becoming more and more unreachable as I'm human, bound by an excess of things in addition to time. AI has helped me rediscover some of this sporadic creativity demonstrably due its ability to prototype recreational ideas on a whim

Professionally, I'm employed writing safety-critical avionics software. Superfluous amounts of cogent tooling putting guardrails on agents has enabled me to spend heaps more time to think deeply about how the software should work at a systemic level. The code by definition must be heavily criticized and battle-tested before it can go out the door to begin with. Albeit a beautiful part of coding, those sporadic bursts of creativity drive the code leaving my desk less and less, and I feel strongly that has made its quality paradoxically better since I'd spent much more time on broader implications and interactions.