I feel the same way. I miss the joy of creative flow that came with architecting and solving problems. I also feel the entire computer tech industry is headed in the wrong direction. We're creating systems that are too complex to understand, that lack human discretion when it's most needed, and then we're turning over control of whole organizations to those systems.

onion2k has a point. You can still write a lot of code by hand, or at least write the interesting code by hand, but your output may fall behind your peers.

After 27 years in the industry, I've cut down to part-time software dev work, and I've enjoyed learning and doing more hands-on work, including bicycle and motorcycle repair. It's actually really nice to get away from the screen and the constant reading of internet garbage during those down times when I'm waiting for tests to run or an AI bot to come back with a response. My mind feels less polluted. But I'm not making money at my new hobbies.

My answer to your question is I don't know. But often, if you can free up some time and mental space, you'll find you start to drift toward other things that interest you.

My primary motivation for work has always been to earn money for myself and my family. This enables me to do things that I want to do outside of work time. I have tried to align this with work that I find interesting or working with people I like, but this is not always the case.

If this is not an issue for you, then by all means find something else to do. Maybe look to move into a business domain you already provide IT/software for, or retrain to something else.

It's highly likely that many domains currently will be looking to maximise use of AI e.g. medical professionals, accountants, lawyers will not escape completely. Moving to something practical may be a better short term bet.

People who write code with AI are mostly just moving their time from coding to reviewing the output of AI. If you just keep coding you won't be seen as going any slower, and if your peers are bad at reviewing you'll look better than them because your output won't fail testing as much.

> This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems.

With agentic development and senior experience you are now able to write and build systems that are 100x more complex and powerful. You’re no longer thinking about how to some mundane data massaging or crud - rather you can spend time thinking about how to solve actual problems that matter and have an impact - as a solo engineer!

Got a problem with climate change? Start brainstorming.

Want to model how a chemical factory works to simulate its IoT topology? It’s at your fingertips.

Think bigger. A lot bigger. Forget about the trees. Look for the forest.

Your decade plus of engineering experience combined with AI is a super power many other new comers to game would benefit from. Capitalize on it and do something cool.

I'm working at a big tech company (not faang). I use agents (claude/codex) in 3 ways:

1. mainly for discovery and research. I clone all the repos I need and then I talk with the agent: "I need to work on service A which has dependencies on service B, C, D and E. How can I accomplish X? Oh ok it seems, B can offer that but only when Z happens, after that I should rely on C. Cool. And now we probably need to extend E. Umm, ok, but I think E's team won't like that. Hold on, I'll reach out to them. Give me a succinct paragraph explaining what we need from them. Alright I'm back, so we have green light but only if we implement it like H. So, give me a plan"

2. Implement the plan. So the agent spits out code that I need to babysit (e.g., perhaps the class is not in the best package, or perhaps we are adding too many e2e tests when unit tests could be enough, etc.)

3. Answer product questions like: "Why is button K disabled in this screenshot? What are the potential causes? Afaik, I have the permissions A, B and C, and I have enough Z, so why is still disabled?", "How does the flow for endpoint 'api/a/b/c/ work? Where are the entry points? Dependant services? Tables touched?"

I could live without the agent generating the code, but not anymore without their help for discovery and research. I dislike using agents for coding (I feel the same as you), but not for research (I actually use them as a sort of improved "google for everything")