Finally I can articulate it.
These feelings about AI and why it feels weird.
I consider myself to be a builder and someone who can build things. I love building prototypes and novel things, especially love being on the side of discovery. It feels rewarding and fulfilling. With advent of agentic coding, vibe coding, vibe engineering, agentic engineering and all that crap, it has created a FOMO.
When cost of execution was expensive, slowly building things up was rewarding to the point you would take pride and show it to others. Any clone of popular software would mean you learnt the internals and built with. The most dehumanizing part of AI or any automation is, it takes a creative work reduces the complexity to "machines can do it." If I can prompt and build a thing A, so can you, and so can these companies that provide these models. (I understand what Luddites must have felt during the industrial revolution. The dehumanizing part is real)
Software factory of our generation would be owned by capitalist and they would produce cheap knock off software. We buy so many random things in our own day-to-day lives, same will be for software too. Getting back to dehumanization, if machines can do things to best of your abilities, you start to question what value do you bring. After all prompts will be the same for you or for me. The one skill you trained for, that one particular thing, now machines are doing it too but at cheaper and faster rate.
Before, learning meant you would gain a skill. Now learning means you get skill that these clankers can do too. Sure there is fun in learning but you will not provide any useful economic value without being the top 1%. That has always been the case with creative fields. You are either 1% or the crowd. By all means, everyone is trying their best to make their living, but man expenses do rise up.
Software, in any association with physical and engineering sciences, meant you only needed analytical abilities. The ability to go through hard math and abstraction which is way easier than being creative (talking about that 1% effect). It is methodical, it has a truthful answer that could be verified. When things worked, you knew how and why they worked. It was repeatable and solving problem meant figuring that repeatable pattern and converting to automation.
The hope for very automation was so we could break the repetitive tasks and focus on what is more rewarding like building things, creating things and essentially just enjoying life. The fabled abundance.
When the point of building and cost of building reduces, you wouldn't want to go to old days. My friends and colleagues, we have been feeling the same. We use these systems to design and solve problems but it doesn't reward like it used to. Over the course of time, the expectation went from writing a program in assembly, to creating a web server, to scaling a web server, to pipelining for robustness and functionality. We were already at the end game and they just had to take that one last joy. How rewarding it was for OGs back in the day to make something in assembly. Later we just scaled but it never felt rewarding as it used to. Time and time we see programmers go back to C because C is special for the same very reason. It sits at the perfect balance between assembly and higher level abstraction.
What this taught me is engineering and technology comes in wave where you reach a fixed point where further refinement and improvement barely adds any new value and it becomes more of an art than science. The AI is taking the art part of the science. It is attacking that little bit of creative space that was left in engineering.
Economically it really doesn't make sense to write code manually. Like thinking rationally it is cheaper to just use the damn machine for what it is. But the essence of living and soul cries for a plea to do it manually. The manual task is rewarding despite taking longer time. Probably is the reason manual activities felt good. Having that holiday meal in the sweater from grandma meant something. It was warm, bright and full of hope. All these little thing, mistakes and imperfections meant we were living. No wonder we long for the past.
When these little moments disappear, we lose the joy, the soul. It is just a hollow.
I will keep on using these tools because there is no alternative. If someone would pay me say $100k (and whatever that keeps with inflation) and say never to use these AI, oh boy, I would happily not use it.
But those firms and companies won't even exists because the cost doesn't justify at all. So the sweet salary of being software engineer is gone. Either you are that mythical 10xer or you are just someone who learned what designing and building software was.