Over the past few weeks, I’ve been brushing up on LeetCode to prepare for interviews.
And something happened that I genuinely didn’t expect:

I was enjoying myself.

I was getting that old hit—the “holy shit, it works” dopamine spike I haven’t felt during my day-to-day work in years.
Maybe a decade.

That feeling didn’t come from my job.
It didn’t come from a product I’m building.
It didn’t come from shipping a ticket or closing a Jira task.

It came from solving a small coding puzzle in isolation.
Just me and the code again.

Then I saw someone post:

“The joy of coding is gone. AI killed it.”

And it made me realize something important:

The joy isn’t gone.
It just doesn’t live where it used to.

When you’re young, code is the joy

You fall in love with programming because every problem is new.
Every bug is a mystery.
Every solution feels like something clicking into place.

But 15–20 years in, the nature of the work changes:

  • integrations
  • refactors
  • maintenance
  • edge cases
  • migrating old logic

Corporate coding isn’t a playground.
It’s a paycheck.

I actually lost the joy of coding ten years ago—when I started my startup

Long before AI wrote anything useful.

Running your own company forces you to grow up fast.

You don’t rewrite things because you “had a better idea.”
You don’t chase beautiful abstractions.
You don’t polish for fun.

You ship.
You settle for good enough.
Survival beats elegance every time.

And you learn quickly that your time is better spent doing anything other than coding:

  • talking to customers
  • pricing
  • lowering churn
  • support
  • fixing onboarding

That’s the job.
The adult version.

Some founders never accept this.
They hide in VS Code or Figma because the dopamine hit feels safer than facing reality.

But here’s the truth:

Nobody cares about your code.
They care if your product solves a real problem.

That’s what people buy.

AI didn’t kill the joy—it just sped up the parts nobody misses

People won’t admit this, but it’s true:

AI makes the tedious parts faster.

The job becomes:

  • describe what you want
  • make sure it fits your patterns
  • review
  • adjust
  • ship

It’s not “vibe coding.”
It’s accelerated plumbing.

Once you see your job clearly, AI feels like a lubricant, not a threat.

So where does the joy live now?

Not in the code.
Not usually.

It shows up in different places:

  • building something people actually use
  • watching someone pay for something you made
  • solving a real human problem
  • reducing churn
  • hearing “I love your product”
  • seeing your traffic grow

And if you’re an engineer, it shows up in different ways there too—smaller, but no less real.

This is the adult version of “holy shit it works.”

It’s quieter.
But deeper.

If you want the coding dopamine hit, go solve a LeetCode problem

Seriously.

That kind of joy still exists—but it’s separate from real software engineering.

If you want the deeper joy—the joy that lasts—build things.
Try to sell them.
Solve problems that matter.

AI doesn’t kill that joy.
It gives you more time to chase it.

The joy of writing code didn’t die.
We just grew up.