I can definitely relate to wanting to feel accomplished after a coding session and how AI can sort of strip you of that feeling at times. For me personally, I started to find the joy in the AI + coding relationship once I realized I just had to reframe my thinking a bit.

It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a way I hadn't even thought of or it could be me wanting to learn a new complex architectural pattern I haven't had the time to deep dive but have wanted to. Now I can spin something up and have a base understanding of it in minutes. That's exciting to me more than anything else. In a way, it takes me back to way earlier in my career when every day felt like I was learning something new and cool on the job from more seniors devs. I think as you get more senior and experienced, those "cool" learning moments start to happen a little less, so having AI be able to reignite that is exciting in a lot of ways.