I shipped my biggest project ever and felt… nothing

Last month I finished one of the largest side project of my career — an open-source framework, docs, demo, the works. Eight-years-ago me would have floated for a week.

Instead I felt… fine. Mildly pleased. Like I'd closed a well-run Jira ticket.

Here's the thing: a big part of the code was written with AI assistance. I designed everything — the concepts, the failure semantics, what the demo had to prove — and I reviewed everything. The thinking was mine. But the hours of grinding, the stupid bugs at midnight, the twentieth test run — those are gone. And apparently that's where the feeling lived.

I'm not against this. I don't actually want to hand-write boilerplate again, the same way I don't want to hand-wash clothes. But nobody warned me that the satisfaction was coupled to the struggle, and that automating one would automate away the other.

The best analogy I've found: it's the difference between cooking a meal and ordering a very good delivery. The food might even be better. But you didn't cook.

What I've been trying

• Keeping one deliberately hand-made project where AI is only allowed to explain, never to type
• Going deeper into the work AI can't do yet e.g. production debugging
• Letting "people actually use the thing I designed" become the new reward channel instead of "I typed the thing"

Jury's still out.

So, the actual question

Does anyone else feel this?

If you've been coding 5+ years and work with AI daily — where did your satisfaction move? Did it come back somewhere else, or is it just gone?

And for folks earlier in their careers: do you even relate to this, or does it sound like blacksmiths complaining about factories?

Genuinely curious what this community is feeling.