Fantastic thread. As a game engine programmer I've gotten a lot of satisfaction designing and executing all aspects of coding. But I have always stood on the shoulders of giants: former lead engine devs at EA and Sony and BBN and countless articles from GDC and Siggraph. The language and platform creators themselves. My innovations live on top of theirs. I don't know if I'd have attained that same feeling starting with AI, but I know AI hasn't replaced the need for good architecture or novel algorithms yet. And it's still bad at breaking down and testing implementations. I use it for all it's good at and try to stay away from what it's not. My recent job satisfaction comes from that combination, to deliver a system in 10 months that should have taken a couple years.
The most useful analogy I've heard is LLMs are to the internet what lossy jpegs are to images. The more you drill in the more compression artifacts you get.
