The Grief of AI Coding: Why Senior Engineers Are Mourning Their Craft

When machines write better code than you do, what happens to the identity you built over decades?

There’s something deeply unsettling happening in software engineering right now, and it’s not a technical problem—it’s an existential one. Gergely Orosz, the veteran engineer behind The Pragmatic Engineer, recently voiced what many senior developers are quietly feeling: grief.

The Core Insight

The hardest part isn’t that AI writes code faster. It’s that AI often writes better code than we do, especially in unfamiliar languages or frameworks. After years of blood, sweat, and late-night debugging sessions to master our craft, we’re watching machines casually outperform us.

Orosz puts it bluntly: “It took a lot of effort to get good at coding… Once you’re pretty good, you have something that’s valuable and easy to validate by writing code that works! Now, all that looks like it will be history.”

This isn’t imposter syndrome. This is legitimate loss.

Why This Matters

The psychological dimension of AI adoption rarely gets discussed in technical circles. We’re obsessed with benchmarks, prompt engineering, and productivity metrics. But beneath the surface, an entire generation of engineers is grappling with questions that no documentation can answer:

• What’s the value of expertise when expertise is commoditized?
• What happens to “flow state” when you’re reviewing AI output instead of creating?
• Does the satisfaction of building something yourself still matter?

For many developers, coding wasn’t just a job—it was identity. The rush of compiling code and watching it work, the pride of solving a gnarly bug, the satisfaction of writing elegant solutions. These weren’t just productive moments; they were meaningful moments.

Key Takeaways

• AI coding grief is real — Dismissing it as resistance to change misses the human dimension of this transition
• Expertise still matters, but differently — The game is shifting from “how to write code” to “how to think about problems”
• Flow state may transform, not disappear — Perhaps being “in the zone” will mean orchestrating complex AI agents rather than typing syntax
• The craft identity crisis is industry-wide — From artists to writers to coders, creative professionals are all facing similar questions

Looking Ahead

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: this grief is productive. It forces us to ask what we actually valued about coding in the first place. Was it the typing? The syntax memorization? Or was it the problem-solving, the creativity, the building of something from nothing?

If it’s the latter, then AI doesn’t eliminate that—it amplifies it. We just need time to mourn the old way of doing things before we can embrace the new.

The engineers who thrive in the AI era won’t be the ones who code fastest. They’ll be the ones who think clearest, communicate best, and understand systems most deeply. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the actual job, finally stripped of its mechanical trappings.

But let’s be honest: that transition hurts. And it’s okay to say so.

Based on analysis of “The grief when AI writes most of the code” by Gergely Orosz