I'm a 40yo front-end developer. I can relate to what you say, and without detracting from your feelings, may I offer some of my personal experience caveats:
I currently use AI both for work and for side projects. My usage patterns are different in both cases and make me think about different things.
At work, where I'm working on a large, long-term codebase, we still code review. Knowing concepts about the language and coding style still helps me there, if only to make the code reviews easier and the code more readable and scalable (but also in actually improving the quality and weeding out bugs). I agree that catching up with the latest technologies and patterns became a lower priority, and I miss it being relevant, but honestly I feel like I should get back to it because it still helps.
At personal projects - well, I'm actually finishing stuff! The joy of creation didn't dissapear, it's just different. Here, too, I miss the riddle solving and thought that had to go to coding, but seeing my vision becoming real - and actually getting to a stage where it's useful and polished - is satisfying.
As for activating cheat codes - partially true. I feel like without my previous frontend knowledge and UX approach, my projects would have been much more slop-like.
I don't agree with people not caring about new side projects. I'm working on utilities for my tea and cocktail hobbies, and getting very good responses from fellow enthusiasts, and that's also very satisfying.
As for the jobs not being there next year - I'm not sure the trend of "replacing all devs with AI" will continue forever, or that it is continuing in full force now. As far as I know, companies begin to realize that the human developers are not that irreplaceable. And I think that in startups the situation might be a bit different than the large companies we hear about in the news (backed by my last job search last December).
I know the situation can be despairing, and I hope you'll find a silver lining.
I currently use AI both for work and for side projects. My usage patterns are different in both cases and make me think about different things.
At work, where I'm working on a large, long-term codebase, we still code review. Knowing concepts about the language and coding style still helps me there, if only to make the code reviews easier and the code more readable and scalable (but also in actually improving the quality and weeding out bugs). I agree that catching up with the latest technologies and patterns became a lower priority, and I miss it being relevant, but honestly I feel like I should get back to it because it still helps.
At personal projects - well, I'm actually finishing stuff! The joy of creation didn't dissapear, it's just different. Here, too, I miss the riddle solving and thought that had to go to coding, but seeing my vision becoming real - and actually getting to a stage where it's useful and polished - is satisfying. As for activating cheat codes - partially true. I feel like without my previous frontend knowledge and UX approach, my projects would have been much more slop-like.
I don't agree with people not caring about new side projects. I'm working on utilities for my tea and cocktail hobbies, and getting very good responses from fellow enthusiasts, and that's also very satisfying.
As for the jobs not being there next year - I'm not sure the trend of "replacing all devs with AI" will continue forever, or that it is continuing in full force now. As far as I know, companies begin to realize that the human developers are not that irreplaceable. And I think that in startups the situation might be a bit different than the large companies we hear about in the news (backed by my last job search last December).
I know the situation can be despairing, and I hope you'll find a silver lining.