Has AI taken the fun out of programming? (And What We Now Owe the Next Developer)

There has been an endless flood of commentary about whether AI is going to replace programmers. That debate has run its course, and we now agree that AI is a tool, not a total replacement, and most of us have made peace with that. But a quieter, more existential question has started to linger in developer circles: has AI taken the fun out of programming? If the machine is doing the heavy lifting of writing code, are we losing the magic that drew us to this craft to begin with? To answer that, I had to go back to the beginning and ask myself something more basic: why did I fall in love with programming in the first place? And once I had that answer, a harder set of questions followed: if AI is taking over the writing of code, what's actually left for us to do, what's at risk of being lost along the way, and what should we be teaching the next generation of developers to prepare them for it?