I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

That's true, but let me give an example of something I've experienced in my own lifetime. In about 1996 I heard about Open Source software and after wrestling with the idea for a bit I became a convert and threw out Windows and installed a Linux distribution on my home machine. At the time, when I talked to people about Open Source software, there was a near universal reaction of, 'nice idea, but it'll never catch on' and they would go on to give me many reasons why this utopian idea would fail. Now, 25 years later, Open Source is a great success.

As a postscript, I got into making contributions to Open Source and I still do. Maybe one day my mind will be too addled to code, or perhaps an AI will do it better than me, but until that day I fully intend to carry on with Open Source contributions.

Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.

I think this is difficult to get over within a few years, let alone overnight. I can sympathize as a programmer - only very recently did I notice that I can finally implement a feature or create a new program and have it work on the first try. That took years of practice (for me at least) and I feel like I've really learned a "craft".

On the other hand, as a kid I first got into programming because I wanted to create computer games. And the only time when I actually did that consistently was before I knew any programming languages, just point-and-click tools specifically made for creating games. I eventually studied CS, on my way to making games got sidetracked by learning OpenGL and graphics programming, interned at a gamedev company where I did more graphics programming and learned that this is not the industry for me even though (or maybe because) I love games. Now I've been doing backend programming for a few years where I've been way more concerned with data and architectures than I am with what it's actually for.

I feel bad for people who love the process more than they love achieving a goal. Sometimes I really love coding, solving little challenges, optimizing something, the feeling of having build something basically by meticulously translating an idea into something a computer can understand in every detail. But sometimes it gets really boring. Writing yet another REST controller. Copying and mapping the same data object. Handling errors. It feels like I'm solving the same problem over and over and over again.

Then I think about what I would be doing if I didn't feel like it was too much work to make it happen. I have an idea for a game that's currently impossible to do unless you have a team or at least one extremely experienced and multi-talented game developer with no job. I have several ideas for web services that I could figure out, but don't have time for. Finally at my job, my team currently has absolutely no way of properly dealing with a decade of technical debt.

With AI, I can see myself actually making these things happen, as long as I'm willing to give up some control over how it's done.

Which comes with a little bit of alienation, unfortunately. Maybe that's how older programmers felt when switching from punch cards to assembly, from assembly to compiled languages, and from those to interpreted languages. Obviously the step to AI will be bigger than that. Same with artists: I'm sure many people were discouraged by not holding a brush anymore, or molding something with their hands. Some just love the process of bringing an idea into existence, others just want it to happen by any means necessary.

Personally, my way of dealing with this will be focusing on seeing technology as a means to an end again, which it always has been. Falling in love with a specific tool is not a good idea in an era where changes happen faster literally every day.

I think R&D is good in any company. Sure, the nature of R&D is that most of it is failure; that's just the way it is.

AI makes the R&D iteration shorter and cheaper, IMO. The more you try, the more likely you're to succeed (aside: I should listen to my own advice sometimes lol).