Yeah, I'm this way. The best is when I have a job that gives me an opportunity to learn something new, or create a reason to learn something difficult along the way... but I'll try difficult things in my spare time for pleasure, too.
On the other hand, I'd also say there's one type of satisfaction you get from learning a new language, instrument or paradigm, toying around to see if you can write something difficult that proves to yourself that you understand it, and there's a different satisfaction from using your knowledge to make something truly large and impressive in scale and scope. And the large/impressive stuff does require a lot of boring boilerplate or rehashing things you already know how to do, with little creative flourishes along the way. But historically this would be when I would really discover the flaws and corner cases, too. And polish the end product.
So, like, you build some demo engine you think is amazing. Now you want to share it with people, so you have to write a bunch of UI. As you go along you get new ideas to add to the engine and you spot performance flaws or logical flaws, because the work of polishing it is meticulous, and you're actually using what you made the way someone new would use it for the first time. Seeing it through their eyes. This is where most of my projects would always fizzle before AI. But AI short circuits everything you'd get from this process because, for one thing, it feels like cheating. And for another, it disengages you. That core change to the kernel you realize you want to make, suddenly you let AI make the change and there's one less thing you actually own or understand perfectly in your code. It's no longer your hand crafted ninja blade. And yet the temptation to let it happen is very strong... so strong that I actually find it paralyzing. I neither want to write the UI myself nor let AI help me. I get depressed and stop caring.
I'm a musician, too. And I paint. What you get when you play music or paint is 100% yours, comprised of your knowledge and skill and whatever spirit happens to be inside you at that moment. Code was that way for me. It was art, part technical and part inspiration. But it's been robbed of some essence, the satisfaction of not only solving something but also materializing some piece of yourself out of sand for the whole world to enjoy. Some piece of thought that was completely yours. Nothing coded with AI completely belongs to its prompter. And honestly, losing that sense of craftsmanship is devastating to me and I think it's a huge loss for humanity.