I feel you and at a much younger age. I started programming professionally full time around 2011-2012. Documentation was good but practical applications where you could see what you want to achieve in action were very limited. At the time I found myself writing drivers for fiscal printers using RS-232. The documentation provided by the manufacturer was absolutely horrible. "0x0b -> init, 0x23 -> page", literally code -> single word. Although I hated having to effectively brute force it, the feeling at the end was amazing. I tried AI code on several occasions and I hate it with a passion: full of bugs, completely ignoring edge cases and horrible performance. And ultimately having to spend more time fixing the slop than it takes me to sit down, think it through and get it done right. And I see many "programmers" just throw in a prompt in
insert AI company here and celebrate the slop, patting themselves on the back.
It's the programming equivalent of those tiktok videos split in half, top half being random stock videos, bottom being temple run and an AI narration of a mildly wtf reddit post.
In a way I am lucky that I work at a place where everyone gets to choose what they want to use and how they use it. So my weapons of choice are a slightly tweaked, almost vanilla zsh, vim and zed with 0 ai features. I have a number of friends/former coworkers working at places where the usage of ai is not just allowed or encouraged but mandated. And is part of their performance score - the more you slop-code, the better your performance.