Eight years isn't very long at all. Many of us love programming, 20, 30, or even 40 years later. It's the challenge of making a lump of metal do exactly what it is that you want it to do.<p>In the beginning, I thought that playing computer games would be great. They aren't. I find them boring because they can't give me the challenge that plain old programming can do.<p>Eight years. <grin><p>That reminds me of the story of the city boy who met an old moonshiner and proceeded to tell him that he drank a bottle of hard liquor a day.<p>The moonshiner replied "A bottle? Hell, I <i>spill</i> more'n that!"
Programming is not dead. The point you make about write once, run infinite is exactly what machines and LLMs fail at.<p>The booking press didn't kill literature, neither did napster kill music.<p>If you feel stuck in your career path and watch people burn out - coding has lots of opportunities to get into philosophy and other arts. Feeling stuck just means it's time to get in touch with those.<p>All the best on your journey!