I've had the absolute opposite experience, AI has brought back a lot of the joy of programming and building products for me.<p>I've been using Cursor extensively these past few months, for anything ranging from scaffolding to complex UIs. The trick, I've found, is to treat the AI like I would work with a junior engineer, giving in concrete detailed tasks to accomplish, breaking the problem down myself into manageable chunks. Here are two examples of little word games I've made, each of them took all in all a couple of days to ideate, design and build.<p><a href="https://7x7.game" rel="nofollow">https://7x7.game</a>
You're given a grid and you need to make as many words as possible, you can only use the letters in the bottom row. There's complex state management, undo, persistent stats, light/dark modes, animations. About 80-90% of the code was generated and then manually tweaked/refactored.<p><a href="https://vwls.game" rel="nofollow">https://vwls.game</a>
Given 4 consonants, you have to generate as many words as possible. This is heavily inspired by Spelling Bee, but with a slightly different game mechanic. One of the challenges was that not all "valid" words are fun, there are a lot of obscure/technical/obsolete words in the dictionary, I used Claude's batch API to filter down the dictionary to words that are commonly known. I then used cursor to generate the code for the UI, with some manual refactoring.<p>In both cases, having the AI generate the code enabled me to focus on designing the games, both visually and from an interaction perspective. I also <i>chose</i> to manually code some parts myself, because these were fun.<p>At the end of the day, tools are tools, you can use them however you like, you just need to figure out how they fit in your workflow.