How to enjoy programming in a world of AI

It's widely accepted that as AI writes more and more of our code, opportunities decrease for newcomers to gain the skills needed to become professional programmers. At the same time, experienced people bemoan the way AI is causing them to gradually lose the skills they took so long and worked so hard to gain. Programming, like mathematics and perhaps music, sits in the middle between science and art. As science, it's all about capturing and organising knowledge, and as art, it's the application of creativity to problem-solving. Enjoyment - deep satisfaction or an emotional rush - can be had from either or both of these. But the perception is that AI is depriving us of opportunity, both to learn and to be creative. Code written by a human reveals a lot about the coder. Their depth of knowledge of the coding language, their creative use of variable and function names, and even the visual layout of a script. You can often tell at a glance whether the writer truly cared about the code they wrote, or whether it was just a means to an end, to ensure their next pay packet arrives on time. As AI improves, it makes fewer mistakes, but it also produces code that is increasingly hard for any human to read and truly understand. Since the job of a human in the coding loop is increasingly not to write but to validate code, this is becoming a problem. So here's my recent story, a series of happy accidents. I've been using agentic AI for about a year. First with Copilot in VS Code, then more recently with Claude Code at the command line. At the start, I found Copilot to make a lot of mistakes and to produce rather repetitive, poorly-structured code, but looking back, a lot of that was probably down to my own ignorance of how to control the process. The biggest problem I had was in validating JS or Python code. There was just so much of it, often using features of both languages I never fully got to grips with. I've never been a first-class programmer and most of my own code is pure