Legal marketing specifically. Weirdly, my work had more impact, respect and longevity there than the place where I'm a much more senior engineer supposedly directing the work of a whole organization of engineers. I had it better where I was a 1 of 2 than a leader among hundreds.

So true!

But it's interesting that, from the perspective of someone in the middle, neither near the beginning or end of my career, I am (now, after a period of sadness) experiencing AI as a reinvigoration of fun in the work. But it's a very different kind of fun. I had totally lost the fun of clean code and figuring out new technologies and approaches and abstractions, just like you describe.

But now I'm experiencing the joy of thinking about what I can build, now that it's so much faster and easier to try ideas. I think this is actually getting back to an earlier version of my joy with computers. I can (vaguely) remember in my early years being like "wow! cool! I can make stuff that shows up on a computer screen!". But then it turned out to be ... pretty damn hard to actually do that, which led me to more excitement about all the ideas and technologies and techniques for managing the complexity of software engineering. But then that started feeling more tedious and samey, but I still had to put lots of time into it, there wasn't any other option.

But now all that is so much easier, and I'm rediscovering the fun of "wow cool, I can make things!", but now also with the whole benefit of the time I have spent doing the work of software engineering.

I hit that point after about 5 years. At the time, software development was mostly desktop applications (which are sadly defunct), and UI frequently doesn't require much in the way of algorithms. Then I focused on the challenge of design a UI that matches the user's mental model, which lasted about five years. After another a stint in mobile games and apps, I started doing contracting. The key for me was the concept of serving someone else' vision (instead of my own vision of FIRE), and some HN conversation on some of Steve Job's videos on work. This all boiled down into an attitude of "I will solve your problem (and you will pay me)" (from Job's discussion with the guy who designed the NeXT logo).

As a contractor, sometimes I solve your problem with a cool algorithm, sometimes by simply implementing your pixel-perfect design, and sometimes with a true-Agile back-and-forth of vague design into concrete software. Since I switching to the "I solve your problem" perspective, I haven't had any problems with feeling frustrated at just being a code monkey implementing stuff I don't need to think about. (However, I have discovered that I get really bored doing server stuff, and it doesn't save me from that. I just like something concrete, and not having to debug by putting in print statements and wading through thousands of lines of output, with only the reward that the variable contents is now correct. Turns out I want to see something. I get unreasonably excited about going from a blank screen and slowly populating it with widgets.)

Software development has more in common with agriculture than architecture. The code always needs maintenance.