Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

People are debating whether generative AI is killing the joy of hands‑on tinkering or simply changing what tinkering looks like. The core dispute is definitional: some insist that true tinkering requires doing the low‑level work yourself (one commenter joked about punching cards and hand‑writing machine code), so prompting an AI to produce code is not tinkering. Others expand the term to include accomplishing objectives and integrating systems, arguing that using AI to prototype, troubleshoot, or combine datasets still counts as nerding out. A recurring complaint is that when AI does the heavy lifting the user often learns less and feels less satisfaction, while proponents say AI lowers the barrier to entry and speeds progress.

Practical experiences are split but concrete: several people report being able to start and finish projects they never would have attempted before - examples include Home Assistant setups, LibreELEC servers, game development with Godot, time‑lapse mushroom rigs, and dataset mashups for economic analysis - because AI accelerates learning and unblocks problems. Others use AI selectively: hand‑coding to understand a system and delegating repetitive tasks to an AI “minion.” The net outcome is not uniform adoption or abandonment of tinkering; instead AI shifts efforts toward higher‑level orchestration, prompt engineering, and verification, with personal satisfaction hinging on whether learning or outcomes matter more.