That's a fair point and I actually agree with you. A large part of writing code is doing something menial as you said. I think both of the viewpoints are valid

That's a fair point and I actually agree with you. A large part of writing code is doing something menial as you said. I think both of the viewpoints are valid depending on where you're at in your career. We can imagine a junior developer who isn't quite bored with those low-value tasks just yet. As you grow more senior/experienced, the novel problems become harder to find - and those are the one's you want to work on. AI can certainly help you cut through the chaff so you have more time to focus on those. But trends are trends and AI is increasingly getting better at solving the novel/interesting problems that I think you're referring to. Everyone's different and I know there are folks who are excited to not have to write a single line of code. I'd wager that's not actually most engineers/developers though. People still garden by hand because it's innately satisfying.