I think this is a really meaningful insight. There's passion projects and there's - let's call it "industrial production".
Developers long had the privilege that what they were passionate about also aligned with what industries needed - at least somewhat. Then, outsourcing dev shops and later Claude and Codex turned code into industrial production. That doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy sipping a nice glass of wine and coding the 2D platformer we always wanted to exist - but it does mean that industrial production of code is less satisfying now.
The same is true for mathematicians and will be true for ever-increasing swaths of life. It's understandable to be sad about it and to miss the times when you were the mythical 10x coder with the super-high bus factor - but it is important to distinguish between activity oriented towards individual satisfaction and activity oriented towards outcomes, and not to allow the first to hinder the second.
Developers long had the privilege that what they were passionate about also aligned with what industries needed - at least somewhat. Then, outsourcing dev shops and later Claude and Codex turned code into industrial production. That doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy sipping a nice glass of wine and coding the 2D platformer we always wanted to exist - but it does mean that industrial production of code is less satisfying now.
The same is true for mathematicians and will be true for ever-increasing swaths of life. It's understandable to be sad about it and to miss the times when you were the mythical 10x coder with the super-high bus factor - but it is important to distinguish between activity oriented towards individual satisfaction and activity oriented towards outcomes, and not to allow the first to hinder the second.