“And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward.”

Yea I’ve had similar thoughts. Other thoughts have been something like “I’ll have different types of projects and try to be thoughtful in advance about what this is doing for me. If it’s about the building up a system manually and slowly, and having that kind of experience, then I’ll only use the AI maybe as a primary source gatherer or maybe in some limited sense.” And “Okay well this is an MMO and even though in the past I would have wanted to program this plug-in, I guess I’m middle aged now and there’s only so much time and I’d probably be really excited about using my programming energy on these dozen other things I’ve always wanted to work on, and having the thing would be a strict positive compared to not having the thing, so I’ll have the AI make this plug-in which makes the game (which is about play) more fun.”

Programming is a lot of things, so the ambiguity of language probably causes a lot of conflict here.