I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
Why not? What is the goal of "having an amazing tapestry"? Do you need to do increasing more things in the limited time you have left and making a tapestry isn't one of those things? What will you have once you've "finished" an amazing tapestry, just something to hang on the wall and look at? How does one "use" a tapestry after it's "finished" such that the act of finishing it is the most important thing? If you've finished it, will you get more enjoyment from looking at it for longer because it was finished sooner and thus the length of time you can look at it before you die is maximized? Exactly what you are optimizing for here?
Let's call it "Joy".
I've done hard things. Many of them have a significant amount of time that is a slog. A tapestry is going to have a lot of days of just slog work. And that's fine. Doing hard things can be very rewarding. I've reupholstered a couch by taking it down to the sticks, repairing and reinforcing the frame ("hey kids, the couch isn't designed for walking and jumping on"), enhancing the design, re-springing it, redesigning the cushions so that they didn't need readjusting every time you sat down, making new foam cushions, and then sewing a upholstery. Took 3-4 months.
But, I'm in the last half of my 50s. The project you're commenting on, apt-cacher-ultra, probably would have taken 2 full time developer years to get to where it is now, and I'm doing some pretty big changes for the next version. I literally probably have a handful of that sort of project I can do left in my life, assuming I quit my job now and work full time on it.
Let me tell you, it's pretty sobering to be faced with: "I may only be doing this once, maybe twice more in my career."
So yes, building experiments where I get to try out my ideas without 2 developer-years of coding required is going to give me an opportunity for a lot of creation that I otherwise wouldn't have had. I've spent decades hand-crafting code, I fully understand the joy of doing so.