> i find myself building some new niche tool almost daily. so the notion of ai "replacing programmers" seems kinda odd because most of my friends and I just still build stuff and jump in to tweak code here and there. our desire to build stuff and be on our IDEs every day still hasnt gone anywhere.

From scratch, try something in range of 1 million or more lines of code for basic functionality. aka OS, database management system, video editor, etc.