I would argue it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination. I have always enjoyed the journey, I think people having a blast nowadays are enjoying the destination. AI gave us more destinations, but less journey. It is not worse or better, just different.
I've made and continue to make things that I've been thinking about for a while, but the juice was never worth the squeeze. Bluetooth troubleshooting for example -- 5 or 6 different programs will log different parts of the stack independently. I've made an app calling all of these apps, and grouping all of their calls based on mac address' and system time of the calls to correlate and pinpoint the exact issue.
Now I heard the neckbeards crack their knuckles, getting ready to bear down on their split keyboards and start telling me how the program doesn't work because AI made it, it isn't artistic enough for their liking, or whatever the current lie they comfort themselves with is. But it does work, and I've used it already to determine some of my bad devices are really bad.
But there are bugs, you exclaim! Sure, but have you seen human written code?? I've made my career in understanding these systems, programming languages, and people using the systems -- troubleshooting is the fun part and I guess lucky for me is that my favorite part is the thing that will continue to exist.
But what about QA? Humans are better? No. Please guys, stop lying to yourselves. Even if there was a benefit that Humans bring over AI in this arena, that lead is evaporating fast or is already gone. I think a lot of people in our industry take their knowledge and ability to gatekeep by having that knowledge as some sort of a good thing. If that was the only thing you were good at, then maybe it is good that the AI is going to do the thing they excel at and leave those folks to theirs.
It can leave humans to figure out how to maybe be more human? It is funny to type that since I have been on a computer 12h a day since like 1997...but there is a reason why we let calculators crunch large sums, and manufacturing robots have multiple articulating points in their arms making incredible items at insane speeds. I guess there were probably people who like using slide rules and were really good at it, pissed because their job was taken by a device that can do it better and faster. Diddnt the slide rule users take the job from people who did not have a tool like that at first but still had to do the job?
Did THEY complain about that change as well? Regardless, all of these people were left behind if all they are going to do is complain. If you only built one skill in your career, and that is writing code and nothing else, that is not the programs fault.
The journey exists for those who desire to build the knowledge that they lack and use these new incredible tools.
For everyone else, there is Hacker News and an overwhelmingly significant crowd that are ready to talk about the good ole days instead of seeing the opportunities in expanding your talents with software that helps you do your thing better than you have ever dreamed of.
I recently wanted to monitor my vehicle batteries with a cheap BLE battery monitor from AliExpress (by getting the data into HomeAssistant). I could have spent days digging through BlueZ on a Raspberry Pi, or I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later.
Yes, I gave up the chance to manually learn every layer of the stack. I’m fine with that. The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem. AI got me there faster - and let me move on to my next fun project.
That sounds really cool. You should share what you used.
> The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem.
I'm sympathetic to this view. It seems very pragmatic. After all, the reason we write software is not to move characters around a repo, but to solve problems, right?
But here's my concern. Like a lot of people, I starting programming to solve little problems my friends and I had. Stuff like manipulating game map files and scripting ftp servers. That lead me to a career that's meant building big systems that people depend on.
If everything bite-sized and self-contained is automated with llms, are people still going to make the jump to be able to build and maintain larger things?
To use your example of the BLE battery monitor, the AI built some automation on top of bluez, a 20+ year-old project representing thousands of hours of labor. If AI can replace 100% of programming, no-big-deal it can maintain bluez going forward, but what if it can't? In that case we've failed to nurture the cognitive skills we need to maintain the world we've built.
I am looking for a web API I could use with CURL, and limited "public/testing" API keys. Anyone?
I am very interested in Claude code to test its ability to code assembly (x86_64/RISC-V) and to assist the ports of c++ code to plain and simple C (I read something from HN about this which seems to be promising).
It's the best thing to happen to systems engineering.
I also ask it a lot of questions regarding my assumptions, and so "we" (me and the AI) find better solutions that either of us could make on our own.
I'm working with a team that was an early adopter of LLMs and their architecture is full of unknown-unknowns that they would have thought through if they actually wrote the code themselves. There are impedance mismatches everywhere but they can just produce more code to wrap the old code. It makes the system brittle and hard-to-maintain.
It's not a new problem, I've worked at places where people made these mistakes before. But as time goes on it seems like _most_ systems will accumulate multiple layers of slop because it's increasingly cheap to just add more mud to the ball of mud.
Corporate management is full on FOMO and pushes agents down onto teams
I finally made it with Claude. I've been writing code a while so I absolutely didn't let Claude loose and I still refactored stuff by hand as sometimes that was faster than trying to get Claude to do it. I also know what the whole thing does - I read all the diffs it presented.
I wouldn't fully trust it to go off and do its thing unsupervised especially in my areas of speciality. But the scaffolding work like command line arguments - typing all that out was never my passion and I had snippets in my editor for most of it.
Perhaps if your passion is the process of doing that kind of meticulously laying out of each file then I can understand. Although the journey for me is the problem solving. Nothing much excites me about any of the boilerplate parts.
Claude can certainly take a stab at the solution too and is best when it has some kind of test case to match or validation step. To me working out what those are was always the core of the job and without them Claude can make plenty of mistakes.
It's just a tool and I use it in ways to support what I enjoy.
My work situation is way more complicated. Bigcorp organizational dynamics nullify any marginal gain anywhere.
Similar to when IDEs and autocomplete became common.
That is hard if you are working in Notepad and have to write your own class import statements and write your own Maven POM or Gradle file. It’s a lot quicker in an IDE with autocomplete and auto-generated Maven POMs. And with AI it’s even faster but at the risk of lower code maintainability.
Can you share?
I just use the chat interface to study and do one-off scripts.
I love having 4-5 bots open and spam the same questions then reading the answers. For everything. Feels like I am doing something, like video games.
It has elevated my wardrobe and music tastes but I still had to have a baseline ofc. They are way too agreeable still.
You're not missing much; don't believe the hype and liars.
This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.
I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.
Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.
I came back into tech professionally over the last decade. Always been into computers, but the first decade or so of my career was in humanitarian amin. Super interesting sector, super boring day-to-day.
Getting back into code felt like coming home. I'm good at it, I really enjoy it, the problem-solving aspect totally lights up my brain in this amazing way.
I feel exactly the same way. Totally robbed of pleasure at work, with the added kicker of mass layoffs hanging over the sector.
At least OP is sixty, I've got 25 years of work left and I really don't know what to do. I hate it all so much.
Sure, part of the fun of programming is understanding how things work, mentally taking them apart and rebuilding them in the particular way that meets your needs. But this is usually reserved for small parts of the code, self-contained libraries or architectural backbones. And at that level I think human input and direction are still important. Then there is the grunt work of glueing all the parts together, or writing some obvious logic, often for the umpteenth time- these are things I can happily delegate. And finally there are the choices you make because you think of the final product and of the experience of those who will use it- this is not a puzzle to solve at all, this is creative work and there is no predefined result to reach. I'm happy to have tools that allow me to get there faster.
Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster.
I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.
Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them, unless they eventually became viable to do in a commercial setting where I then had some junior developer to make the annoying stuff go away.
Now with LLMs I have my own junior developer to handle the annoying stuff - and as a result, a lot of my fun stuff I was thinking about in the last 3 decades finally got done.
One example from just last week - I had a large C codebase from the 90s I always wanted to reuse, but modern compilers have a different idea of how C should look like. It's pretty obvious from the compiler errors what you need to do each case, but I wasn't really in the mood for manually going through hundreds of source files. So I just stuck a locally running qwen coder in yolo mode into a container, forgot about it for a week, and came back to a compiling code base. Diff is quick to review, only had a handful of cases where it needed manual intervention.
AI can make that process still enjoyable. For instance I had to build a very intricate cache handler for Next.js from scratch that worked in a very specific way by serializing JSON in chunks (instead of JSON.parse it all in memory). I knew the theory, but the API details and the other annoyances always made it daunting for me.
With AI I was able to thinker more about the theory of the problem and less about the technical implementation which made the process much more fun and doable.
Perhaps we're just climbing the ladder of abstraction: in the early days people were building their own garbage collection mechanisms, their own binary search algorithms, etc. Once we started using libraries, we had to find the fun in some higher level.
Perhaps in the future the fun will be about solving puzzles within the realm of requirement definitions and all the intricacies that stem from that.
It's the programming equivalent of those tiktok videos split in half, top half being random stock videos, bottom being temple run and an AI narration of a mildly wtf reddit post.
In a way I am lucky that I work at a place where everyone gets to choose what they want to use and how they use it. So my weapons of choice are a slightly tweaked, almost vanilla zsh, vim and zed with 0 ai features. I have a number of friends/former coworkers working at places where the usage of ai is not just allowed or encouraged but mandated. And is part of their performance score - the more you slop-code, the better your performance.
I thought I enjoyed the journey more, but it turns out the destination is wild! There are still quite a few projects I keep for myself, pieces I want done in a specific way, that I now have time to do properly, while the dull stuff can get done elsewhere.
Ever since the dawn of time I've wanted to make my own games but always ended up wasting time on trying to make engines and frameworks and shit, because no development environment worked the way I wanted to, out of the box.
I don't trust AI enough to let it generate code out of thin air yet, and it's often wrong or inefficient when it does, so I just ask it to review my existing code.
I've been using Codex that way for the last couple months and it's helped me catch of lot of bugs that would have taken me ages on my own. All the code and ideas are still my own, and the AI's made me more productive without being lazy.
Maybe this time I will manage to finish making an actual game for once :')
If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.
It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.
One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder.
That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I used to. Mastering a “simple” thing is rewarding. Trying to master much of modern software is not. Web programming rots your brain. Modern languages and software product motivations are all about gaining more money and mindshare. There is no mastering any stack, it changes to swiftly to matter. I view the necessity of using LLMs as an indictment against what working in and with information technology has become.
I wonder if the hope of mastering the agentic process, is what is rejuvenating some programmers. It’s a new challenge to get good at. I wonder what Pink would say today about the role of AI in “what motivates us”.
(Edited, author name correction)
It would have been worth it if the frontier models were open weight. Right now, if you invest time in mastering tools like Claude Code or Google’s Antigravity, there is no guarantee that you won’t be removed from their ecosystems for any reason, which would make your efforts and skills useless.
I am having long design sessions with Claude Code and let it implement the resulting features and changes in version controlled increments.
But I am the one who writes the example games and simulations in the DSL to get a feel for where its design needs to change to improve the user experience. This way I can work on the fun and creative parts and let Claude do the footwork.
I let Claude simultaneously write code, tests and documentation for each increment, and I read it and suggest changes or ask for clarification. I find it a lot easier to dismiss an earlier design for a better idea than when I would have implemented every detail of the system myself, and I think so far the resulting product has largely benefited from this.
To me, now more than ever it is important to keep the love for programming alive by having a side project as a creative outlet, with no time pressure and my own acceptance criteria (like beautiful code or clever solutions) that would not be acceptable in a commercial environment.
Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.
It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.
It's more like iterating on the REPL with AI in the loop, meaning the user stays in control while benefitting from AI, so real growth happens.
Interesting thing to consider, in a couple of years, will there be a differentiator between people who are good at driving company-specific AI tools and those who are generally better by having built skills the hard way ground up with benefit of AI?
I'm more on the second group so LLMs let me get to that part faster without having to get bogged on in the "small stuff".
But I do get the people that enjoy the craftsmanship of the finer details instead.
Then you hopefully capture that information somehow in a future prompt, documentation, test, or other agent guardrail.
So I finds fun in the knowledge engineering of it all. The meta practice of building up a knowledge base in how to solve problems like this codebase.
Adding a jit to perl, inlining, ssa, fixing raku,... Endless possibilities. Just fixing glibc or gcc is out, because people.
I’ve made the choice to not go full bore into AI as a result. I still use it to aid search or ask questions, but full on agentic coding isn’t for me, at least not for the projects I actually care about and want/need to support long-term.
FunSociety•3h ago
Jcampuzano2•2h ago
Rather the issue is they believe they are GOOD at the "journey" and getting to the destination and could compare their journey to others. Another take is they could more readily share their journey or help their peers. Some really like that part.
Now who you are comparing to is not other people going through the same journey, so there is less comradery. Others no longer enjoy that same journey so it feels more "lonely" in a way.
Theres nothing stopping someone from still writing their own code for fun by hand, but the element of sharing the journey with others is diminishing.
EagnaIonat•2h ago
ZenoArrow•2h ago
criley2•2h ago
AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are engineering solutions to real human problems and who just want to tinker with code.
Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".
ZenoArrow•1h ago
Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results. Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck, because you don't have the necessary oversight in the quality of the output unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving.
wek•2h ago
Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
lukan•2h ago
kensai•2h ago
You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
retired•1h ago
georgefrowny•2h ago
A career sailor on a sailing ship who finds meaning in rigging a ship just so with a team of shipmates in order to undertake a useful journey may find his love of sailing diminished somewhat when his life's skills and passions are abruptly reduced to a historical curiosity.
Other sailors may prefer their new "easier" jobs now they don't have to climb rigging all day or caulk decking (but now they have other problems, you need far fewer of them per tonne of cargo).
And the diesel engine mechanics are presumably cock-a-hoop at their new market.
(This analogy makes no claim as to the relative utility of AI compared to diesel ships over sailing vessels).
Isamu•2h ago
At work though the hype sucks the life out of the last part of the job that some people found enjoyable, because complete control is enjoyable. Personally I think work is just doing what someone else wants, rather than pleasing yourself.
fred1268•2h ago
in12parsecs•1h ago
I turned 59 this week. I am excited to go to work again. I use Claude every day. I check Claude. I learn new things from Claude.
I no longer need a "UI person" to get something demonstrable quickly. (I've never been a "UI guy"). I've also never been a guy coding during every waking moment of my life as that would have been disastrous for my mental health.
I am retiring in <=2 years, so I am having fun with this new associate of mine.
One pitfall I've managed to avoid all these 36 years I've been at it is not falling in love with the solution. I fall in love with the problems. Claude solves those problems far quicker than I ever could.
adelie•28m ago
i can continue to row as a hobby, but i've been very lucky in that my work has always been something i genuinely enjoyed. now that it's become something that's actively burning me out, it's far harder to find time for hobbies and interests.