Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.
I believe:
While communication can be satisfying, it’s not as rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.
Flow states.
When the right level of challenge and capability align and you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth. Emerging satisfied. Nourished.
But it does feel less fulfilling I suppose.
I've seen people unable to work at average speed on small features suddenly reach above average output through a llm cli and I could sense the pride in them. Which is at odds with my experience of work.. I love to dig down, know a lot, model and find abstractions on my own. There a llm will 1) not understand how my brain work 2) produce something workable but that requires me to stretch mentally.. and most of the time I leave numb. In the last month I've seen many people expressing similar views.
I’ve realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot more energy onto high satisfaction projects
I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.
> Number of Survey Respondents
> Building apps 53
> Testing 1
I think this sums up everybody complaints about AI generated code. Don't ask me to be the one to review work you didn't even check.
I. Don't. Care.
I don't even care about those debates outside. Debates about do LLM work and replace programmers? Say they do, ok so what?
I simply have too much fun programming. I am just a mere fullstack business line programmer, generic random replaceable dude, you can find me dime a dozen.
I do use LLM as Stack Overflow/docs replacement, but I always code by hand all my code.
If you want to replace me, replace me. I'll go to companies that need me. If there are no companies that need my skill, fine, then I'll just do this as a hobby, and probably flip burgers outside to make a living.
I don't care about your LLM, I don't care about your agent, I probably don't even care about the job prospects for that matter if I have to be forced to use tools that I don't like and to use workflows I don't like. You can go ahead find others who are willing to do it for you.
As for me, I simply have too much fun programming. Now if you excuse me, I need to go have fun.
Like I said, I am just a generic replaceable dime a dozen programmer dude.
a job isn't supposed to be fun its nice when it is but it shouldn't be what drives decisions
I meant it can be your (not necessarily your employer) driving decision in life.
Of course, you need to suffer. That's about having tradeoffs.
you can definitely choose not to participate and give the opportunity someone who are happy to use AI and still have fun with it.
or something like that
I'd at least be more likely to get a boost in impact and ability to affect decision making, maybe.
(1) already have enough money to survive without working, or
(2) don't realize how hard of a life it would be to "flip burgers" to make a living in 2026.
We live very good lives as software developers. Don't be a fool and think you could just "flip burgers" and be fine.
I also did dry cleaning, cleaning service, deli, delivery guy, etc.
Yup I now have enough money to survive without working.
But I also am very low maintenance, thanks to my early life being raised in harsh conditions.
I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again.
This has nothing to do with deployment. I never talked about deployment.
Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough products are based on AI.
Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.
Hence why you have in the same thread, some developer who claims that Claude writes 99% of their code and another developer who finds it totally useless. And of course others who are somewhere in the middle.
I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second.
Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source to build on.
And those giants and others like them that were enabled by open source employed a TON of people, at competitive rates that greatly increased our salaries.
With AI at least locally I'm seeing the opposite now - less hiring, less wage pressure and in social circles a lot less status when I mention I'm a SWE (almost sympathy for my lot vs respect only 5 years ago). While I don't care for the status aspect, although I do care for my ability to earn money, some do.
At least locally inflation adjusted in my city SWE wages bought more and were higher in general compared to others in the 90's-2000's than on wards (ex big tech). Partly because this difficulty and low level knowledge meant only very skilled people could participate.
I mean, this seems like a pretty big thing to leave out, no? That's where all the crazy high salaries were!
Also, there are still legacy places that more or less build software like it's 1999. I get the impression that embedded, automotive, and such still rely a lot on proprietary tools, finicky manual processes, low level languages (obviously), etc. But those are notorious for being annoying and not very well paid.
It could even have been picked up in pretraining and then rewarded during rlhf when the output domain was being refined; I haven’t used enough LLMs before post training to know what step it usually becomes noticeable.
As with every new tech there's a hell of a lot of noise (plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP - to quote Kaparthy) but most of it can just be disregarded. No one is "behind" - it's all very easy to use.
The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.)
This is notable because a lot of academic papers take 6-12 months to come out, by which time the LLM space has often moved on by an entire model generation.
It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months to fight with reviewers
Off your intuition, do you think the same study with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5 would see even better results?
If people are really set in their ways, maybe they won't try anything beyond what old models can do, and won't notice a difference, but who's had time to get set in their ways with this stuff?
game_the0ry•2h ago
Not a statistically significant sample size.
superjose•1h ago
HPsquared•1h ago
bee_rider•1h ago
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/