I can predict this because I’m building such a thing for myself as are many others. It seems to be where the tao of slop is going.
The days of:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"; 20 GOTO 10
Are long gone.
giving that code as a prompt to Claude yields:
Worked for 5s · done 8:30 AM
10 PRINT "Hello World"; 20 GOTO 10
Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction: create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)
But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...
I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...
As a domain expert, I spent all my time learning my scientific niche, and only a small bit on practical coding. Now I can manifest the ideas I formerly needed to hire developers for. WAY more fun.
If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
For me it's mixed. There's aspects of coding I do enjoy but also there's tedium that I don't. What I don't like about vibe coding is it has turned me into just a code reviewer in a lot of cases.
Would I want to build a business around products that are built this way? Not yet. I'm definitely not comfortable supporting a vibe coded heap of code in a production setting.
It's awful when the boundary breaks down. It might just be inherit to the loop (no mind readers) but I will walk away from an AI task for 30 minutes and all too frequently there will be insane code smells.
I've been doing a thing where I will have "integration" projects between many different subsystems to demonstrate some capability, test it, then destroy the integration folder, folding back what we learned into the subsystems themselves. So far this has been OK for learning and it incentivizes the AI to not throw garbage everywhere. Of course, this assumes you get subsystems right but it prevents direct reaching into them and modifying excessively - try to do the most you can with fixed interfaces, etc.
I started a small one-man SaaS in 2022 that I coded by hand, and have gradually adopted AI usage. I don't write a single line of code anymore today, and my speed/performance has supercharged in the last 6-12months. The fun of coding is completely gone, but replaced with me being able to deliver what I need to grow the product (from dev, to design and marketing work).
Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.
Vibe coding is like a last second weekend trip to Paris.
Accelerated software construction is like planning a four week backpacking trip through Western Europe.
I’m a grey beard so I’m on the far side of “writing code is fun” but I get it. I used to love those ah-ha moments when solving coding problems.
But now I love delivering solutions to the business or creating software that works as I envisioned it and those two things are fun in very different ways.
Edit: Or the bits I don't want to learn about because I'll literally use it once and never again
For me, personally, I have learned that fun is often more correlated with social connection and sharing than it is with subjective perception or gratification of the task at hand if removing the social element.
The most fun I had in life was when I had great teams, great people, and great challenges to share both the growth and struggles with. The rest, like what tooling we used, was optional and easy to misjudge as important at the time. Looking back I rarely recall the experience of using certain tooling over another, and often remember the people and the stories.
Unfortunately it also means that whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel.
But if we are talking about personal projects where the aim is to learn complex interesting things, then of course writing code by hand is the only way to actually learn.
I guess antirez agrees with this as well[0].
it's fine to keep riding though as long as you're having fun!! but it will definitely get worse and worse as a form of transportation
(this is true for hand coding too)
We can no longer deny that LLMs are useful for coding, so we now move on the only remaining and defensible goalpost: I don't use LLMs because I don't want to. To be clear, this is a perfectly fine position and I hold no ill will against anybody holding it, but I don't think one gets to this conclusion naturally. It comes first from a lifetime of writing software, like I and many others have experienced.
And for what it's worth, I always had more fun planning what I was going to build rather than handling the brass tax of implementation. The specifics of problem and solution are always what interested me more than writing each character, and LLMs allow for one to do just this, and nothing else. Not a bad deal!
Again, my apologies for being such an insufferable asshole to come here and tell you what you ought to like. This is my experience, and I might be wrong, but I don't think I am.
Our business-side employees have only begun using agents, and their spending accelerating. They're claiming their ROI is massively positive and have an enormous willing to spend.
Prices will probably go down because of the emerging price war between Anthropic and OpenAI, but there are many firms willing to spend.
For your personal projects or as a hobby, absolutely. But in a professional setting, coding by hand gone forever.
I've written >90% this code by hand.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
he still pays me for my handwritten code tho. luckily it's easy to pretend you like AI and know by lying since it has basically no skill curve.
and then just carry on doing a good job the old way.
"People" say a lot of things, I can only reply to comments said here, not to vague words by anonymous people from the ether.
>my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
Good think your CEO speaks for everyone in the industry.
I think what he means is that he's afraid for his company being beaten by competitors who will overtake you if they use AI but you don't.
> Nobody here is saying that.
To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended usecase.
I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where the output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
Robots are much easier.
I love AI coding because I can use it to automate all the parts that are not fun or that would take far, far too much time to implement by hand. It puts things within reach that would formerly be unthinkable without millions of dollars and a gigantic software development team.
I still also enjoy coding things by hand... interesting, original things.
The technology itself is also absolutely fascinating. I've followed AI research for a long time and played around with it a lot, but the incredible breakthroughs of the last 5-10 years have blown me away. I've been working through the math on attention layers and feel like I've almost got it, and it's genius. Very cool stuff.
(The companies behind marketing and scaling it are, to varying degrees, not cool, but the tech and science and math is.)
tom_•53m ago
Waterluvian•39m ago
xhkkffbf•38m ago
Lio•22m ago
It was the hobby I was really happy to turn into a full time, paying job.
I know I'm not alone in that either. I used to joke with colleagues about not letting the boss know how much we enjoyed the work.
Razengan•12m ago
dpkirchner•30m ago
Anyone that assumes an author is speaking for everyone will find something else to gripe about, IMO.
kazinator•21m ago
john_strinlai•2m ago
whateveracct•16m ago
unless you want to water down the title with an "i think"
lambda•12m ago
When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.
Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.
kevinh•3m ago
boesboes•10m ago