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Comments (190)

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  ryandvm
  I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
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  searls
  I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.
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  hollowturtle
  > Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changedI'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.> the economics of purely hand-written code have changedwho are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
• rglover
  The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.
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  dleslie
  I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
• tjeerdnet
  I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.Last year I started at a new job and was first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.
• thayne
  > Work is not life.Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.
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  kazinator
  Anyhone who tells you things like, "what, you are still looking at code and care what it looks like?" just exposes themselves as a supreme twit.
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  Ultcyber
  Those types of articles make me wonder - is it specific to current US-based software companies culture to be so much involved in AI? I work for in central-eastern Europe and AI has changed the way I code, but not to an extent that I don't ever manually write code anymore. I don't want to sound patronizing, just a genuine question, cause I have a disconnect with what I'm reading on HN and what I see on a daily basis.
• stackedinserter
  Gosh, programming was never that enjoyable.I finally freed from typewriting mundane stuff like yet another API endpoint or subscribing to rabbitmq, and can focus of creative work and really building useful things.
• aftergibson
  And here I was trying so hard to hate the thing I've loved doing.Thanks blog!
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  mycocola
  It's like meat was invented.Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".
• Rochus
  > I still program on the weekends because it is funFully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?
• hmokiguess
  Most of the times someone writes something like that I find they are mostly talking to themselves.Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.
• hexasquid
  For a second I didnt see where it says "made by my own two hands", but it's down the bottom.Phew!
• crystaln
  It’s on to enjoy knitting too.
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  0c3ca83
  (as a hobby. God forbid you enjoy it for money.)This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.The future sucks.
• rskeens
  Some of us enjoy mentally modelling everything to see opportunities to iterate as each cog turns in their head. Often without being in front of a device, letting sub conscious figuring out difficult problems. AI has its place but so does that process.If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.
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  mbsa7
  I wish there was I way I could forget this site existed so I would never go back here.
• anon
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• ur-whale
  > It's still ok to enjoy programmingIt is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.
• micromacrofoot
  Yeah but I want to get paid for it.
• cute_boi
  The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
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  Apocryphon
  NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...)1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 commentshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.
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  radial_symmetry
  I can now freely admin that I never enjoyed programming. It was just a means to an end for creating.
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  esafak
  So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.
• anon
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  128317836
  HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.The dumbest people always win temporarily.
• meet30997
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• fbilhaut
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• anon
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