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I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disag

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.

ajcp 8mo ago
->...it's commissioning. I like this. I'm going to see if my boss will go for me changing my title from Solutions Architect to Solutions Commissioner. I'll insist people refer to me as "Commissioner ajcp"
mrocklin 8mo ago
One can have fun with all manner of things. Take wood-working for example. One can have fun with a handsaw. One can also have fun with a table saw. They're both fun, just different kinds
- zephen 8mo ago
  What about a table saw with no guard, a wobbly blade, and directions from management to follow a faint line you'd have a hard time doing with a scroll saw?
CharlesW 8mo ago
> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.
- fridder 8mo ago
  That is accurate for me. I have never enjoyed coding puzzles or advent of code. My version of that is diving into systems and software when it breaks. That is fun...as long as my job or income is not on the line
- thewebguyd 8mo ago
  I am one of those, but that's why I went into the ops side of things and not dev, although the two sides have been merging for a while now and even though I deal with infrastructure, I do so by writing code. I don't mind ops code though. I dislike building software as in products, or user-facing apps but I don't mind glue code and scripting/automation. Don't ask me to do leetcode though, I'll fail and hate the experience the entire time.
  - dionian 8mo ago
    i like delivering value, AI lets me do that better on low risk projects very fast
    - crashabr 8mo ago
      > I like delivering value I understand where comedians get their source material now.
lawlessone 8mo ago
Thinking the same thing, nobodies calling the Pope a painter because he paid Michelangelo to paint a chapel. In b4 someone mentions some famous artists had apprentices under them. I might start watching golf, and everytime someone else get's the ball in the hole i'll take credit for it. "Did you see what did there? "
quotemstr 8mo ago
> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning. What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist? What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Florence --- is it not architecture? Is it not art?
- deergomoo 8mo ago
  I would call the designing of the building art, yes. But I wouldn’t call it construction. I would also call designing a system to be fed into an LLM designing. But I wouldn’t call it programming. If people are more into the design and system architecture side of development, I of course have no problem with that. What I do find baffling, as per my original comment, is all the people saying basically “programming is way more fun now I don’t have to do it”. Did you even actually like programming to begin with then?
  - somebehemoth 8mo ago
    I do think a huge number of people are infatuated with the idea of programming but hate the act itself. I have tried to teach a lot of people to code and it is rare to find the person who is both enthusiastic and able to maintain motivation once they realize every single character matters and yes, that bracket does have to be closed. Of course not everyone who programs AI style hate programming, but I do think your take explains a large chunk of zealotry: It has become Us v. Them for both sides and each is staking out their territory. Telling the vibe coder they are not programming hurts their feelings much like telling a senior developer all their accumulated experience and knowledge is useless if not today, for sure some day soon!
    - quotemstr 8mo ago
      > I do think a huge number of people are infatuated with the idea of programming but hate the act itself. I have tried to teach a lot of people to code and it is rare to find the person who is both enthusiastic and able to maintain motivation once they realize every single character matters and yes, that bracket does have to be closed. I think it's legitimate that someone might enjoy the act of creation, broadly construed, but not the brick-by-brick mechanics of programming.
tsukikage 8mo ago
> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.
- emseetech 8mo ago
  Understanding memory and using a debugger is hard but I'll take that over telling an AI my grandma will die if it does something wrong.
- 9dev 8mo ago
  I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead. You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
  - tsukikage 8mo ago
    The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions. Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
    - vanviegen 8mo ago
      You've clearly never had to work with Gradle. :-)
sodapopcan 8mo ago
Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time. I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast without it and enjoy the process this author callously calls "wrestling with computers." Of course this isn't going to help with the whole "making me fast at things I don't know" but that's another can of worms.
- rileymichael 8mo ago
  yep.. learning vim or all of the keybinds/tools at ones disposal in $jetbrains_editor would _actually_ make some peers 2x faster but alas..
  - sodapopcan 8mo ago
    Agreed but it's not even that. I worked with someone who was insanely fast with RubyMine. All the shortcuts were second-nature and shit just flew onto the screen. So generally, the argument would be to be really good with whatever editor you have. It also goes outside of that, like snippets are still very viable for lots of boilerplate. At the same time, one of the best developers I worked with was a two-finger typist who had to look at the keyboard. But again, I don't care if you're going to use AI (well, that's not entirely true but not going to get into it) but the tone of this article that "You should learn it, " I take issue with.
- dist-epoch 8mo ago
  You can write 10000 lines of code without AI in a day? Impressive
- sincerely 8mo ago
  Isn't that because the "best in class" LLM-enabled IDE or dev environment keeps changing every few months, or even more frequently if you're price conscious and want to use the most powerful coding models?
harles 8mo ago
~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
- gamerdonkey 8mo ago
  The gambling analogy has been brought up before. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gam...
- awfulneutral 8mo ago
  It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.
  - harles 8mo ago
    > But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow. I feel this exactly. I’ve been one of the biggest champions of the tech in my org in spite of the frequent pain I feel from it.
    - somekyle2 8mo ago
      If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.
- rileymichael 8mo ago
  > I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist
kleinsch 8mo ago
AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.
- Yoric 8mo ago
  Yeah, that is one of my main uses for AI: getting the build stuff and scripts out of the way so that I can focus on the application code. That and brainstorming. In both cases, it works because I can mostly detect when the output is bullshit. I'm just a little bit scared, though, that it will stop working if I rely too much on it, because I might lose the brain muscles I need to detect said bullshit.
  - dionian 8mo ago
    Im super interested to know how juniors get a long. i have dealt with build systems for decades and half the time its just use google or stackoverflow to get past something quickly, or manually troubleshoot deps. now i automate that entirely. and for code, i know what good or not, i check its output and hve it redo anything t5hat doesnt pass my known stndards. It makes using it so much easier. the article is so on point
- ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
  Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop. I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.
  - vlod 8mo ago
briansteffens 8mo ago
There are some things that I think become more fun, like dealing with anything you don't actually find interesting. I recently made a quick little web app and I hand-coded the core logic since I find that part fun. But I vibe-coded the front-end, especially the CSS, because I just don't find that stuff very interesting and I'm less picky about the visuals. Letting the AI just do the boring parts for me made the overall project more fun I think.
libraryofbabel 8mo ago
But it’s not really an argument, it’s a statement about feelings. Some people really do prefer coding with AI. Is that so strange? Often we’ve spent 1 or 2 decades writing code and in our day jobs we don’t see a lot of novel problems come our way at the level of the code anymore (architecture, sure, still often novel). We’ve seen N number of variations on the same thing; we are good at doing them but get little joy in doing them for the N + 1th time. We find typing out api serializers and for loops and function definitions and yaml boilerplate just a little boring, if we already have a picture in our head of what we want to do. And we like being able to build faster and ship to our users without spending hours and extra brain cycles dealing with low-level complexity that could be avoided. I am happy to accept that some people still prefer to write out their code by hand… that’s ok? Keep doing it if you want! But I would gently suggest you ask yourself why you are so offended by people that would prefer to automate much of that, because you seem to be offended. Or am I misreading? And hey, I still enjoy solving interesting problems with code. I did advent of code this year with no LLM assistance and it was great fun. But most professional software development doesn’t have that novelty value where you get to think about algorithms and combinatorical puzzles and graphs and so on. Before anyone says it, sure, there is a discussion to be had about AI code quality and the negative effects of all this. A bad engineer can use it to ship slop to production. Nobody is denying that. But I think that’s a separate set of questions. Finally, I’m not sure painting is the best analogy. Most of us are not creating works of high art here. It’s a job, to make things for people to use, more akin to building houses than painting the Sistine Chapel. Please don’t sneer at use if we enjoy finding ways to put up our drywall quicker.
dolebirchwood 8mo ago
I don't care about technology for what it is. I care about it for what it can do. If I can achieve what I want by just using plain English, I'm going to achieve what I want faster and more thoroughly enjoy the process. Just my two cents.
lynx97 8mo ago
Well, washing cloths has definitely become "more fun" since the invention of washing machines... Cleaning your flat has become "more fun" since vacuum cleaners. Writing has become "more fun" since editors overtook typewriters. Bedroom studios power most of the clubs I know. Navigating a city as a blind pedestrian has definitely become more fun since the introduction of the oh-so-evil-screentime-bad smartphone. I could go on forever. Moving has become more fun since the invention of the wheel... See?
aspenmartin 8mo ago
I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end. It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part" You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful. Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!
- lunar_mycroft 8mo ago
  > It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part" The compiler reliably and deterministically produces code that does exactly what you specified in the source code. In most cases, the code it produces is also as fast/faster than hand written assembly. The same can't be said for LLMs, for the simple reason that English (and other natural languages) is not a programming language. You can't compile English (and shouldn't want to, as Dijkstra correctly pointed out) because it's ambiguous. All you can do is "commission" another > Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? For enjoying it on your own time? No. But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.
  - aspenmartin 8mo ago
    That a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument. > But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans. Is that what I’m doing? I understand your frustration. But I hope you understand that this is a straw man: I can straw man the antagonists and AI-hostile folks but the point is the factions and tribes are complex and unreasonable opinions abound. My stance is that people can dismiss coding agents at their peril, but it’s not really a problem: taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that. But all the folks that lamented compilers didn’t crumble away, they eventually adapted. I see that analogy as being applicable here, it may be hard to see the insanity of coding agents because we’re not time travelers from 2020 or even 2022 or 3. But this used to be an absurd idea and is now very serious and highly adopted. But still quite weak!! Still we’re missing key reliability and functionality and capabilities. But if we got this far this fast, and if you realize that coding agent training is not limited in the same way that e.g. vanilla LLM training is by being a verifiable domain, we seem to be careening forward. But by nature of their current weakness, absolutely it is reasonable not to use them and absolutely it is reasonable to point out all of their flaws. Lots of unreasonable people out there, my argument is simply: be reasonable.
Jonovono 8mo ago
It’s more like saying you love painting, but you’re glad you no longer have to hike into the wilderness, crush minerals, boil oils, and invent pigments from scratch before you can put brush to canvas.
AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
I have zero desire to go hunt down and create a wrapper to avoid some kernel bug because what I want to do can’t be implemented because of an edge case of some CPU-package incompatibility. I have found in my software writing experience that the majority of what I want to write is boiler plate with small modifications but most of the problems are insanely hard to diagnose edge cases and I have absolutely no desire nor is it a good use of time in my opinion to deal with structural issues in things that I do not control. The vast majority of code you do not control because you aren’t the owner of the framework or library your language or whatever and so the Bass majority of software engineering is coming up with solutions to foundational problems of the tools you’re using The idea that this is the only true type of software engineering is absurd True software engineering is systems, control and integration engineering. What I find absolutely annoying is that there’s this rejection of the highest level Hofstetter level of software architecture and engineering This is basically sneered at over the idea of “I’m gonna go and try to figure out some memory management module because AMD didn’t invest in additional SOC for the problems that I have because they’re optimized for some Business goals.” It’s frankly junior level thinking
lacy_tinpot 8mo ago
Who's actually coding? You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart. Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation? Most of the time it's wasting time learning some bs framework or implementing some other poorly designed system that some engineer that no longer works at the company created. In fact the entire industry is basically just one poorly designed system with technological debt that grows increasingly burdensome year by year. It's very rarely about actual programming or actual computation or even "engineering". But usually just one giant kludge pile.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Computers are one big kludge pile because they can do anything.
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
I have been developing for 30 years professionally and 10 years before that as a hobbyist or in school Development is solely to exchange labor for money. I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since 1992. I did it for my degree between 1992-1996 while having fun in college and after that depending on my stage in life, dating, hanging out with friends, teaching fitness classes and doing monthly charity races with friends, spending time with my wife and (step)kids, and now enjoying traveling with my wife and friends, and still exercising
forgetfulness 8mo ago
Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems. Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines. I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.
- matkoniecz 8mo ago
  Well, so far I tried using LLMs in hobby/open source/personal projects where I get benefits of code working.
xnx 8mo ago
What part of making a movie is fun? Acting, costumes, sets, camerawork, story, dialogue, script, sound effects, lighting, editing, directing, producing, marketing? Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.
- falloutx 8mo ago
  All parts of making a movie are fun. If you hire people who are passionate at each task, you will get 1000x better result. It may be 10 days late but better to be late than slop.
BeetleB 8mo ago
People have given most of the answers, but here's another one: At work, when I write code, I spend a lot of time designing it, making good interfaces, good tests, etc. It gave me joy to carefully craft it. At home, I never had the time/will to be as thorough. Too many other things to do in life. Pre-LLMs, most of my personal scripts are just - messy. One of the nice things with LLM assisted coding is that it almost always: 1. Gives my program a nice interface/UI 2. Puts good print/log statements 3. Writes tests (although this is a hit or miss). Most of the time it does it without being asked. And it turns out, these are motivation multipliers. When developing something, if it gives me good logs, and has a good UI, I'm more likely to spend time developing it further. Hence, coding is now more joyful. And it turns out, these tend to
dang 8mo ago
Fun is a feeling, so one can't really have an argument that something is fun or not - that would be a category error no? You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name. I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference in our present moment, of course, is that the "assistants" are mechanical ones. (as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then also, I don't enjoy writing grunt code / boilerplate etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, - and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)
- vercaemert 8mo ago
  yeah, well said i like what software can do, i don't like writing it i can try to give the benefit of the doubt to people saying they don't see improvements (and assume there's just a communication breakdown) i've personally built three poc tools that proved my ideas didn't work and then tossed the poc tools. ive had those ideas since i knew how to program, i just didn't have the time and energy to see them through.
williamcotton 8mo ago
Most master painters of the past had teams organized as workshops where the majority of the painting was NOT done by the master. The “lone genius” image is largely a modern romantic invention.
- grugagag 8mo ago
  Thats not quite true. The “lone genius” type went against the grain and created something new while still showing some skill (well, that’s debatable in modern art).
rukuu001 8mo ago
It shaves yaks for me. I appreciate that.
mattwilsonn888 8mo ago
If you have to work in a language or framework with a lot of arbitrary-seeming features, ugly or opaque translation layers, or a lot of boiler-plate, then I absolutely understand the sentiment. Programming a system at a low-level from scratch is fun. Getting CSS to look right under a bunch of edge cases - I won't judge that programmer too harshly for consulting the text machine. This is especially true considering it's these shallow but trivia-dominated tasks which are the least fun and also which LLMs are the most effective at accomplishing.
nl 8mo ago
I love building things with computers. I'm not particularly interested in the coding. I've coded professionally for 30 years (ergh!). I'm ok at it. But I love building things with AI. I haven't had this much fun since the early 2000s.
sph 8mo ago
> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun AI is more fun for programmers that should've gone into management instead, and prefer having to explain things in painstaking detail in text, rather than use code. In other words, AI is for people that don't like programming that much. Why would you even automate the most fun part of this job? As a freelance consultant, I'd rather have a machine to automate the whole boring business side so I could just sit in front of my computer and write stuff with my own hands.
simonw 8mo ago
[dead]
bandrami 8mo ago
And the thing I don't get about how excited people are is that if what LLMs really do is change software development from coding to code review, which is the part of software development that is universally hated.

ajcp 8mo ago

->...it's commissioning. I like this. I'm going to see if my boss will go for me changing my title from Solutions Architect to Solutions Commissioner. I'll insist people refer to me as "Commissioner ajcp"

mrocklin 8mo ago

One can have fun with all manner of things. Take wood-working for example. One can have fun with a handsaw. One can also have fun with a table saw. They're both fun, just different kinds

zephen 8mo ago
What about a table saw with no guard, a wobbly blade, and directions from management to follow a faint line you'd have a hard time doing with a scroll saw?

CharlesW 8mo ago

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.

fridder 8mo ago
That is accurate for me. I have never enjoyed coding puzzles or advent of code. My version of that is diving into systems and software when it breaks. That is fun...as long as my job or income is not on the line
thewebguyd 8mo ago
I am one of those, but that's why I went into the ops side of things and not dev, although the two sides have been merging for a while now and even though I deal with infrastructure, I do so by writing code. I don't mind ops code though. I dislike building software as in products, or user-facing apps but I don't mind glue code and scripting/automation. Don't ask me to do leetcode though, I'll fail and hate the experience the entire time.
- dionian 8mo ago
  i like delivering value, AI lets me do that better on low risk projects very fast
  - crashabr 8mo ago
    > I like delivering value I understand where comedians get their source material now.

lawlessone 8mo ago

Thinking the same thing, nobodies calling the Pope a painter because he paid Michelangelo to paint a chapel. In b4 someone mentions some famous artists had apprentices under them. I might start watching golf, and everytime someone else get's the ball in the hole i'll take credit for it. "Did you see what did there? "

quotemstr 8mo ago

> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning. What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist? What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Florence --- is it not architecture? Is it not art?

deergomoo 8mo ago
I would call the designing of the building art, yes. But I wouldn’t call it construction. I would also call designing a system to be fed into an LLM designing. But I wouldn’t call it programming. If people are more into the design and system architecture side of development, I of course have no problem with that. What I do find baffling, as per my original comment, is all the people saying basically “programming is way more fun now I don’t have to do it”. Did you even actually like programming to begin with then?
- somebehemoth 8mo ago
  I do think a huge number of people are infatuated with the idea of programming but hate the act itself. I have tried to teach a lot of people to code and it is rare to find the person who is both enthusiastic and able to maintain motivation once they realize every single character matters and yes, that bracket does have to be closed. Of course not everyone who programs AI style hate programming, but I do think your take explains a large chunk of zealotry: It has become Us v. Them for both sides and each is staking out their territory. Telling the vibe coder they are not programming hurts their feelings much like telling a senior developer all their accumulated experience and knowledge is useless if not today, for sure some day soon!
  - quotemstr 8mo ago
    > I do think a huge number of people are infatuated with the idea of programming but hate the act itself. I have tried to teach a lot of people to code and it is rare to find the person who is both enthusiastic and able to maintain motivation once they realize every single character matters and yes, that bracket does have to be closed. I think it's legitimate that someone might enjoy the act of creation, broadly construed, but not the brick-by-brick mechanics of programming.

tsukikage 8mo ago

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

emseetech 8mo ago
Understanding memory and using a debugger is hard but I'll take that over telling an AI my grandma will die if it does something wrong.
9dev 8mo ago
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead. You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
- tsukikage 8mo ago
  The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions. Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
  - vanviegen 8mo ago
    You've clearly never had to work with Gradle. :-)

sodapopcan 8mo ago

Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time. I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast without it and enjoy the process this author callously calls "wrestling with computers." Of course this isn't going to help with the whole "making me fast at things I don't know" but that's another can of worms.

rileymichael 8mo ago
yep.. learning vim or all of the keybinds/tools at ones disposal in $jetbrains_editor would _actually_ make some peers 2x faster but alas..
- sodapopcan 8mo ago
  Agreed but it's not even that. I worked with someone who was insanely fast with RubyMine. All the shortcuts were second-nature and shit just flew onto the screen. So generally, the argument would be to be really good with whatever editor you have. It also goes outside of that, like snippets are still very viable for lots of boilerplate. At the same time, one of the best developers I worked with was a two-finger typist who had to look at the keyboard. But again, I don't care if you're going to use AI (well, that's not entirely true but not going to get into it) but the tone of this article that "You should learn it, " I take issue with.
dist-epoch 8mo ago
You can write 10000 lines of code without AI in a day? Impressive
sincerely 8mo ago
Isn't that because the "best in class" LLM-enabled IDE or dev environment keeps changing every few months, or even more frequently if you're price conscious and want to use the most powerful coding models?

harles 8mo ago

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

gamerdonkey 8mo ago
The gambling analogy has been brought up before. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gam...
awfulneutral 8mo ago
It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.
- harles 8mo ago
  > But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow. I feel this exactly. I’ve been one of the biggest champions of the tech in my org in spite of the frequent pain I feel from it.
  - somekyle2 8mo ago
    If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.
rileymichael 8mo ago
> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist

kleinsch 8mo ago

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

Yoric 8mo ago
Yeah, that is one of my main uses for AI: getting the build stuff and scripts out of the way so that I can focus on the application code. That and brainstorming. In both cases, it works because I can mostly detect when the output is bullshit. I'm just a little bit scared, though, that it will stop working if I rely too much on it, because I might lose the brain muscles I need to detect said bullshit.
- dionian 8mo ago
  Im super interested to know how juniors get a long. i have dealt with build systems for decades and half the time its just use google or stackoverflow to get past something quickly, or manually troubleshoot deps. now i automate that entirely. and for code, i know what good or not, i check its output and hve it redo anything t5hat doesnt pass my known stndards. It makes using it so much easier. the article is so on point
ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop. I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.
- vlod 8mo ago

briansteffens 8mo ago

There are some things that I think become more fun, like dealing with anything you don't actually find interesting. I recently made a quick little web app and I hand-coded the core logic since I find that part fun. But I vibe-coded the front-end, especially the CSS, because I just don't find that stuff very interesting and I'm less picky about the visuals. Letting the AI just do the boring parts for me made the overall project more fun I think.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago

But it’s not really an argument, it’s a statement about feelings. Some people really do prefer coding with AI. Is that so strange? Often we’ve spent 1 or 2 decades writing code and in our day jobs we don’t see a lot of novel problems come our way at the level of the code anymore (architecture, sure, still often novel). We’ve seen N number of variations on the same thing; we are good at doing them but get little joy in doing them for the N + 1th time. We find typing out api serializers and for loops and function definitions and yaml boilerplate just a little boring, if we already have a picture in our head of what we want to do. And we like being able to build faster and ship to our users without spending hours and extra brain cycles dealing with low-level complexity that could be avoided. I am happy to accept that some people still prefer to write out their code by hand… that’s ok? Keep doing it if you want! But I would gently suggest you ask yourself why you are so offended by people that would prefer to automate much of that, because you seem to be offended. Or am I misreading? And hey, I still enjoy solving interesting problems with code. I did advent of code this year with no LLM assistance and it was great fun. But most professional software development doesn’t have that novelty value where you get to think about algorithms and combinatorical puzzles and graphs and so on. Before anyone says it, sure, there is a discussion to be had about AI code quality and the negative effects of all this. A bad engineer can use it to ship slop to production. Nobody is denying that. But I think that’s a separate set of questions. Finally, I’m not sure painting is the best analogy. Most of us are not creating works of high art here. It’s a job, to make things for people to use, more akin to building houses than painting the Sistine Chapel. Please don’t sneer at use if we enjoy finding ways to put up our drywall quicker.

dolebirchwood 8mo ago

I don't care about technology for what it is. I care about it for what it can do. If I can achieve what I want by just using plain English, I'm going to achieve what I want faster and more thoroughly enjoy the process. Just my two cents.

lynx97 8mo ago

Well, washing cloths has definitely become "more fun" since the invention of washing machines... Cleaning your flat has become "more fun" since vacuum cleaners. Writing has become "more fun" since editors overtook typewriters. Bedroom studios power most of the clubs I know. Navigating a city as a blind pedestrian has definitely become more fun since the introduction of the oh-so-evil-screentime-bad smartphone. I could go on forever. Moving has become more fun since the invention of the wheel... See?

aspenmartin 8mo ago

I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end. It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part" You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful. Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!

lunar_mycroft 8mo ago
> It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part" The compiler reliably and deterministically produces code that does exactly what you specified in the source code. In most cases, the code it produces is also as fast/faster than hand written assembly. The same can't be said for LLMs, for the simple reason that English (and other natural languages) is not a programming language. You can't compile English (and shouldn't want to, as Dijkstra correctly pointed out) because it's ambiguous. All you can do is "commission" another > Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? For enjoying it on your own time? No. But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.
- aspenmartin 8mo ago
  That a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument. > But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans. Is that what I’m doing? I understand your frustration. But I hope you understand that this is a straw man: I can straw man the antagonists and AI-hostile folks but the point is the factions and tribes are complex and unreasonable opinions abound. My stance is that people can dismiss coding agents at their peril, but it’s not really a problem: taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that. But all the folks that lamented compilers didn’t crumble away, they eventually adapted. I see that analogy as being applicable here, it may be hard to see the insanity of coding agents because we’re not time travelers from 2020 or even 2022 or 3. But this used to be an absurd idea and is now very serious and highly adopted. But still quite weak!! Still we’re missing key reliability and functionality and capabilities. But if we got this far this fast, and if you realize that coding agent training is not limited in the same way that e.g. vanilla LLM training is by being a verifiable domain, we seem to be careening forward. But by nature of their current weakness, absolutely it is reasonable not to use them and absolutely it is reasonable to point out all of their flaws. Lots of unreasonable people out there, my argument is simply: be reasonable.

Jonovono 8mo ago

It’s more like saying you love painting, but you’re glad you no longer have to hike into the wilderness, crush minerals, boil oils, and invent pigments from scratch before you can put brush to canvas.

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago

I have zero desire to go hunt down and create a wrapper to avoid some kernel bug because what I want to do can’t be implemented because of an edge case of some CPU-package incompatibility. I have found in my software writing experience that the majority of what I want to write is boiler plate with small modifications but most of the problems are insanely hard to diagnose edge cases and I have absolutely no desire nor is it a good use of time in my opinion to deal with structural issues in things that I do not control. The vast majority of code you do not control because you aren’t the owner of the framework or library your language or whatever and so the Bass majority of software engineering is coming up with solutions to foundational problems of the tools you’re using The idea that this is the only true type of software engineering is absurd True software engineering is systems, control and integration engineering. What I find absolutely annoying is that there’s this rejection of the highest level Hofstetter level of software architecture and engineering This is basically sneered at over the idea of “I’m gonna go and try to figure out some memory management module because AMD didn’t invest in additional SOC for the problems that I have because they’re optimized for some Business goals.” It’s frankly junior level thinking

lacy_tinpot 8mo ago

Who's actually coding? You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart. Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation? Most of the time it's wasting time learning some bs framework or implementing some other poorly designed system that some engineer that no longer works at the company created. In fact the entire industry is basically just one poorly designed system with technological debt that grows increasingly burdensome year by year. It's very rarely about actual programming or actual computation or even "engineering". But usually just one giant kludge pile.

pixl97 8mo ago
Computers are one big kludge pile because they can do anything.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

I have been developing for 30 years professionally and 10 years before that as a hobbyist or in school Development is solely to exchange labor for money. I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since 1992. I did it for my degree between 1992-1996 while having fun in college and after that depending on my stage in life, dating, hanging out with friends, teaching fitness classes and doing monthly charity races with friends, spending time with my wife and (step)kids, and now enjoying traveling with my wife and friends, and still exercising

forgetfulness 8mo ago

Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems. Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines. I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

matkoniecz 8mo ago
Well, so far I tried using LLMs in hobby/open source/personal projects where I get benefits of code working.

xnx 8mo ago

What part of making a movie is fun? Acting, costumes, sets, camerawork, story, dialogue, script, sound effects, lighting, editing, directing, producing, marketing? Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.

falloutx 8mo ago
All parts of making a movie are fun. If you hire people who are passionate at each task, you will get 1000x better result. It may be 10 days late but better to be late than slop.

BeetleB 8mo ago

People have given most of the answers, but here's another one: At work, when I write code, I spend a lot of time designing it, making good interfaces, good tests, etc. It gave me joy to carefully craft it. At home, I never had the time/will to be as thorough. Too many other things to do in life. Pre-LLMs, most of my personal scripts are just - messy. One of the nice things with LLM assisted coding is that it almost always: 1. Gives my program a nice interface/UI 2. Puts good print/log statements 3. Writes tests (although this is a hit or miss). Most of the time it does it without being asked. And it turns out, these are motivation multipliers. When developing something, if it gives me good logs, and has a good UI, I'm more likely to spend time developing it further. Hence, coding is now more joyful. And it turns out, these tend to

dang 8mo ago

Fun is a feeling, so one can't really have an argument that something is fun or not - that would be a category error no? You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name. I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference in our present moment, of course, is that the "assistants" are mechanical ones. (as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then also, I don't enjoy writing grunt code / boilerplate etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, - and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)

vercaemert 8mo ago
yeah, well said i like what software can do, i don't like writing it i can try to give the benefit of the doubt to people saying they don't see improvements (and assume there's just a communication breakdown) i've personally built three poc tools that proved my ideas didn't work and then tossed the poc tools. ive had those ideas since i knew how to program, i just didn't have the time and energy to see them through.

williamcotton 8mo ago

Most master painters of the past had teams organized as workshops where the majority of the painting was NOT done by the master. The “lone genius” image is largely a modern romantic invention.

grugagag 8mo ago
Thats not quite true. The “lone genius” type went against the grain and created something new while still showing some skill (well, that’s debatable in modern art).

rukuu001 8mo ago

It shaves yaks for me. I appreciate that.

mattwilsonn888 8mo ago

If you have to work in a language or framework with a lot of arbitrary-seeming features, ugly or opaque translation layers, or a lot of boiler-plate, then I absolutely understand the sentiment. Programming a system at a low-level from scratch is fun. Getting CSS to look right under a bunch of edge cases - I won't judge that programmer too harshly for consulting the text machine. This is especially true considering it's these shallow but trivia-dominated tasks which are the least fun and also which LLMs are the most effective at accomplishing.

nl 8mo ago

I love building things with computers. I'm not particularly interested in the coding. I've coded professionally for 30 years (ergh!). I'm ok at it. But I love building things with AI. I haven't had this much fun since the early 2000s.

sph 8mo ago

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun AI is more fun for programmers that should've gone into management instead, and prefer having to explain things in painstaking detail in text, rather than use code. In other words, AI is for people that don't like programming that much. Why would you even automate the most fun part of this job? As a freelance consultant, I'd rather have a machine to automate the whole boring business side so I could just sit in front of my computer and write stuff with my own hands.

simonw 8mo ago

[dead]

bandrami 8mo ago

And the thing I don't get about how excited people are is that if what LLMs really do is change software development from coding to code review, which is the part of software development that is universally hated.