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All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved und

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falling in love w/ and getting good at picking problems & systems apart, breaking them down, and understanding them fully. I respect the discipline, curiosity, and intellect they have. but I also am elated w/ where things are at/going. this feels absurd to say, but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months, but having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me is intoxicating

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?
- pdntspa 6mo ago
  Because the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees. I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years, are actually getting done. And quickly! The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding? Who cares, let the AI handle it
  - mkehrt 6mo ago
    None of my side projects are things where I want the output. They're all things where I want to write the code myself so I understand it better. AI is antithetical to this.
    - pdntspa 6mo ago
      All of my side projects scratch an itch, so I do want the output. There are not enough hours in the day for me to make all the things I want to make. Code is just the vessel, and one I am happy to outsource if I can maintain a high standard of work. It's a blessing to finally find a workflow that makes me feel like I have a shot at building most of the things I want to.
      - cess11 6mo ago
        Are these things that no one previously built and published, so you can go and take a look at their implementation?
        pdntspa 6mo ago
        Possibly. Mostly? I wanted a stackable desk tray shelf thing for my desk in literally any size for my clutter. Too lazy to go shopping for one, and couldn't find one on any of the maker sites, so I had claude write me an openSCAD file over lunch break then we iterated on it after-hours. By end of work next day I had three of them sitting on my desk after about 3 hours of back-and-forth the night before (along with about half a dozen tiny prototypes), and thats including the 2hr print time for each shelf. I want a music metadata tool that is essentially TheGodfather but brought into the modern day and incorporates workflows I wish I had for my DJing and music production. And not some stupid web app, a proper desktop app with a proper windowing toolkit. I'd estimate it would take me 12-18 months to get to a beta the old way, to the exclusion of most of my other hobbies and projects, instead first Gemini then Claude and I managed to get a pretty nice alpha out in a few months over the summer while I was unemployed. There's still a lot left I want to add but it already replaced several apps in my music intake workflow. I've had a number of successful DJ gigs making use of the music that I run through this app. Funny enough the skills I learned on that project landed me a pretty great gig that lets me do essentially the same thing, at the same pace, for more pay than I've ever made in my SWE career to-date. A bunch of features for my website, a hand-coded Rails app I wrote a few years ago, went from my TODO pile to deployment in just a couple of hours. Not to mention it handled upgrading Ruby and Rails and ported the whole deployment to docker in an afternoon, which made it easy to migrate to a $3 VPS fronted by cloudflare. I have a ton of ideas for games and multimedia type apps that I would never be able to work on at an acceptable pace and also earn the living that lets me afford these tools in the first place. Most of those ideas are unlike any game I've ever seen or played. I'm not yet ready to start on these yet but when/if I do I expect development to proceed at a comfortably brisk pace. The possibilities for Claude + Unreal + the years and years of free assets I've collected from Epic's Unreal store are exciting! And I haven't even gotten into having AI generate game assets. So idunno, does that count?
- thendrill 6mo ago
  I see alot of people get really confused between the act of writing code VS. programming... Programming is willing the machine to do something... Writing code is just that writing code, yes sometimes you write code to make the machine do something and other times you write code just to write code ( for example refactoring, or splitting logic from presentation etc.) Think about it like this... Everyone can write words. But writing words does not make you a book writer. What always gets me is that the act of writing code by itself has no real value. Programming is what solves problems and brings value. Everyone can write code, not everyone can "program"....
  - bigstrat2003 6mo ago
    Programming is writing code. There's nothing to confuse because that's what the word means.
    - ModernMech 6mo ago
      They're saying writing code is programming but not all programming is writing code. What is Scratch?
      - r-w 6mo ago
        A graphical means of writing and manipulating a program.
        boc 6mo ago
        Aka Claude Code.
    - simplyluke 6mo ago
      Is it? I wouldn't consider punch cards writing code but they were certainly programming. Programming is a broader concept than code in a text file.
- orsorna 6mo ago
  Well for one, programming actually sucks. Punching cards sucks. Copywriting sucks. Why? Well, implementation for the sake of implementation is nothing more than self-gratifying, and sole focus on it is an academic pursuit. The classic debate of which programming language is better is an argument of the best way to translate human ideas of logic into something that works. Sure programming is fun but I don't want to do it. What I do want to do is transform data or information into other kinds of information, and computing is a very, very convenient platform to do so, and programming allows manipulation of a substrate to perform such transformations. I agree with OP because the journey itself rarely helps you focus on system architecture, deliverable products and how your downstream consumers use your product. And not just product in the commercial sense, but FOSS stuff or shareware I slap together because I want to share a solution to a problem with other people. The gambling fallacy is tiresome as someone who, at least I believe, can question the bullshit models try to do sometimes. It is very much gambling for CEOs, idea men who do not have a technical floor to question model outputs. If LLMs were /slow/ at getting a working product together combined with my human judgement, I wouldn't use them. So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains. Not to disparage hobby trains, because model trains are awesome, but they are hubris.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    > Well for one, programming actually sucks Speak for yourself. Programming is awesome. I love it so much and I hate that AI is taking a huge steaming dump on it > So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains Growing and building rapidly at all costs is the behavior of a cancer cell, not a human I love model trains
    - orsorna 6mo ago
      Your cancer cell analogy is moot unless you paint all AI generated applications to be unusable trash, which is not the case, and I wouldn't describe my own work with it. It's true that standards have dropped to the floor where anyone can "ship" something but doesn't mean it's good. I think I have a better handle on how to steer GenAI versus the average linkedinbro. But the divide between journey and destination is valid, I guess it's something that hasn't been explored until GenAI.
- wmeredith 6mo ago
  I think this is a semantics thing. I feel the same way, but I wouldn't say that I feel like I'm good at programming. I'm most certainly not. What I am good at is product design and development, and LLM tech has made it so that I can concentrate on features, business models, and users.
- MattGaiser 6mo ago
  Different definitions of programming. OP defines it as getting the machine to do as he wants. You define it as the actual act of writing the detailed instructions.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    It is very difficult to get the machine to do what you want without the detailed instructions If you have an LLM generate the instructions, then the LLM is programming, you're just a "prompter" or something. Not a programmer
    - r-w 6mo ago
      Exactly. There's a probabilistic machine in between you and every instruction that gets executed, without exception. It's straight up different.
      - cgg23 6mo ago
        Im concerned that people are debating over this lol.
- poszlem 6mo ago
  Why do you feel good about programming despite not writing in machine code?
  - bakugo 6mo ago
    False equivalence. x86 assembly is a programming language, C is a programming language, Javascript is a programming language. English is NOT a programming language. If it was, you wouldn't need "AI" to convert English into a real programming language before that, in turn, can be converted to machine code.
    - throwawaytea 6mo ago
      My boss can make people do countless things in the proper order, with just a few words. Sounds like a programming language to me.
  - jlarcombe 6mo ago
    I enjoyed that too when I was a youngster but there are good reasons why it is impractical for day to day work.
- throwawaytea 6mo ago
  I know how to build a house for the most part. But I don't have time to build a house. If I get a robot someday and manage it daily before I leave for work to slowly build a house, when it's done, I gotta be honest and admit I'll consider myself a home builder. Otherwise, who is a home builder? Very few people do every single part themselves, even if they technically could.
  - jdkdksisn 6mo ago
    [dead]
- reverius42 6mo ago
  This is like saying you can accomplish a lot "in assembly" if you write C++ instead of hand-writing assembly. I think I agree that similarly to "this is not hand written assembly", for the use of LLMs to generate high level code, "this is not programming" is also true. It didn't mean we shouldn't use C++ and stop hand-writing (almost all) assembly. I don't think it means we should't use LLMs and stop hand-writing C++ either.
strangattractor 6mo ago
One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing. I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high and requires the use of many technologies that most of us cannot remotely claim to be expert in. Getting an idea and getting a prototype will definitely be easier. Production Code is another beast. Dealing with legacy systems etc will still require experts at least for the near future IMHO.
- hungryhobbit 6mo ago
  I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ. Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".
  - rsoto2 6mo ago
    Flat out wrong. The most impressive engineers I've met in my career did not care for fancy tools with bells and whistles.
    - hext 6mo ago
      Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.
      - skydhash 6mo ago
        Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.
applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since you're not the one writing them, and apparently were not capable of writing them before so are not qualified to review them very much. > having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part. The hard part was in all of the hundreds and thousands of little details that go into building the ideas into something actually worthwhile, and that hasn't changed. LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend. I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale, once, ever, other than LLM wrappers. Either every person who is all-in on vibes only has ideas that consist of making .md files and publishing them as a "meta agent framework", or LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software.
- 542458 6mo ago
  > Anyone can be an "ideas guy". I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!
  - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    I do agree that having good ideas is a skill in its own right. But people with bad ideas are idea guys too! You see them all the time in the indie game development scene in particular. "I need a programmer, and an artist, and a composer, to build this amazing idea for me!", together with an 8 paragraph wall of text (the paragraphs are if you're lucky) describing the idea, and as you'd expect from somebody who couldn't be bothered to develop a single skill, their game ideas are exactly as good as their programming, art, and music. I find that the strength of people's ideas tends to be highly correlated with their overall skills. I don't know that you can develop the capability for good ideas without getting your hands dirty learning a field, experimenting, absorbing all kinds of information and understanding what really goes into the making of a good idea. In that way, the person with good ideas always ends up being more than just a ideas guy. They don't just have good ideas, they have good ideas and the skills to back them up. Whereas the "ideas guy" label is usually applied to people who have nothing to bring to the table other than their ideas, and wouldn't you know it, they aren't nearly as good as they think they are.
manmal 6mo ago
I've felt this exact same way until very recently. But in the end, it's slop that never quite does what it's supposed to. Anthropic is proud of themselves that they brute-forced the world's crappiest C compiler into existence. Guess what, nobody will use it.
bakugo 6mo ago
> Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking. You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.
- itsgrimetime 6mo ago
  a lot of the replies on here (not just yours, I just picked yours to respond to) make it clear I didn't articulate what I was meaning to very well - I'm still doing the "engineering". I used "programming" in a more general sense: building stuff with computers. I still go through the same motions. I try something, hit some failure mode, have to think of and (with the help of claude) execute on that, evaluate it, decide if its better or not, identify when the agent is off track or deviating from the vision I have, etc. it seems you and others took my words a bit more literally than I intended for them to come across. it's not like I'm just one-shotting all my ideas directly into existence, I still need to understand how to use the tool to do it. it's just a different tool. one that's allowing me to build way more than I ever have, while having a ton of fun doing it. and sure, your analogy seems reasonable if I was simply buying the code w/ my tokens. that wouldn't be fun or fulfilling at all - it's more like there is some new "cooking" tool that immediately spawns 90% of the ingredients pre-cut & prepped (maybe the other 10% isn't exactly what I asked for but I can improvise with it) and gives me a decent recipe based on the idea of what I wanted to cook in the first place that fills in (and gives me a starting point to learn about) the gaps that I didn't even realize I was missing. I see it more as: "All this time I thought I loved chopping onions and setting up the grill, but actually I just loved cooking". you weren't wrong about the mcdonalds though. I do love mcdonalds
  - em-bee 6mo ago
    i love chopping onions and the whole cooking process. it is very meditative, and creative, whereas working at mcdonalds isn't.
- Finbel 6mo ago
maplethorpe 6mo ago
If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it. If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.
- jondwillis 6mo ago
  If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.
- Apocryphon 6mo ago
  To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.
- gpt5 6mo ago
  In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.
  - leptons 6mo ago
    Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction. When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying. We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing. People aren't going to line up for slop.
estimator7292 6mo ago
For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible. Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible. The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.
- the_af 6mo ago
  What's the basis for this assertion? It seems wild: > The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible. If it's just a case of keeping a positive attitude and self-help, I can accept it. A sort of white lie one tells themselves.
jarjoura 6mo ago
I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered. It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in near real-time the idea you had baked in your head come alive in front of you. Most of us get to this point and become the biggest evangelists of the tech. I see no reason you should feel guilty for the excitement you're feeling right now, and you should enjoy the journey. You're definitely paying for it in tokens, that's for sure. However, there will come a point at which you will have successfully willed into existence a novel thing that you always wanted, and there it is, exactly as you dreamed, but by then, you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for. Maybe it's a feeling of not earning the thing you built, or maybe it's just, your idea is finished and now you have to think of another idea. Certainly, this was your idea though, and it proves you were right, or at least on to something, and it is valuable, to you. Yet, you didn't go on the journey to get there. You didn't bump up against limitations of the programming language or system and think about workarounds while you were showering or commuting to the office. You basically bought the finished product from the dynamic template marketplace of Anthropic (or whereever), and that's cool that it does what you need. It just isn't really programming, or being a software engineer in the traditional sense. What used to be something you could potentially leave your day job for to go create a startup with a cofounder over, or maybe sell off to a buyer, or just open source and share with the world, isn't going to have the same meaning. It's a black box of code that you'll need a coding agent to continue working on, keeping that money flowing to Anthropic or whereever. Anyway, I think the Slot Machine question is where a lot of early adopters are now at in this journey, and once more of us are there, then we can start asking the hard questions. Right now too many of us are where you're at, and it's impossible to know where things will end up in a year or so.
- devanil 6mo ago
  Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."
  - the_af 6mo ago
    There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.
riantogo 6mo ago
Exactly this for me as well. When I was a SWE I thought what I loved was problem solving. So after many years of doing that I decided to move upsteam and took Product roles so that I can identify and address big business problems. It was only after I switched that I realized that I was not in love with problem solving. I was in love with art. Programming was art of me. I kept at it on the side as a hobby. But stacks evolved and I was left behind. Now with AI it's back on.
- em-bee 6mo ago
  do i read that right, you didn't enjoy addressing big business problems? i learned programming in high school and i enjoyed it, then while starting computer science i did and internship at a software company, and i hated it, and i thought i hated programming and wanted to give up studying computer science, but when i discovered programming MUDs and then web development with the same language i loved it again. turns out i always loved programming, what i didn't like was the corporate work environment, 9-5, using CASE tools (remember those?) on windows, maybe the feeling of inferiority as an untrained intern among everyone else. what i hate about LLMs is the tediousness, the unreliability, having to try over and over to get a result. i often work with customers directly, less technical ones too. seeing their satisfaction when i solve a problem for them (no matter how) is what allowed me to keep going doing even non-programming work, though i admit that i prefer programming if that customer interaction is missing. so i too love the art, but i still love problem solving if there is someone who appreciates the solution. so maybe it wasn't problem solving that was your problem, but the big business environment, and how it constrained your role and didn't give you the feedback you needed?
sublinear 6mo ago
That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming. You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.
- ctoth 6mo ago
  I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0]. Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthesizer with a citation-backed parameter space" is approximately me. I could not have built this without AI coding tools, and I've been a professional developer for 15+ years. I wrote the specs, I chose the architecture, I read the papers, I know what the output needs to sound like. The sheer surface area of translating hundreds of papers worth of acoustic phonetics into a working runtime would have taken me years solo. With Claude Code it's taken months, and I'm still the one catching when it misinterprets a Klatt coefficient or botches a formant transition rule, because you have to actually know the domain to do that. Reducing what you do not understand to "Ikea or microwave meals?" Because you don't like it? or aren't familiar with it? Is saying a thing about you. Not about people who know how to use the tools. [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/ https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/
  - sublinear 6mo ago
    I think you're missing my point. It has nothing to do with what I like. I'm saying there's a ton of nuance and human feedback necessary to build the software most developers work on for a living. It's built to requirements that evolve with the business. Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences. Businesses need to pass audits. Specs can change quarterly. Clients and their contracts come and go. It's exactly like building/maintaining custom furniture for a bespoke house, or consistently cooking a signature recipe at any scale and considering any necessary accommodations. If it wasn't true, the business wouldn't be viable regardless if AI is used or not. I'm talking about systems and services, not products. You are building a product for a narrow use case requiring DSP. Modeling was always the point. I don't doubt AI helped, but we're not talking about the same thing. If you were building something for an enterprise client, nobody would give a shit how you got it done as long as you have a demo by monday and it ships next month. No excuses and no gotchas. Any incident risks breaking the SLA and losing the contract. If the client calls a meeting at the last minute to make changes, you're probably working on the weekend. People don't like using AI for stuff like that. Efficiency is not the priority. People don't want cutting edge or novel. They want reliability and competence. Their livelihood depends on knowing exactly how it works and how it can be extended and maintained. They want to stay at least one step ahead of what the client asks for next. People want to test the hell out of it and nobody wants to get fired for not noticing what is obvious to other stakeholders who don't share their tunnel vision. Clients don't have much tolerance for delays or bugs. This is why AI has mixed or negative results for all but personal projects or startups.
zurtri 6mo ago
I'm the same, it's about the "Act of Creation".
possiblydrunk 6mo ago
Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.
raxxorraxor 6mo ago
I heavily use AI for coding, but you cannot skip the understanding part. At some point it falls apart and then you need someone to wade through the results. If you understand the architecture, server and service configuration and how they interact, you can use AI to be quite productive. But you still need the deep level understanding.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?

pdntspa 6mo ago
Because the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees. I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years, are actually getting done. And quickly! The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding? Who cares, let the AI handle it
- mkehrt 6mo ago
  None of my side projects are things where I want the output. They're all things where I want to write the code myself so I understand it better. AI is antithetical to this.
  - pdntspa 6mo ago
    All of my side projects scratch an itch, so I do want the output. There are not enough hours in the day for me to make all the things I want to make. Code is just the vessel, and one I am happy to outsource if I can maintain a high standard of work. It's a blessing to finally find a workflow that makes me feel like I have a shot at building most of the things I want to.
    - cess11 6mo ago
      Are these things that no one previously built and published, so you can go and take a look at their implementation?
      - pdntspa 6mo ago
        Possibly. Mostly? I wanted a stackable desk tray shelf thing for my desk in literally any size for my clutter. Too lazy to go shopping for one, and couldn't find one on any of the maker sites, so I had claude write me an openSCAD file over lunch break then we iterated on it after-hours. By end of work next day I had three of them sitting on my desk after about 3 hours of back-and-forth the night before (along with about half a dozen tiny prototypes), and thats including the 2hr print time for each shelf. I want a music metadata tool that is essentially TheGodfather but brought into the modern day and incorporates workflows I wish I had for my DJing and music production. And not some stupid web app, a proper desktop app with a proper windowing toolkit. I'd estimate it would take me 12-18 months to get to a beta the old way, to the exclusion of most of my other hobbies and projects, instead first Gemini then Claude and I managed to get a pretty nice alpha out in a few months over the summer while I was unemployed. There's still a lot left I want to add but it already replaced several apps in my music intake workflow. I've had a number of successful DJ gigs making use of the music that I run through this app. Funny enough the skills I learned on that project landed me a pretty great gig that lets me do essentially the same thing, at the same pace, for more pay than I've ever made in my SWE career to-date. A bunch of features for my website, a hand-coded Rails app I wrote a few years ago, went from my TODO pile to deployment in just a couple of hours. Not to mention it handled upgrading Ruby and Rails and ported the whole deployment to docker in an afternoon, which made it easy to migrate to a $3 VPS fronted by cloudflare. I have a ton of ideas for games and multimedia type apps that I would never be able to work on at an acceptable pace and also earn the living that lets me afford these tools in the first place. Most of those ideas are unlike any game I've ever seen or played. I'm not yet ready to start on these yet but when/if I do I expect development to proceed at a comfortably brisk pace. The possibilities for Claude + Unreal + the years and years of free assets I've collected from Epic's Unreal store are exciting! And I haven't even gotten into having AI generate game assets. So idunno, does that count?
thendrill 6mo ago
I see alot of people get really confused between the act of writing code VS. programming... Programming is willing the machine to do something... Writing code is just that writing code, yes sometimes you write code to make the machine do something and other times you write code just to write code ( for example refactoring, or splitting logic from presentation etc.) Think about it like this... Everyone can write words. But writing words does not make you a book writer. What always gets me is that the act of writing code by itself has no real value. Programming is what solves problems and brings value. Everyone can write code, not everyone can "program"....
- bigstrat2003 6mo ago
  Programming is writing code. There's nothing to confuse because that's what the word means.
  - ModernMech 6mo ago
    They're saying writing code is programming but not all programming is writing code. What is Scratch?
    - r-w 6mo ago
      A graphical means of writing and manipulating a program.
      - boc 6mo ago
        Aka Claude Code.
  - simplyluke 6mo ago
    Is it? I wouldn't consider punch cards writing code but they were certainly programming. Programming is a broader concept than code in a text file.
orsorna 6mo ago
Well for one, programming actually sucks. Punching cards sucks. Copywriting sucks. Why? Well, implementation for the sake of implementation is nothing more than self-gratifying, and sole focus on it is an academic pursuit. The classic debate of which programming language is better is an argument of the best way to translate human ideas of logic into something that works. Sure programming is fun but I don't want to do it. What I do want to do is transform data or information into other kinds of information, and computing is a very, very convenient platform to do so, and programming allows manipulation of a substrate to perform such transformations. I agree with OP because the journey itself rarely helps you focus on system architecture, deliverable products and how your downstream consumers use your product. And not just product in the commercial sense, but FOSS stuff or shareware I slap together because I want to share a solution to a problem with other people. The gambling fallacy is tiresome as someone who, at least I believe, can question the bullshit models try to do sometimes. It is very much gambling for CEOs, idea men who do not have a technical floor to question model outputs. If LLMs were /slow/ at getting a working product together combined with my human judgement, I wouldn't use them. So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains. Not to disparage hobby trains, because model trains are awesome, but they are hubris.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > Well for one, programming actually sucks Speak for yourself. Programming is awesome. I love it so much and I hate that AI is taking a huge steaming dump on it > So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains Growing and building rapidly at all costs is the behavior of a cancer cell, not a human I love model trains
  - orsorna 6mo ago
    Your cancer cell analogy is moot unless you paint all AI generated applications to be unusable trash, which is not the case, and I wouldn't describe my own work with it. It's true that standards have dropped to the floor where anyone can "ship" something but doesn't mean it's good. I think I have a better handle on how to steer GenAI versus the average linkedinbro. But the divide between journey and destination is valid, I guess it's something that hasn't been explored until GenAI.
wmeredith 6mo ago
I think this is a semantics thing. I feel the same way, but I wouldn't say that I feel like I'm good at programming. I'm most certainly not. What I am good at is product design and development, and LLM tech has made it so that I can concentrate on features, business models, and users.
MattGaiser 6mo ago
Different definitions of programming. OP defines it as getting the machine to do as he wants. You define it as the actual act of writing the detailed instructions.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  It is very difficult to get the machine to do what you want without the detailed instructions If you have an LLM generate the instructions, then the LLM is programming, you're just a "prompter" or something. Not a programmer
  - r-w 6mo ago
    Exactly. There's a probabilistic machine in between you and every instruction that gets executed, without exception. It's straight up different.
    - cgg23 6mo ago
      Im concerned that people are debating over this lol.
poszlem 6mo ago
Why do you feel good about programming despite not writing in machine code?
- bakugo 6mo ago
  False equivalence. x86 assembly is a programming language, C is a programming language, Javascript is a programming language. English is NOT a programming language. If it was, you wouldn't need "AI" to convert English into a real programming language before that, in turn, can be converted to machine code.
  - throwawaytea 6mo ago
    My boss can make people do countless things in the proper order, with just a few words. Sounds like a programming language to me.
- jlarcombe 6mo ago
  I enjoyed that too when I was a youngster but there are good reasons why it is impractical for day to day work.
throwawaytea 6mo ago
I know how to build a house for the most part. But I don't have time to build a house. If I get a robot someday and manage it daily before I leave for work to slowly build a house, when it's done, I gotta be honest and admit I'll consider myself a home builder. Otherwise, who is a home builder? Very few people do every single part themselves, even if they technically could.
- jdkdksisn 6mo ago
  [dead]
reverius42 6mo ago
This is like saying you can accomplish a lot "in assembly" if you write C++ instead of hand-writing assembly. I think I agree that similarly to "this is not hand written assembly", for the use of LLMs to generate high level code, "this is not programming" is also true. It didn't mean we shouldn't use C++ and stop hand-writing (almost all) assembly. I don't think it means we should't use LLMs and stop hand-writing C++ either.

strangattractor 6mo ago

One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing. I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high and requires the use of many technologies that most of us cannot remotely claim to be expert in. Getting an idea and getting a prototype will definitely be easier. Production Code is another beast. Dealing with legacy systems etc will still require experts at least for the near future IMHO.

hungryhobbit 6mo ago
I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ. Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".
- rsoto2 6mo ago
  Flat out wrong. The most impressive engineers I've met in my career did not care for fancy tools with bells and whistles.
  - hext 6mo ago
    Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.
    - skydhash 6mo ago
      Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.

applfanboysbgon 6mo ago

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since you're not the one writing them, and apparently were not capable of writing them before so are not qualified to review them very much. > having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part. The hard part was in all of the hundreds and thousands of little details that go into building the ideas into something actually worthwhile, and that hasn't changed. LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend. I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale, once, ever, other than LLM wrappers. Either every person who is all-in on vibes only has ideas that consist of making .md files and publishing them as a "meta agent framework", or LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software.

542458 6mo ago
> Anyone can be an "ideas guy". I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!
- applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
  I do agree that having good ideas is a skill in its own right. But people with bad ideas are idea guys too! You see them all the time in the indie game development scene in particular. "I need a programmer, and an artist, and a composer, to build this amazing idea for me!", together with an 8 paragraph wall of text (the paragraphs are if you're lucky) describing the idea, and as you'd expect from somebody who couldn't be bothered to develop a single skill, their game ideas are exactly as good as their programming, art, and music. I find that the strength of people's ideas tends to be highly correlated with their overall skills. I don't know that you can develop the capability for good ideas without getting your hands dirty learning a field, experimenting, absorbing all kinds of information and understanding what really goes into the making of a good idea. In that way, the person with good ideas always ends up being more than just a ideas guy. They don't just have good ideas, they have good ideas and the skills to back them up. Whereas the "ideas guy" label is usually applied to people who have nothing to bring to the table other than their ideas, and wouldn't you know it, they aren't nearly as good as they think they are.

manmal 6mo ago

I've felt this exact same way until very recently. But in the end, it's slop that never quite does what it's supposed to. Anthropic is proud of themselves that they brute-forced the world's crappiest C compiler into existence. Guess what, nobody will use it.

bakugo 6mo ago

> Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking. You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.

itsgrimetime 6mo ago
a lot of the replies on here (not just yours, I just picked yours to respond to) make it clear I didn't articulate what I was meaning to very well - I'm still doing the "engineering". I used "programming" in a more general sense: building stuff with computers. I still go through the same motions. I try something, hit some failure mode, have to think of and (with the help of claude) execute on that, evaluate it, decide if its better or not, identify when the agent is off track or deviating from the vision I have, etc. it seems you and others took my words a bit more literally than I intended for them to come across. it's not like I'm just one-shotting all my ideas directly into existence, I still need to understand how to use the tool to do it. it's just a different tool. one that's allowing me to build way more than I ever have, while having a ton of fun doing it. and sure, your analogy seems reasonable if I was simply buying the code w/ my tokens. that wouldn't be fun or fulfilling at all - it's more like there is some new "cooking" tool that immediately spawns 90% of the ingredients pre-cut & prepped (maybe the other 10% isn't exactly what I asked for but I can improvise with it) and gives me a decent recipe based on the idea of what I wanted to cook in the first place that fills in (and gives me a starting point to learn about) the gaps that I didn't even realize I was missing. I see it more as: "All this time I thought I loved chopping onions and setting up the grill, but actually I just loved cooking". you weren't wrong about the mcdonalds though. I do love mcdonalds
- em-bee 6mo ago
  i love chopping onions and the whole cooking process. it is very meditative, and creative, whereas working at mcdonalds isn't.
Finbel 6mo ago

maplethorpe 6mo ago

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it. If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.

jondwillis 6mo ago
If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.
Apocryphon 6mo ago
To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.
gpt5 6mo ago
In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.
- leptons 6mo ago
  Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction. When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying. We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing. People aren't going to line up for slop.

estimator7292 6mo ago

For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible. Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible. The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.

the_af 6mo ago
What's the basis for this assertion? It seems wild: > The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible. If it's just a case of keeping a positive attitude and self-help, I can accept it. A sort of white lie one tells themselves.

jarjoura 6mo ago

I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered. It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in near real-time the idea you had baked in your head come alive in front of you. Most of us get to this point and become the biggest evangelists of the tech. I see no reason you should feel guilty for the excitement you're feeling right now, and you should enjoy the journey. You're definitely paying for it in tokens, that's for sure. However, there will come a point at which you will have successfully willed into existence a novel thing that you always wanted, and there it is, exactly as you dreamed, but by then, you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for. Maybe it's a feeling of not earning the thing you built, or maybe it's just, your idea is finished and now you have to think of another idea. Certainly, this was your idea though, and it proves you were right, or at least on to something, and it is valuable, to you. Yet, you didn't go on the journey to get there. You didn't bump up against limitations of the programming language or system and think about workarounds while you were showering or commuting to the office. You basically bought the finished product from the dynamic template marketplace of Anthropic (or whereever), and that's cool that it does what you need. It just isn't really programming, or being a software engineer in the traditional sense. What used to be something you could potentially leave your day job for to go create a startup with a cofounder over, or maybe sell off to a buyer, or just open source and share with the world, isn't going to have the same meaning. It's a black box of code that you'll need a coding agent to continue working on, keeping that money flowing to Anthropic or whereever. Anyway, I think the Slot Machine question is where a lot of early adopters are now at in this journey, and once more of us are there, then we can start asking the hard questions. Right now too many of us are where you're at, and it's impossible to know where things will end up in a year or so.

devanil 6mo ago
Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."
- the_af 6mo ago
  There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.

riantogo 6mo ago

Exactly this for me as well. When I was a SWE I thought what I loved was problem solving. So after many years of doing that I decided to move upsteam and took Product roles so that I can identify and address big business problems. It was only after I switched that I realized that I was not in love with problem solving. I was in love with art. Programming was art of me. I kept at it on the side as a hobby. But stacks evolved and I was left behind. Now with AI it's back on.

em-bee 6mo ago
do i read that right, you didn't enjoy addressing big business problems? i learned programming in high school and i enjoyed it, then while starting computer science i did and internship at a software company, and i hated it, and i thought i hated programming and wanted to give up studying computer science, but when i discovered programming MUDs and then web development with the same language i loved it again. turns out i always loved programming, what i didn't like was the corporate work environment, 9-5, using CASE tools (remember those?) on windows, maybe the feeling of inferiority as an untrained intern among everyone else. what i hate about LLMs is the tediousness, the unreliability, having to try over and over to get a result. i often work with customers directly, less technical ones too. seeing their satisfaction when i solve a problem for them (no matter how) is what allowed me to keep going doing even non-programming work, though i admit that i prefer programming if that customer interaction is missing. so i too love the art, but i still love problem solving if there is someone who appreciates the solution. so maybe it wasn't problem solving that was your problem, but the big business environment, and how it constrained your role and didn't give you the feedback you needed?

sublinear 6mo ago

That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming. You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.

ctoth 6mo ago
I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0]. Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthesizer with a citation-backed parameter space" is approximately me. I could not have built this without AI coding tools, and I've been a professional developer for 15+ years. I wrote the specs, I chose the architecture, I read the papers, I know what the output needs to sound like. The sheer surface area of translating hundreds of papers worth of acoustic phonetics into a working runtime would have taken me years solo. With Claude Code it's taken months, and I'm still the one catching when it misinterprets a Klatt coefficient or botches a formant transition rule, because you have to actually know the domain to do that. Reducing what you do not understand to "Ikea or microwave meals?" Because you don't like it? or aren't familiar with it? Is saying a thing about you. Not about people who know how to use the tools. [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/ https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/
- sublinear 6mo ago
  I think you're missing my point. It has nothing to do with what I like. I'm saying there's a ton of nuance and human feedback necessary to build the software most developers work on for a living. It's built to requirements that evolve with the business. Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences. Businesses need to pass audits. Specs can change quarterly. Clients and their contracts come and go. It's exactly like building/maintaining custom furniture for a bespoke house, or consistently cooking a signature recipe at any scale and considering any necessary accommodations. If it wasn't true, the business wouldn't be viable regardless if AI is used or not. I'm talking about systems and services, not products. You are building a product for a narrow use case requiring DSP. Modeling was always the point. I don't doubt AI helped, but we're not talking about the same thing. If you were building something for an enterprise client, nobody would give a shit how you got it done as long as you have a demo by monday and it ships next month. No excuses and no gotchas. Any incident risks breaking the SLA and losing the contract. If the client calls a meeting at the last minute to make changes, you're probably working on the weekend. People don't like using AI for stuff like that. Efficiency is not the priority. People don't want cutting edge or novel. They want reliability and competence. Their livelihood depends on knowing exactly how it works and how it can be extended and maintained. They want to stay at least one step ahead of what the client asks for next. People want to test the hell out of it and nobody wants to get fired for not noticing what is obvious to other stakeholders who don't share their tunnel vision. Clients don't have much tolerance for delays or bugs. This is why AI has mixed or negative results for all but personal projects or startups.

zurtri 6mo ago

I'm the same, it's about the "Act of Creation".

possiblydrunk 6mo ago

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

raxxorraxor 6mo ago

I heavily use AI for coding, but you cannot skip the understanding part. At some point it falls apart and then you need someone to wade through the results. If you understand the architecture, server and service configuration and how they interact, you can use AI to be quite productive. But you still need the deep level understanding.