Discussion
beardyw: I'm even older, I've been coding for over 50 years. Now I just do it as a passtime and I use AI to complete lines of code I would have written anyway. It's the structure and the approach which interests me and it's all mine.
FunSociety: I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.
EagnaIonat: I was like this a few months back. You want to code and solve problems, but the AI can do all that for you. I got over it by moving the problem solving further down the chain. Treat the AI the team you are directing to solve the issue.
ZenoArrow: If I wanted to become a project manager I would have become one. AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.
markus_zhang: My trick is to let AI help the journey but not hold on it. Use it for discussion, not implementation. It is even surprisingly good for kernel level projects.
ZenoArrow: You do know you don't have to use AI, right? I don't use it for coding (or much at all outside of coding). I'm free to code just like I did before, and so are you.
RALaBarge: I'm 42 years old and it has re-ignited mine. I've spent my career troubleshooting and being a generalist, not really interested in writing code outside of for systems and networking usage. It's boring to type out (lots of fun to plan though!) and outdated as soon as it is written.I've made and continue to make things that I've been thinking about for a while, but the juice was never worth the squeeze. Bluetooth troubleshooting for example -- 5 or 6 different programs will log different parts of the stack independently. I've made an app calling all of these apps, and grouping all of their calls based on mac address' and system time of the calls to correlate and pinpoint the exact issue.Now I heard the neckbeards crack their knuckles, getting ready to bear down on their split keyboards and start telling me how the program doesn't work because AI made it, it isn't artistic enough for their liking, or whatever the current lie they comfort themselves with is. But it does work, and I've used it already to determine some of my bad devices are really bad.But there are bugs, you exclaim! Sure, but have you seen human written code?? I've made my career in understanding these systems, programming languages, and people using the systems -- troubleshooting is the fun part and I guess lucky for me is that my favorite part is the thing that will continue to exist.But what about QA? Humans are better? No. Please guys, stop lying to yourselves. Even if there was a benefit that Humans bring over AI in this arena, that lead is evaporating fast or is already gone. I think a lot of people in our industry take their knowledge and ability to gatekeep by having that knowledge as some sort of a good thing. If that was the only thing you were good at, then maybe it is good that the AI is going to do the thing they excel at and leave those folks to theirs.It can leave humans to figure out how to maybe be more human? It is funny to type that since I have been on a computer 12h a day since like 1997...but there is a reason why we let calculators crunch large sums, and manufacturing robots have multiple articulating points in their arms making incredible items at insane speeds. I guess there were probably people who like using slide rules and were really good at it, pissed because their job was taken by a device that can do it better and faster. Diddnt the slide rule users take the job from people who did not have a tool like that at first but still had to do the job?Did THEY complain about that change as well? Regardless, all of these people were left behind if all they are going to do is complain. If you only built one skill in your career, and that is writing code and nothing else, that is not the programs fault.The journey exists for those who desire to build the knowledge that they lack and use these new incredible tools.For everyone else, there is Hacker News and an overwhelmingly significant crowd that are ready to talk about the good ole days instead of seeing the opportunities in expanding your talents with software that helps you do your thing better than you have ever dreamed of.
klinquist: I agree with this.I recently wanted to monitor my vehicle batteries with a cheap BLE battery monitor from AliExpress (by getting the data into HomeAssistant). I could have spent days digging through BlueZ on a Raspberry Pi, or I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later.Yes, I gave up the chance to manually learn every layer of the stack. I’m fine with that. The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem. AI got me there faster - and let me move on to my next fun project.
wek: But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated.Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.
zackify: I just built two projects where one dogfooded the other and setup a fully working slack bot all in 1 hour. If you still want to manually do things you can. AI can answer questions about common topics way faster than searching docs. Idk why this kills peoples passions. Especially of you're old enough to not need a salary
Art9681: I enjoy the journey too. The journey is building systems, not coding. Coding was always the most tedious and least interesting part of it. Thinking about the system, thinking about its implementation details, iterating and making it better and better. Nothing has changed with AI. My ambition grew with the technology. Now I don't waste time on simple systems. I can get to work doing what I've always thought would be impossible, or take years. I can fail faster than ever and pivot sooner.It's the best thing to happen to systems engineering.
sylware: Hello, I cannot tell if this is true or not, since I have not been able to really test the ability of Claude AI to code.I am looking for a web API I could use with CURL, and limited "public/testing" API keys. Anyone?I am very interested in Claude code to test its ability to code assembly (x86_64/RISC-V) and to assist the ports of c++ code to plain and simple C (I read something from HN about this which seems to be promising).
Jcampuzano2: My hypothesis around this and other peoples sentiments who dislike AI while citing similar reasons as the post is not simply that they enjoyed arriving at the destination.Rather the issue is they believe they are GOOD at the "journey" and getting to the destination and could compare their journey to others. Another take is they could more readily share their journey or help their peers. Some really like that part.Now who you are comparing to is not other people going through the same journey, so there is less comradery. Others no longer enjoy that same journey so it feels more "lonely" in a way.Theres nothing stopping someone from still writing their own code for fun by hand, but the element of sharing the journey with others is diminishing.
Rochus: For me (60 too) it's both, the journey and the destination. LLMs not only help me get around the boring stuff so I have more time for the things I really want to design and build, but they also open areas for me in which I always wanted to go but for which it was very time consuming or difficult to get the required knowledge (e.g. tons of academic papers which are neither well written nor complete and sometimes just wrong). The LLMs help me to explore and find the right way through those areas, so these adventures suddenly become affordable for me, without doing a PhD on each subject. And even if the LLM generates some code, it still needs a "guiding hand" and engineering experience. So for me, no, AI doesn't kill my passion, but offers a very attractive symbiosis, which makes me much more efficient and my spare-time work even more interesting. I find myself watching fewer and fewer streaming videos because exploring new areas and collaborating with the LLM is much more entertaining.
kreicer: The sad truth of life. This story reminded me of the time when I tried my first MMO - at first it felt like a fairy tale, something unknown, something that could still surprise you. And then you get familiar with all the mechanics, and the magic disappears. Now it’s just a “tool.”
foldr: If it's a personal project, I just get AI to do the boring bits and write the fun bits myself. I enjoy coding in general, but every project has its share of boring boilerplate code, or utility functions that you've already written 100 times. Also, LLMS are pretty good at code review, which is very beneficial when you are working on something solo.
lambdathoughts: I can totally get what you are feeling so much, that I actually wrote a whole novel about ithttps://leanpub.com/we-mourn-our-craft
cies: So much agreed. I'm constraining my AI, that always wants to add more dependencies, create unnecessary code, broaden test to the point they become useless. I have in mind what I want it to build, and now I have workflows to make sure it does so effectively.I also ask it a lot of questions regarding my assumptions, and so "we" (me and the AI) find better solutions that either of us could make on our own.
bvan: Very well said. Slow code for me. I fully understand what I build. The AI magic bus will come crashing down at some point.
helsinkiandrew: The original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777
donatj: > it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destinationThis has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.
il-b: >Idk why this kills peoples passionsCorporate management is full on FOMO and pushes agents down onto teams
criley2: I'm convinced that most programmers largely hate making software and solving user problems. They just like fiddling with code. And honestly it explains so much.
axegon_: I feel you and at a much younger age. I started programming professionally full time around 2011-2012. Documentation was good but practical applications where you could see what you want to achieve in action were very limited. At the time I found myself writing drivers for fiscal printers using RS-232. The documentation provided by the manufacturer was absolutely horrible. "0x0b -> init, 0x23 -> page", literally code -> single word. Although I hated having to effectively brute force it, the feeling at the end was amazing. I tried AI code on several occasions and I hate it with a passion: full of bugs, completely ignoring edge cases and horrible performance. And ultimately having to spend more time fixing the slop than it takes me to sit down, think it through and get it done right. And I see many "programmers" just throw in a prompt in insert AI company here and celebrate the slop, patting themselves on the back.It's the programming equivalent of those tiktok videos split in half, top half being random stock videos, bottom being temple run and an AI narration of a mildly wtf reddit post.In a way I am lucky that I work at a place where everyone gets to choose what they want to use and how they use it. So my weapons of choice are a slightly tweaked, almost vanilla zsh, vim and zed with 0 ai features. I have a number of friends/former coworkers working at places where the usage of ai is not just allowed or encouraged but mandated. And is part of their performance score - the more you slop-code, the better your performance.
g051051: As I commented in the other post, it killed mine at work, because my boss is pushing "AI" really hard on the devs. Fortunately, he's now seeing enough evidence to counteract the hype, but it's still going to be present and dragging down my work. But it my off time, I only experiment with LLMs to see if they're getting better. Spoiler alert: they aren't, at least not for the kind of things I want to do.
lukan: "at least not for the kind of things I want to do."Can you share?
lukan: Yes indeed, but when you code in your room, you are free to follow the AI debates - or ignore them.
rowanseymour: I don't buy this journey vs destination binary I keep hearing. I always considered myself lucky to be 44 and still writing code all day. I love the journey - the mental satisfaction of creating something complex yet elegant. The perfectionism that leads you to ask yourself can this be simpler, faster etc. But I also now love creating things that frankly I was never going to find the time for.
khalic: Just… keep coding?
in12parsecs: He's not getting customers by rowing them across the river when the motorboats do it faster and cheaper. You compared a hobby to doing something "for a living".I turned 59 this week. I am excited to go to work again. I use Claude every day. I check Claude. I learn new things from Claude.I no longer need a "UI person" to get something demonstrable quickly. (I've never been a "UI guy"). I've also never been a guy coding during every waking moment of my life as that would have been disastrous for my mental health.I am retiring in <=2 years, so I am having fun with this new associate of mine.One pitfall I've managed to avoid all these 36 years I've been at it is not falling in love with the solution. I fall in love with the problems. Claude solves those problems far quicker than I ever could.
antfarm: I found my peace with AI aided coding in the last three months. I started development of an environment for programming games and agent simulations that has its own S-expresion based DSL as a private project. Think somewhere between Processing and StarLogo, with a functional style and a unique programming model.I am having long design sessions with Claude Code and let it implement the resulting features and changes in version controlled increments.But I am the one who writes the example games and simulations in the DSL to get a feel for where its design needs to change to improve the user experience. This way I can work on the fun and creative parts and let Claude do the footwork.I let Claude simultaneously write code, tests and documentation for each increment. I find it a lot easier to dismiss an earlier design for a better idea than when I would have implemented every detail of the system myself, and I think so far the resulting product has largely benefited from this.
dfansteel: I feel you. For me it was a love of problem solving. Now that’s been taken away from me and people keep telling me how happy I should be about it.
jomoho: I think this is really honest and the reason we see this big divide. On the one hand people that never enjoyed coding but enjoy to see their ideas realized are celebrating. But the group of people who enjoyed coding in itself and never saw it just as a means to a result feel cheated. I think a lot of the polarization you seen online is revolving around this difference in character. I am of two minds about this really. because I've certainly enjoyed the puzzle and the journey in the past. But I also enjoy to get to see ideas I've had for a while but never had the time for, realize quickly. I also don't think its just a distinction between enjoying the journey or the destination, but I think its enjoying a very specific type of journey, e.g. slow methodical etc. Whereas people with a different temperament find the speed and the ease of experimentation and the sometimes surprising results more appealing.
travisgriggs: 14 years ago hearing Dan Pink talk on motivation (https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc) catalyzed the decision to change jobs.One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder.That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I used to. Mastering a “simple” thing is rewarding. Trying to master much of modern software is not. Web programming rots your brain. Modern languages and software product motivations are all about gaining more money and mindshare. There is no mastering any stack, it changes to swiftly to matter. I view the necessity of using LLMs as an indictment against what working in and with information technology has become.I wonder if the hope of mastering the agentic process, is what is rejuvenating some programmers. It’s a new challenge to get good at. I wonder what Pink would say today about the role of AI in “what motivates us”.(Edited, author name correction)
specproc: One hundred percent.I came back into tech professionally over the last decade. Always been into computers, but the first decade or so of my career was in humanitarian amin. Super interesting sector, super boring day-to-day.Getting back into code felt like coming home. I'm good at it, I really enjoy it, the problem-solving aspect totally lights up my brain in this amazing way.I feel exactly the same way. Totally robbed of pleasure at work, with the added kicker of mass layoffs hanging over the sector.At least OP is sixty, I've got 25 years of work left and I really don't know what to do. I hate it all so much.
mike_slinn: "wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time" SO TRUE!
zahllos: I agree. I wanted a particular tool to support my development. The libraries are well known and understood by people who work in text editors, but this is not my area and I have a busy life. Simply working out what I needed to know produced enough inertia to stop it happening.I finally made it with Claude. I've been writing code a while so I absolutely didn't let Claude loose and I still refactored stuff by hand as sometimes that was faster than trying to get Claude to do it. I also know what the whole thing does - I read all the diffs it presented.I wouldn't fully trust it to go off and do its thing unsupervised especially in my areas of speciality. But the scaffolding work like command line arguments - typing all that out was never my passion and I had snippets in my editor for most of it.Perhaps if your passion is the process of doing that kind of meticulously laying out of each file then I can understand. Although the journey for me is the problem solving. Nothing much excites me about any of the boilerplate parts.Claude can certainly take a stab at the solution too and is best when it has some kind of test case to match or validation step. To me working out what those are was always the core of the job and without them Claude can make plenty of mistakes.It's just a tool and I use it in ways to support what I enjoy.My work situation is way more complicated. Bigcorp organizational dynamics nullify any marginal gain anywhere.
jshaqaw: If you enjoyed coding for the sake of coding it hasn't gone anywhere. People still knit for themselves when they can go buy clothes off the rack. People still enjoy chess and Go even though none of them can beat a machine.If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.
jebarker: I agree with you. I try to remember though that this is just the same situation that artists, musicians and (more recently) writers have been in for a long time. Unless you’re one of a very lucky few you’ll only get fulfillment in those pursuits if you enjoy the process rather than the output since it’s hard to get money or recognition for output anymore. Pure coding and lots of areas of code problem solving are going to end up in the same position.
kensai: The lake is not however yours to dictate how others will move along. Imagine if the horse owners decided in such an analogy not to allow cars on the road because they noisy and "totally different experience".You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.
Razengan: AI is a tool like any other.Ever since the dawn of time I've wanted to make my own games but always ended up wasting time on trying to make engines and frameworks and shit, because no development environment worked the way I wanted to, out of the box.I don't trust AI enough to let it generate code out of thin air yet, and it's often wrong or inefficient when it does, so I just ask it to review my existing code.I've been using Codex that way for the last couple months and it's helped me catch of lot of bugs that would have taken me ages on my own. All the code and ideas are still my own, and the AI's made me more productive without being lazy.Maybe this time I will manage to finish making an actual game for once :')
skywhopper: How old is that exactly?
bool3max: Why can you not enjoy both the journey and the destination? Surely you find some sub-disciplines of writing code more pleasant than others - can't you just keep doing those manually and offload/automate the rest to the machine?
jrjeksjd8d: I hear everyone say "the LLM lets me focus on the broader context and architecture", but in my experience the architecture is made of the small decisions in the individual components. If I'm writing a complex system part of getting the primitives and interfaces right is experiencing the friction of using them. If code is "free" I can write a bad system because I don't experience using it, the LLM abstracts away the rough edges.I'm working with a team that was an early adopter of LLMs and their architecture is full of unknown-unknowns that they would have thought through if they actually wrote the code themselves. There are impedance mismatches everywhere but they can just produce more code to wrap the old code. It makes the system brittle and hard-to-maintain.It's not a new problem, I've worked at places where people made these mistakes before. But as time goes on it seems like _most_ systems will accumulate multiple layers of slop because it's increasingly cheap to just add more mud to the ball of mud.
retired: The problem is that since AI employers now expect developers to write code faster.Similar to when IDEs and autocomplete became common.
retired: I have decided that I will only write artisanal code. I’m even thinking of creating a consultancy agency where people can hire me to replace AI generated code.
krmboya: What do you all think about the "Solve It" method by the Answer dot AI folks?It's more like iterating on the REPL with AI in the loop, meaning the user stays in control while benefitting from AI, so real growth happens.Interesting thing to consider, in a couple of years, will there be a differentiator between people who are good at driving company-specific AI tools and those who are generally better by having built skills the hard way ground up with benefit of AI?
vitriol83: In my field which involves large legacy codebases in C++ and complex numerical algorithms implemented by PhDs. LLMs have their place but improvements in productivity are not that great because current LLMs simply make too many mistakes in this context and mistakes are usually very costly.Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.
erickxu1: I think AI Coding allows more people to do more things, which is why for most people it "ignited their passion" because now they have the tools to build their ideas
ZenoArrow: It's not hard to pick holes in this approach by showing the code being generated is flawed. Also, code quality is different from code velocity, better to write 10 lines that more accurately describes functionality than 50.
finaard: > This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them, unless they eventually became viable to do in a commercial setting where I then had some junior developer to make the annoying stuff go away.Now with LLMs I have my own junior developer to handle the annoying stuff - and as a result, a lot of my fun stuff I was thinking about in the last 3 decades finally got done.One example from just last week - I had a large C codebase from the 90s I always wanted to reuse, but modern compilers have a different idea of how C should look like. It's pretty obvious from the compiler errors what you need to do each case, but I wasn't really in the mood for manually going through hundreds of source files. So I just stuck a locally running qwen coder in yolo mode into a container, forgot about it for a week, and came back to a compiling code base. Diff is quick to review, only had a handful of cases where it needed manual intervention.
softwaredoug: There is some joy in catching the LLM in a house of cards misunderstanding of how something works. They’ll weave really convincing fictions about from a bit of debugging. Then the Socratic probing of that can be fun. In part because the LLM tries to use big words to often seem smart.Then you hopefully capture that information somehow in a future prompt, documentation, test, or other agent guardrail.So I finds fun in the knowledge engineering of it all. The meta practice of building up a knowledge base in how to solve problems like this codebase.
sktrdie: You still care about end result though: in your case, the end result being the puzzled you solved.AI can make that process still enjoyable. For instance I had to build a very intricate cache handler for Next.js from scratch that worked in a very specific way by serializing JSON in chunks (instead of JSON.parse it all in memory). I knew the theory, but the API details and the other annoyances always made it daunting for me.With AI I was able to thinker more about the theory of the problem and less about the technical implementation which made the process much more fun and doable.I agree with you though that if the end result is to "implement a website" then AI has made the process super boring. But that's good imo, because the simple and easily-replicable things should be boring.
