> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying.
It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).
And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.
It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!
hakunin · 1h ago
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding:
1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc)
2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing)
3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building
To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:
1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)
2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)
I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.
NitpickLawyer · 31m ago
I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more.
Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later.
I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.
yahoozoo · 22m ago
The models themselves seem to be plateauing with the companies behind them shifting to additional products on top of them. It seemed like a weekly occurrence we would get a new model from the top dogs.
MattGaiser · 13m ago
The models are plateauing, but unlike humans, a certain amount of brute force testing of their output is fine. They can just iterate until they succeed.
radicalbyte · 58m ago
I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities).
I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.
hakunin · 53m ago
I haven't seen many folks who actually hands-on programmed this long willingly and grown to hate it. Instead one is usually trying to become something else (CTO, executive, etc) but due to financial difficulties, struggle to make connections and promote themselves, had to keep writing code. Are you sure this wasn't more of your case? That said, I haven't programmed for 35 years yet (approaching 30 in my case), so I don't know how I might feel when I get there.
ljm · 29m ago
Only 20 years since it started as a hobby. There is programming that I enjoy doing for the fun of it or for experimentation and I wouldn’t use AI for that (most likely because it’d be something that isn’t well known or documented).
If work wants me to use it for the job, then sure why not? That too is something new to learn how to do well, will possibly be important for future career growth, and is exciting in a different way. If anything, I’ve got spare mental compute by the end of the week and might even have energy to do my hobbyist stuff.
Win win for me.
gavmor · 33m ago
> career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities).
I'm confused—can you expand on this? What's "the work" that you've "grown to hate?" Is it "coding," or is it your "responsibilities?"
andoando · 28m ago
If its any typical corporate job, as they said I imagine the coding is rather boring.
We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.
Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work
MattGaiser · 21m ago
I’ve found GitHub Copilot Agent quite good for this kind of coding. You write up the architecture you want and I paste it into an issue and it fills in the rest.
KoolKat23 · 2m ago
Not development related but I have plenty of colleagues that take pleasure in the mundane. Small easy dopamine hits I guess.
peab · 44m ago
I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it.
Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.
I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.
sitzkrieg · 8m ago
no one uses ai to one shot system design because they cant. it will fuck up in any moderate sized project
echelon · 41m ago
I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems.
But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.
monkey26 · 49m ago
I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions.
I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain.
Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.
hakunin · 32m ago
We are in a similar length of experience, but weirdly as I got older, it's the opposite for me: I got more particular about clarity, readability, especially in the context of handling edge cases. The 10% of situations that require 90% of effort. My new hobby is a codebase that can read as a business rulebook.
crawshaw · 29m ago
I first got paid to code 25 years ago. I have been programming since I was a kid, and always will. I love making computers do things.
I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI).
It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them.
But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.
Wowfunhappy · 1h ago
Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code!
But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!
zqna · 53m ago
It's like saying I never like carpentering, but hey that great ikea thing (or 3d printer), we all now can have nice furniture for pennies! Except it's not nice furniture, it's not for pennies and you still really need carpenters for building houses.
sitkack · 47m ago
You ignored what they said, put words in their mouth and made a cheap shot.
weego · 56m ago
I'm in the ~25 years group and my only AI pleasure is the f**ing boilerplate that some libs and frameworks insist on still pushing onto the developer that is almost always the same but not quite.
I actually get to do the job I love which is problem solving.
tjr · 24m ago
I am finding that I really like AI for tasks I don't want to do, and am annoyed by it for tasks I enjoy.
A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork.
(I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)
benreesman · 38m ago
I'm squarely in the latter group and I just don't think of it in like/dislike terms: I think of it as a rapidly changing (though beginning to converge) set of new tools in a toolbox that only ever grows. In particular its in the code generation / code validation subtoolbox that already included IDL compilers, emacs macros, type systems / proof assistants, code review, and others.
It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier.
This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.
kasey_junk · 24m ago
I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai.
Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts?
Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine?
I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.
gavinray · 54m ago
I think you might have to get more granular than:
> people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)
I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions.
But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something.
I enjoy making things.
hakunin · 44m ago
That's what I mean by product-building vs programming (3rd group).
sitkack · 49m ago
I got into this industry as a side gig from science, I love solving problems. I am pretty ok at code, but code is a problem in the way of another problem. Sometimes it is easy to get distracted by a cute puzzle or a new game, but my purpose is to solve larger problems not play games (I didn't intend for this to be HN rhetorical combat).
The people most against AI assistance are those that define themselves by what they do, have invested a lot into honing their craft and enjoy the execution of that craft.
There are multiple vocal groups on the Internet about vibe coding. I don’t think any of them really capture the average use case.
Most of the people I know use use AI coding tools do so selectively. They pick the right tool for the job and they aren’t hesitant to switch or try different modes.
Whenever I see someone declare that the other side is dead or useless (manual programming or AI coding) it feels like they’re just picking sides in a personal preference or ideology war.
Kiro · 33m ago
I didn't understand which group was supposed to be which until the very last point, so I don't think you're correct. In my personal network, the most senior people with lots of programming experience have the most positive attitude and seem to be more pragmatic about it in general.
iamflimflam1 · 29m ago
This is my experience as well. Occasionally when using code tools - I do actually feel like a 10x engineer. I’ve got sufficient experience to know what I want and to correct course when needed. And I can dive into the code and help when needed.
It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
hakunin · 26m ago
Couple of questions: the most senior people in your personal network — are they hands-on _lately_? And are they ~>25y experience? If it's a no to either, I took those into account.
lodovic · 54m ago
To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.
hakunin · 39m ago
I was going to include "people who use verbose programming languages/environments" :), but perhaps it's more of a likelihood scale across all group. The more verbose the language, the more drawn to AI you will be.
msgodel · 23m ago
I love programming but I don't really enjoy figuring out how to consume other people's APIs.
The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained.
When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.
fragmede · 6m ago
It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.)
So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work,
instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have.
As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.
MattGaiser · 54m ago
If you have a process and pattern you like to follow, I imagine that your experience with AI agents will be frustrating. I have had to be willing to change how I structure code to get AI dev to work really well for me.
zqna · 42m ago
To the first list also add the typical mediocre developer who has struggled for their entire career, never investing in acquiring deep understanding of how things work, and who is making guesses when attempting to fix things, later blaming the magic behind them. For those people the magic of LLMs is just the same, they are comfortable with it, and will be giving the same excuses that they are used to, even more so now.
Jgrubb · 1h ago
100% with you. I thought I loved writing code until a few months ago when I was able to tell an LLM exactly how I wanted it done, exactly the structure and the goals for today. I realized that I love getting stuff done and that writing code was the price I had to pay in terms of my time.
stavros · 25m ago
Exactly this for me as well. And I'm really good at writing code! It's so weird to realize I never liked it, that I just liked making things.
Now I don't write code unless Claude does it, I just review.
jonator · 1h ago
For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end.
Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions.
Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up.
With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software.
The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.
garciasn · 1h ago
I see AI-accelerated codegen as doing all of the boring shit I hated:
do while error == true;
Write code
Run code
Read error
Attempt to fix error
Run code
Read error
Search Google for error
Attempt to fix error
Run code
Read error
done
---
Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane parts of it for me.
I like it and I recommend it to those who are willing to admit that their jobs aren't all sunshine and roses until the product is shipped and we can sit back and get to work on the next nightmare.
righthand · 21m ago
If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up.
This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.
Just food for thought.
garciasn · 11m ago
I have the skills; I don't, however, have the time to dedicate myself to one project at a time because I work at an agency that has many irons in many fires. Working at a small company with dozens of clients means that we are spread thin and this helps to resolve many of the issues in this sort of environment.
If I worked at a large company supporting a single product, it might be different; but, that's not my reality.
Wowfunhappy · 1h ago
> and it never gives up.
Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."
jonator · 53m ago
I agree and do experience that. Perhaps to clarify, I mean that it (unlike humans), is always down to code alongside you. It will never complain, get sick, have a life event. etc.
kregasaurusrex · 49m ago
On Friday I was converting a constrained solver from python to another language, and ran into some difficulty with subsituting an optimzer that's a few lines of easily written Scipy; but barely being supported in another language. One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. But another AI tool was really struggling with getting the right syntax to be compatible with the common existing optimization libaries, and I felt like I was repeatedly putting queries (read: $) into the software equivalent of a slot machine that was constantly apologizing for not giving a testable answer while eating tens of dollars in direct costs waiting for the "jackpot" of working code.
The feedback loop of "maybe the next time it'll be right" turned into a few hundred queries resulting in finding the LLM's attempts were a ~20 node cycle of things it tried and didn't work, and now you're out a couple dollars and hours of engineering time.
brookst · 47m ago
A very relatable experience. But not all that different from how humans work when in unfamiliar domains.
leptons · 22m ago
I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.
b_e_n_t_o_n · 1h ago
I think much like how we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility, we're gonna have to do the same with AI. I find it incredibly powerful for certain things and incredibly frustrating for others. Begging the AI to one shot some project feels like the wrong way to use it, it's better as a scalpel. Or as a learning device, or a more advanced rubber ducky.
rollcat · 1h ago
IMHO the root of the issue is that "AI" is being anthropomorphised, or oversold as actually "intelligent".
If there's anything I've learned about software, "intelligent" usually means "we've thrown a lot of intelligent people at the problem, and made the solution even more complicated".
Machine learning is not software, but probably should be approached as such. It's a program that takes some input and transforms it into some output. But I suppose if society really cared about physical or mental health, we wouldn't have had cigarettes or slot machines.
escapecharacter · 31m ago
A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”.
When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.
AlecSchueler · 1h ago
> we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility
Considering the state of today's social media landscape and people's relationship to it, this fills me with dread.
b_e_n_t_o_n · 56m ago
I think we're starting to have a conversation about what healthy social media usage looks like and its place in life. Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation and a shift back towards being genuine. I fully understand the irony here btw.
Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.
AlecSchueler · 12m ago
> Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic but it gave me a good chuckle nonetheless.
There's also a lot of talk about drinking more moderately down at my local bar.
shortrounddev2 · 1h ago
I never allow ai to write code, certainly not unsupervised. I like to write some code and then have claude check my work. Not just for bugs, but for architecture and style as well.
prisenco · 1h ago
I also don't ever let it write code. I don't see much advantage, it's incredibly unsatisfying, low quality and fraught with pitfalls.
I use it as a conversation partner when I'm stuck or planning. I don't mind writing boilerplate, it's a good zen-like exercise that can reveal future problems or opportunities in the process. And evaluating code that isn't working can be useful. But mostly it's a way to think out loud, like the world's smarted rubber duck.
I also don't call up AI often in this workflow. I compare it to Star Trek where most of their work is done without the ship's computer. Every once in a while they ask it a question to help them work through a problem, but they never have the computer solve the problem directly.
An effect is I can use a free plan and hardly ever go over the limits. So what happens if this ends up being the best approach? How do companies survive when software devs only need to use it a handful of times a day, and less and less often as they progress their own skills?
b_e_n_t_o_n · 1h ago
I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code.
It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.
shortrounddev2 · 1h ago
I stopped using copilot because it kept writing really bad c++. It's great at python and Javascript. This was a year or so ago so maybe its better now
b_e_n_t_o_n · 59m ago
I used it to learn C++ but that was for basic stuff. Even I could tell when it started to go off the rails.
I wonder if some of the disconnect between the AI coding fans and skeptics is just the language they're writing.
leptons · 30m ago
Nope, I write Javascript every day and none of the AI coding assistants is really that good. It churns out more crap than gold.
bogzz · 1h ago
But muh cashing in on the tulip mania.
bubblyworld · 5m ago
You definitely need to be careful of the addition mechanics of CC, but is it still a slot machine if there are loads of steps you can take to improve your odds of success? For instance, only allowing it to code within a feedback loop of some kind. I find the author's premise that the skill here is just "knowing which model to use" way too reductive. Seems like an entirely different beast to gambling, where the odds are fixed by the house.
jgb1984 · 6m ago
Any code that chatgpt or claude ever gave me was overly verbose and highly inefficient in the best case, and riddled with subtle or not so subtle bugs in the worst case. Before the average junior dev will even discover those bugs his grasp on the codebase will have fallen so far that he won't stand a chance to redeem the project.
Software quality taking a nosedive.
Our industry is vibecoding itself off the cliff.
tptacek · 1h ago
I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations.
Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.
You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.
aaronbrethorst · 1h ago
I worked on visual studio at Microsoft 20 years ago, and once had the opportunity to go to a trade show to represent the company.
While I was manning a booth, this software developer came up to me and said VS had gotten too good at code generation to automate data access, and we should cut it out because that was the vast majority of what he did. I thought he was joking, but no, he was totally serious.
I said something to him about how those tools were saving him from having to do boring, repetitive work so that he could focus on higher value, more interesting development, instead, but he wasn’t having it.
I think about him quite often, especially these days. I wonder if he’s still programming, and what he thinks about LLMs
qsort · 1h ago
I think I partially agree, your first paragraph is exactly how I feel. Boilerplate and trivial stuff absolutely should be automated. It's also true that people have been pushing a narrative where programming is some dark art and you should use Methodology X or Theory Y. Bro, chill, you're writing a website.
On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level. It's fashionable to claim we all have bullshit jobs, but I don't think that's a fair description at all.
skydhash · 22m ago
Programming is about not doing all of these things. You have a powerful machine that is quite good at doing those things. You just have to notice those patterns and then build the tool that will be doing those kind of works. And the most simple one is a snippet generator and editors macros. Then you have project generators, and code reuse thingies from the programming language.
IanCal · 32m ago
I massively agree. Huge amounts of coding isn’t wild new inventions, it’s not unknowable work like so many seem to suggest when asked to estimate time. Frankly it’s not even conceptually hard, it’s just that computers are fast and accurate and dumb so you need to be annoyingly precise. Imagine if a human refuses to read a manual because a comma should have been a semicolon. Plenty of people are smart enough to do it, but lack either the knowledge about this or the desire to deal with it.
Most of this work should go away. Much of the rest of it should be achievable by the domain experts themselves at a fraction of the cost.
tptacek · 28m ago
If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language.
Instead, it's the opposite.
cbrozefsky · 56m ago
I always thought programming as being a touch more like two imbecile brothers outsmarting Max Von Sydow's plan to control the world with tainted beer and hockey arena organs.
tptacek · 37m ago
Holy shit, I completely forget he was in that. What a get.
rustc · 1h ago
And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?
yomismoaqui · 1h ago
If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code.
I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.
tptacek · 1h ago
I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.
boredtofears · 38m ago
Do you feel like you end up with as clear of a mental model reviewing it as you do if you wrote it?
I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.
tptacek · 35m ago
Yes, of course I do. It's rote stuff. To the balance of time we're accruing to me dealing with generated code, add "stripping off all the comments", "fixing variable names to be like I like them", etc. My fingerprints are still all over everything. And it's still radically faster than doing this all by hand.
Mental expenditure on programming is also not linear through a task; it takes much more energy to get started than to do the back half. Ever stared at an empty function for a minute trying to come up with the right variable name, or choosing which value to compute first? LLMs are geniuses at just getting things started.
whateveracct · 1h ago
My job pays well and I create real stuff but most of the work is honestly just slop. So maybe I should use AI to save myself the effort..I could salvage more free time for myself that way..
quatonion · 30m ago
I have been programming since 1978 and thoroughly enjoy it.
Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all.
But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing.
Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing.
Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away.
Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer.
I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years.
The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.
gonzalohm · 1h ago
My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people.
As an example, the other day asks chatgpt to write a configuration file for SQL fluff that formatted the code as an example that I provided.
It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted.
I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked for help. I know how to code python I don't need AI to write code that then I will need to review
scotty79 · 1h ago
I think that's a very common experience when you try to make it write niche stuff. It just makes everything up wholesale. If you on the other hand wanted to write a react app ...
troupo · 1h ago
> My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people.
It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.
danielbln · 58m ago
Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.
ChuckMcM · 1h ago
That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.
svantana · 1h ago
Oh great, together we are two datapoints that reinforce the OP's hypothesis. I have a strong distaste for gambling in all forms and I don't enjoy using opaque, unreliable text generators either.
leptons · 2m ago
There are many ways to describe LLMs and coding assistants. The slot machine is a pretty good one. I also compare "AI" to using a Ouija Board. It's not meant for getting real answers or truth. It's an entertainment prop, and LLMs should be treated similarly.
I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".
astrobe_ · 1h ago
.. But the house always wins ?
scoreandmore · 1h ago
That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t realized how gamified it has become. I originally felt like Claude and I were a team, but it goes off the rails so much that I find myself pulling the lever with increasing febrility. Fortunately I’m old enough to know when to quit but I’ve seen a friend just disappear into coaxing Claude for hours instead of writing code himself. I wonder if he’s got Claude gambling addiction
stillpointlab · 1h ago
The irony is I alt-tabbed to HN to read this article after starting Claude Code on an implementation pass.
My usage of Claude Code sounds different to a lot of ways I hear people using it. I write medium detail task breakdowns with strict requirements and then get Claude to refine them. I review every single line of code methodically, attempting to catch every instance Claude missed a custom rule. I frequently need to fix up broken implementations, or propose complete refactors.
It is a totally different experience to any other dev experience I have had previously. Despite the effort that I have to put in, it gets the job done. A lot of the code written is better than equivalent code from junior engineers I have worked with in the past (or at worst, no worse).
yuvadam · 4m ago
avoid any gambling addiction, run with --dangerously-skip-permissions
squidbeak · 1h ago
I'd love to read the article, but the gray text is too well camouflaged against the gray background.
rgoldfinger · 52m ago
Good catch. I tweaked it some, let me know if that helps.
misja111 · 1h ago
> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer
I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections.
Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way.
When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.
ggandhi · 1h ago
Lovable, I feel, works at a higher abstraction layer. The unpredictability of whether my prompt will generate something delightful in that initial design creates an addictive slot machine dynamic. But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic?
esafak · 1h ago
Nah, it would become actually useful. Companies are not going to keep paying for slot machines. There is a strong incentive to make them reliable.
sokoloff · 1h ago
Companies will rationally stop paying for slot machines that pay out $0.90 for every $1 wagered, but they’ll happily pay for slot machines that pay out $5 for every $1 wagered.
Which will be the case is the interesting question.
Ekaros · 59m ago
At this point I am doubtful about calling companies rational actors in many many cases. So probably they play both machines. And it is somewhat luck which they hit and some maybe have rational leaders.
troupo · 1h ago
> But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic?
No. They would become extremely useful and more magical. Because instead of weird incantations and shamanic rituals of "just one more .rules file, bro, I swear" you could create useful reproducible working tools.
I've been reading Hooked by Nir Eyal and this was my conclusion too about all LLMs after just the introduction.
hugodan · 1h ago
In both scenarios (slot machines and vibecoding) anticipation is the name of the game. Much like doomscrolling.
whartung · 1h ago
Actually the model I like to use is a Pacinko machine. Where you can visualize all of the options that are available, while internal cursor just randomly bounces from pin to pin.
ankit219 · 31m ago
One unpopular opinion I hold is that in recent times programming became a lot more about integrating libraries and frameworks vs writing your own thing. This was fine because if someone open sourced it, why repeat the same work. That ended up in cases where a lot of work was modifying the libraries to your use case.
With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders and non coders). The thrill comes from problem solving, and when you can try out the solution quickly and validate, it is just addictive. The other side is how open source frameworks have increased, and there are a lot of oss libraries for just about everything. (A personal experience is implementing Cmd bar (like linear) in react when i was just learning. It took me a week or so, and then i just inserted an oss thing for comparison. It was super smooth, but i did not know the assumptions. In production, i will prefer that, and dont always have time to learn and implement from scratch). We see this with langchain etc in LLMs too, and other agentic frameworks as well. The shift is not towards less code but getting the thing to work faster. Claude code accelerates that exponentially as well.
ivanjermakov · 15m ago
Unpopular opinion would be that if the project is not much more than a bunch of libraries/tools/techs integrated together than the need for its existence is questionable. Diversity there breaks "one way of doing things" and makes it harder to learn actual tech that makes it work.
bgwalter · 9m ago
Yes, the gamification is why some people like it. It is another addiction. Most proponents and bloggers are tied to "AI" money though, directly or indirectly.
I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.
mccoyb · 1h ago
> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually.
The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a simulacrum of the thing you had in your mind.
If something is not working, you need to know the precise language to direct CC (and _if you know this language_, you can use CC like a chisel). If you don't know this language, you're stuck -- but you'd also be stuck if you were writing the thing _by hand_.
In contrast to _writing the thing by hand_, you can ask CC to explain what's going on. What systems are involved here, is there a single source of truth, explain the pipeline to me ...
It's not black and white in the way I experienced this paragraph. The "details" you need to know vary across a broad spectrum, and excellent wizards can navigate throughout the spectrum, and know the meta-strategies to use CC (or whatever agentic system) to unstick themselves in the parts of the spectrum they don't know.
(lots of that latter skill set correlate with being a good programmer in the first place)
Many of my colleagues who haven't used CC as much seem to get stuck in a "one track" frame of mind about what it can and cannot do -- without realizing that they don't know the meta-strategies ... or that they're describing just one particular workflow. It's a programmable programming tool, don't put it into a box.
cobbal · 38m ago
I read this entire post before realizing you weren't referring to `cc`, the C compiler. It actually kinda works with this interpretation, particularly the "if you know this language" part.
I compared vibe coding to gambling in one of my recent blog posts and thought that metaphor was slightly uncharitable, but I didn't expect "slot machine" to actually now be the term of art.
abhinavsns · 27m ago
So is our brain. We pay with time.
macawfish · 1h ago
It's definitely addictive. But also, it works really well with some steady guidance.
globular-toast · 26m ago
Am I the only one who doesn't find CC makes me faster? I mean, it could, if I let it, but that means not reading or understanding what it's writing. Basically I just don't really believe anyone is writing software of the same quality in less time. But I can totally see how you can write software of lower quality in a fraction of the time.
The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable.
I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.
gronglo · 1h ago
> but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually.
I don't think that's true. I'm wondering if the author has tried Claude 4 Opus.
nicce · 1h ago
I have just fought 4 days with Claude 4 Sonnet because it generates too much garbage for my usage, and I am considering stopping the AI usage altogether. No matter what system prompt, rules et. all you give, they don't want to do as I said, but instead do something which compiles (Rust) but is not performant or is extremely verbose and includes all kinds of unnecessary things. They have too much assumptions that some function is used/not used in async context, or it is okay to clone, or whatever. Is the Opus really that big leap?
itsthecourier · 1h ago
my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding.
I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.
studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too.
I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine
Disposal8433 · 1h ago
It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.
ChadNauseam · 1h ago
Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's interest. It's at https://yap.town .
[^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first.
Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
tcoff91 · 1h ago
Site isn’t working for me on iOS safari.
ChadNauseam · 56m ago
I should have mentioned. The site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
troupo · 1h ago
Site is stuck on "checking browser support".
ChadNauseam · 47m ago
I should have mentioned. The site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
smokel · 1h ago
You touch upon an interesting phenomenon that is quite pervasive throughout the world of software development, and possibly many other fields as well.
To avoid heated discussions, allow me to illustrate the concept with why enterprise software is mainly built with Java, whereas most blog posts are about writing backends with TypeScript, Python, or Rust. The reason for this is at least twofold:
1. Professional programmers don't get paid to write blog posts, and typically want to spend their free time doing other things. Hobbyists do have the time, but they typically do not see the added value of a boring language such as Java, because they don't work in teams.
2. When something is already known, it is boring for people to read about, and therefore less interesting to write about. When something is new, many people write about it, but it's hard to tell who is right and who is wrong.
Given that good writing, and the additional marketing to find the respective audience, take energy, it is not strange that we find weirdly biased opinions when reading blog posts and forums on the internet. I typically find it better to discuss matters with people I know and trust, or to experiment a bit by myself.
The same might happen now with reporting on AI assisted coding.
Edit: might as well just have said "visibility bias" and "novelty bias" if I had consulted an LLM before commenting.
misja111 · 1h ago
As someone who has been using Java for enterprise software for over 25 years, but who likes to program his pet projects in Python, let me give you another reason:
3. Python has a very fast feedback loop. You type, run and see the result immediately. This is great for small projects and prototypes.
Java needs much more work, not just for the compiling but it also needs more boilerplate. This is fine for enterprise projects which typically are very large and prefer stability over speed of development. But at home I don't have the time or the patience for that.
cess11 · 26m ago
I'm very into tight cadence and have a lot of options to choose from, doing most of my "pets" in Racket, Elixir, Picolisp and p5js, but I still sometimes generate a Maven project and start hacking in a unit test because libraries and performance are excellent and sometimes it requires less effort to brute a problem with imperative mutations.
Pharo is an alternative but documentation and libraries just aren't as good, and maybe never will be.
lubujackson · 1h ago
This is the new "Source?" comment (which, funny enough, still works).
But I don't think the code matters as much as the intention. The comment is all about exploration and learning. If you treat your LLM like a Wikipedia dive, you will come out the other end with newfound knowledge. If you only want it to achieve a discrete goal, it may or may not do so, but you will have no way to know which.
RobinL · 1h ago
I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI:
https://rupertlinacre.com/
I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'.
Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find
cmrdporcupine · 39m ago
Here's an example, from a session from yesterday and today, buyer beware naturally I'm still testing and refining it: https://github.com/rdaum/tature
In both these examples, I leaned on Claude to set up the boilerplate, the GUI, etc, which gave me more mental budget for playing with the challenging aspects of the problem. For example, the tabu graph layout is inspired by several papers, but I was able to iterate really quickly with claude on new ideas from my own creative imagination with the problem. A few of them actually turned out really well.
Sometimes I'll admit that I do treat Claude like a slot machine, just shooting for luck. But in the end that's more trouble than it's worth.
The most fruitful approach is to maintain a solid understanding of what's happening and guide it the whole way. Ask it to prove that it's doing what it says it's doing by writing tests and using debug statements. Channel it toward double checking its own work. Challenge it.
Another thing that worked really well the other day was to use Claude to rewrite some old JavaScript libraries I hand wrote a few years ago in rust. Those kinds of things aren't slot machine problems. Claude code nails that kind of thing consistently.
I took an existing MIT licensed prefix tree crate and had Claude+Gemini rewrite it to support immutable quickly comparable views. In about one day's work. I scoured the prefix tree libraries available in rust, as well as the various existing immutable collections libraries and found that nothing like this existed. This implementation has decently comprehensive tests and benchmarks.
I used vibe kanban like a slot machine and ended up with a messy MCP server that doesn't really do anything useful that I can tell. Mostly because I didn't have a clear vision when I went into it.
blibble · 1h ago
they almost exclusively have under 250 karma too...
elcapitan · 1h ago
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
> pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.
I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.
TheCleric · 1h ago
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
The tool is insanely powerful, but Anthropic needs to build a more interactive structure into the tool. Just "accept this diff or not" is not ideal.
If you prompt it correctly and rigidly, and review everything it does large or small, it's a 10x tool for grinding through some very hard problems very quickly.
But it can very easily lead you into overconfidence and bloat. And it can "cheat" without you even realizing it.
Claude Code is best used as an augmentation, not automation tool. And it's best that the tool makers and investors realize that and stop pretending they're going to replace programmers with things like this.
They only work well when combined with a skilled programmer who can properly direct and sift through the results. What they do allow is the ability to focus on higher level thinking and problems and let the tool help you get there.
varispeed · 1h ago
> I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work.
That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling.
Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, constant upskilling and is not something you can switch off after 5pm and think of something else. Your brain is constantly at work.
That work also is creating millions and billions that gets extracted from developers and flow to the greedy hands of the rich, who now control all the means of production (think of cloud services, regulation - try starting your own forum today, anything with user generated content etc.).
Developer did themselves dirty.
sokoloff · 1h ago
TIL that “developers are poorly paid”.
api · 42m ago
One of the reasons a lot of things look like gambling is that a lot of things look like gambling. Hunting, gathering, and other baseline pre-civilization survival activities look like gambling. Dating looks like gambling. Reproduction even looks like gambling with each offspring, as a product of genetic recombination, being a dice roll. Investing, of course, looks like gambling.
It's why we get so addicted to gambling. We're built for it because a lot of legitimate real things look like gambling.
gatkinso · 1h ago
and a damn good one
quantumHazer · 1h ago
in the sense that is totally unpredictable and suck your time into the void without learning anything?
sergiotapia · 58m ago
Anyone else kind of lose the high of solving a difficult problem since LLMs became the workflow?
You still have to really guide the AI, none of this is automatic. Yet I no longer feel the mega joys I once felt hand building something and watching it work correctly. The thrill is gone! Don't know if this is good or bad yet. I don't miss the plumbing bullshit. I do miss the joy.
minimaxir · 48m ago
This is a common argument against AI generation and I dislike it because people derive their joy from different things. Some engineers get their joy from the process of creation, others get their joy from the final result. Neither way is inherently better or more morally correct than the other.
christiangenco · 1h ago
The world is a slot machine.
There’s a reason intermittent rewards are so intoxicating to naturally evolved brains: exploiting systems that give intermittent rewards is a great resource acquisition strategy.
It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).
And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.
It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!
1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc)
2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing)
3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building
To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:
1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)
2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)
I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.
Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later.
I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.
I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.
If work wants me to use it for the job, then sure why not? That too is something new to learn how to do well, will possibly be important for future career growth, and is exciting in a different way. If anything, I’ve got spare mental compute by the end of the week and might even have energy to do my hobbyist stuff.
Win win for me.
I'm confused—can you expand on this? What's "the work" that you've "grown to hate?" Is it "coding," or is it your "responsibilities?"
We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.
Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work
Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.
I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.
But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.
I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain.
Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.
I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI).
It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them.
But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.
But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!
I actually get to do the job I love which is problem solving.
A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork.
(I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)
It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier.
This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.
Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts?
Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine?
I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.
But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something.
I enjoy making things.
The people most against AI assistance are those that define themselves by what they do, have invested a lot into honing their craft and enjoy the execution of that craft.
I have been getting paid to program for over 35 years, agentic coding is a fresh breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1...
Most of the people I know use use AI coding tools do so selectively. They pick the right tool for the job and they aren’t hesitant to switch or try different modes.
Whenever I see someone declare that the other side is dead or useless (manual programming or AI coding) it feels like they’re just picking sides in a personal preference or ideology war.
It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained.
When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.
So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have.
As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.
Now I don't write code unless Claude does it, I just review.
Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions.
Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up.
With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software.
The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.
do while error == true;
Write code
Run code
Read error
Attempt to fix error
Run code
Read error
Search Google for error
Attempt to fix error
Run code
Read error
done
---
Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane parts of it for me.
I like it and I recommend it to those who are willing to admit that their jobs aren't all sunshine and roses until the product is shipped and we can sit back and get to work on the next nightmare.
This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.
Just food for thought.
If I worked at a large company supporting a single product, it might be different; but, that's not my reality.
Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."
The feedback loop of "maybe the next time it'll be right" turned into a few hundred queries resulting in finding the LLM's attempts were a ~20 node cycle of things it tried and didn't work, and now you're out a couple dollars and hours of engineering time.
If there's anything I've learned about software, "intelligent" usually means "we've thrown a lot of intelligent people at the problem, and made the solution even more complicated".
Machine learning is not software, but probably should be approached as such. It's a program that takes some input and transforms it into some output. But I suppose if society really cared about physical or mental health, we wouldn't have had cigarettes or slot machines.
When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.
Considering the state of today's social media landscape and people's relationship to it, this fills me with dread.
Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic but it gave me a good chuckle nonetheless.
There's also a lot of talk about drinking more moderately down at my local bar.
I use it as a conversation partner when I'm stuck or planning. I don't mind writing boilerplate, it's a good zen-like exercise that can reveal future problems or opportunities in the process. And evaluating code that isn't working can be useful. But mostly it's a way to think out loud, like the world's smarted rubber duck.
I also don't call up AI often in this workflow. I compare it to Star Trek where most of their work is done without the ship's computer. Every once in a while they ask it a question to help them work through a problem, but they never have the computer solve the problem directly.
An effect is I can use a free plan and hardly ever go over the limits. So what happens if this ends up being the best approach? How do companies survive when software devs only need to use it a handful of times a day, and less and less often as they progress their own skills?
It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.
I wonder if some of the disconnect between the AI coding fans and skeptics is just the language they're writing.
Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.
You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.
While I was manning a booth, this software developer came up to me and said VS had gotten too good at code generation to automate data access, and we should cut it out because that was the vast majority of what he did. I thought he was joking, but no, he was totally serious.
I said something to him about how those tools were saving him from having to do boring, repetitive work so that he could focus on higher value, more interesting development, instead, but he wasn’t having it.
I think about him quite often, especially these days. I wonder if he’s still programming, and what he thinks about LLMs
On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level. It's fashionable to claim we all have bullshit jobs, but I don't think that's a fair description at all.
Most of this work should go away. Much of the rest of it should be achievable by the domain experts themselves at a fraction of the cost.
Instead, it's the opposite.
I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.
I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.
Mental expenditure on programming is also not linear through a task; it takes much more energy to get started than to do the back half. Ever stared at an empty function for a minute trying to come up with the right variable name, or choosing which value to compute first? LLMs are geniuses at just getting things started.
Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all.
But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing.
Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing.
Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away.
Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer.
I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years.
The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.
It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted. I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked for help. I know how to code python I don't need AI to write code that then I will need to review
It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.
I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".
My usage of Claude Code sounds different to a lot of ways I hear people using it. I write medium detail task breakdowns with strict requirements and then get Claude to refine them. I review every single line of code methodically, attempting to catch every instance Claude missed a custom rule. I frequently need to fix up broken implementations, or propose complete refactors.
It is a totally different experience to any other dev experience I have had previously. Despite the effort that I have to put in, it gets the job done. A lot of the code written is better than equivalent code from junior engineers I have worked with in the past (or at worst, no worse).
I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections.
Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way.
When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.
Which will be the case is the interesting question.
No. They would become extremely useful and more magical. Because instead of weird incantations and shamanic rituals of "just one more .rules file, bro, I swear" you could create useful reproducible working tools.
With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders and non coders). The thrill comes from problem solving, and when you can try out the solution quickly and validate, it is just addictive. The other side is how open source frameworks have increased, and there are a lot of oss libraries for just about everything. (A personal experience is implementing Cmd bar (like linear) in react when i was just learning. It took me a week or so, and then i just inserted an oss thing for comparison. It was super smooth, but i did not know the assumptions. In production, i will prefer that, and dont always have time to learn and implement from scratch). We see this with langchain etc in LLMs too, and other agentic frameworks as well. The shift is not towards less code but getting the thing to work faster. Claude code accelerates that exponentially as well.
I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.
The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a simulacrum of the thing you had in your mind.
If something is not working, you need to know the precise language to direct CC (and _if you know this language_, you can use CC like a chisel). If you don't know this language, you're stuck -- but you'd also be stuck if you were writing the thing _by hand_.
In contrast to _writing the thing by hand_, you can ask CC to explain what's going on. What systems are involved here, is there a single source of truth, explain the pipeline to me ...
It's not black and white in the way I experienced this paragraph. The "details" you need to know vary across a broad spectrum, and excellent wizards can navigate throughout the spectrum, and know the meta-strategies to use CC (or whatever agentic system) to unstick themselves in the parts of the spectrum they don't know.
(lots of that latter skill set correlate with being a good programmer in the first place)
Many of my colleagues who haven't used CC as much seem to get stuck in a "one track" frame of mind about what it can and cannot do -- without realizing that they don't know the meta-strategies ... or that they're describing just one particular workflow. It's a programmable programming tool, don't put it into a box.
I compared vibe coding to gambling in one of my recent blog posts and thought that metaphor was slightly uncharitable, but I didn't expect "slot machine" to actually now be the term of art.
The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable.
I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.
I don't think that's true. I'm wondering if the author has tried Claude 4 Opus.
I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.
studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too.
I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine
[^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first.
Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
To avoid heated discussions, allow me to illustrate the concept with why enterprise software is mainly built with Java, whereas most blog posts are about writing backends with TypeScript, Python, or Rust. The reason for this is at least twofold:
1. Professional programmers don't get paid to write blog posts, and typically want to spend their free time doing other things. Hobbyists do have the time, but they typically do not see the added value of a boring language such as Java, because they don't work in teams.
2. When something is already known, it is boring for people to read about, and therefore less interesting to write about. When something is new, many people write about it, but it's hard to tell who is right and who is wrong.
Given that good writing, and the additional marketing to find the respective audience, take energy, it is not strange that we find weirdly biased opinions when reading blog posts and forums on the internet. I typically find it better to discuss matters with people I know and trust, or to experiment a bit by myself.
The same might happen now with reporting on AI assisted coding.
Edit: might as well just have said "visibility bias" and "novelty bias" if I had consulted an LLM before commenting.
3. Python has a very fast feedback loop. You type, run and see the result immediately. This is great for small projects and prototypes. Java needs much more work, not just for the compiling but it also needs more boilerplate. This is fine for enterprise projects which typically are very large and prefer stability over speed of development. But at home I don't have the time or the patience for that.
Pharo is an alternative but documentation and libraries just aren't as good, and maybe never will be.
But I don't think the code matters as much as the intention. The comment is all about exploration and learning. If you treat your LLM like a Wikipedia dive, you will come out the other end with newfound knowledge. If you only want it to achieve a discrete goal, it may or may not do so, but you will have no way to know which.
I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'.
All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre
Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find
And I'm even above the 250 karma threshold!
Tabu search guided graph layout:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahscopes.bsky.social/post/3luh4s...
https://bsky.app/profile/micahscopes.bsky.social/post/3luh4d...
Fast Gaussian blue noise with wgpu:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahscopes.bsky.social/post/3ls3bz...
In both these examples, I leaned on Claude to set up the boilerplate, the GUI, etc, which gave me more mental budget for playing with the challenging aspects of the problem. For example, the tabu graph layout is inspired by several papers, but I was able to iterate really quickly with claude on new ideas from my own creative imagination with the problem. A few of them actually turned out really well.
Sometimes I'll admit that I do treat Claude like a slot machine, just shooting for luck. But in the end that's more trouble than it's worth.
The most fruitful approach is to maintain a solid understanding of what's happening and guide it the whole way. Ask it to prove that it's doing what it says it's doing by writing tests and using debug statements. Channel it toward double checking its own work. Challenge it.
Another thing that worked really well the other day was to use Claude to rewrite some old JavaScript libraries I hand wrote a few years ago in rust. Those kinds of things aren't slot machine problems. Claude code nails that kind of thing consistently.
Ah, one more huge success with code: https://github.com/micahscopes/radix_immutable
I took an existing MIT licensed prefix tree crate and had Claude+Gemini rewrite it to support immutable quickly comparable views. In about one day's work. I scoured the prefix tree libraries available in rust, as well as the various existing immutable collections libraries and found that nothing like this existed. This implementation has decently comprehensive tests and benchmarks.
One more I'll share, an embarrassing failure: https://github.com/micahscopes/splice-weaver-mcp
I used vibe kanban like a slot machine and ended up with a messy MCP server that doesn't really do anything useful that I can tell. Mostly because I didn't have a clear vision when I went into it.
I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.
We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.
If you prompt it correctly and rigidly, and review everything it does large or small, it's a 10x tool for grinding through some very hard problems very quickly.
But it can very easily lead you into overconfidence and bloat. And it can "cheat" without you even realizing it.
Claude Code is best used as an augmentation, not automation tool. And it's best that the tool makers and investors realize that and stop pretending they're going to replace programmers with things like this.
They only work well when combined with a skilled programmer who can properly direct and sift through the results. What they do allow is the ability to focus on higher level thinking and problems and let the tool help you get there.
That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling. Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, constant upskilling and is not something you can switch off after 5pm and think of something else. Your brain is constantly at work. That work also is creating millions and billions that gets extracted from developers and flow to the greedy hands of the rich, who now control all the means of production (think of cloud services, regulation - try starting your own forum today, anything with user generated content etc.).
Developer did themselves dirty.
It's why we get so addicted to gambling. We're built for it because a lot of legitimate real things look like gambling.
You still have to really guide the AI, none of this is automatic. Yet I no longer feel the mega joys I once felt hand building something and watching it work correctly. The thrill is gone! Don't know if this is good or bad yet. I don't miss the plumbing bullshit. I do miss the joy.
There’s a reason intermittent rewards are so intoxicating to naturally evolved brains: exploiting systems that give intermittent rewards is a great resource acquisition strategy.