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Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#101

Post by muzani »

RamtinJ95 wrote: post #96
conductr wrote: post #21

If programming is woodworking, using AI is ikea assembly except they packed most the wrong parts in the box so I have to deal with customer service to go back and forth to get the right parts and the hardware parts don’t always function as intended leaving me to find my own. It’s a different, less enjoyable, type of work in my opinion.

This analogy is inaccurate and spreading it just plays into the hands of those trying to press down SWE salaries and their importance. A better analogy is that previously we had a hand saw, now we have one of those automatic ones which speeds up some processes a lot but cant be used everywhere in every situation.

I think both are correct and reflect people's situations at work. Some are doing the ikea thing, some are doing the automatic saws, and some are using the automatic saws to make the ikea things for someone else.

It's also why the opinions are so heated on this. There's many forms of management, and some play way better with the AI tools than others. Some people are doing the assembly line jobs and some are doing code ninja jobs. Some are actually doing engineering, and some are code monkeys who are paid the same range as the engineers and using the same tools.

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#102

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

jjav wrote: post #95
gngoo wrote: post #86

I really like building products, and with AI now I can just offload huge parts of the technical duties, and do the actual product building much faster. For me this is where the real satisfaction is. Yes of course, there was a lot of satisfaction with doing it myself, fixing a bug, problem or finally implementing something after a long grind. But honestly I do not miss it at all. The further AI coding advances, the ea…

> In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction. To use the woodworking analogy of the (current) top comment, the woodworking equivalent of this is to call someone to build you a cabinet and come back home after they're…

I am a staff cloud consultant at a 3rd party AWs company specializing in software development + cloud architecture. My day job consists of.

1. Working with sales to land clients

2. Doing management consulting style projects where I tell the client what they should do.

3. Designing the architecture from the infra side and code.

4. Leading implementations and on smaller projects doing the hands on keyboard work by myself and on larger projects, leading a team

I don’t use AI agents. What I will do is use ChatGPT as a junior developer where I tell it the context of the problem, diagrams, and I will build up the pieces with the abstractions, modules etc I want. While the architect of a building may not build everything themselves and they definitely won’t be building the cabinets, they should have a vision of how everything is built and guide how it works together.

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#103

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

loveparade wrote: post #77

Reading HN I seem to be in the minority but AI has made programming a lot more fun for me. I've been an engineer for nearly 25 years and 95% of the work is rather mindless boilerplate. I know exactly what I need to do next, it just takes time and iteration. The "you think about the problem and draw diagrams" part of you describe probably makes up less than 5% of a typical engineering workflow, depending on what you w…

I said more in another comment. But after 20+ years in the industry as of 2018 and and before that 10 years as a hobbyist, coding had become a grind. I started liking solving business problems, talking to customers, mentoring etc and even the high level architect of the code.

AI has made a world of difference. I don’t use agents, I build the system up using ChatGPT as a junior developer with hand holding.

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#105

Post by askafriend »

KevinMS wrote: post #104

Why do all these posts make it seem like everybody is using AI for coding now? How many devs are actually using this stuff? The furthest I've gotten is just reading the google AI results from a search to see if they actually answer my question.

It's because A LOT of people are. I can't imagine doing it any other way now that I've adopted all the tooling.

I haven't hand-written more than a dozen lines of code in months. The models are really really good now if you can learn to use them. There's definitely a learning curve though as is true with anything new.

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#107

Post by unnouinceput »

marxism wrote: post #67
unnouinceput wrote: post #25

No, it didn't. Or rather it did for run of the mill coder camp wanna be programmer. Like you sound you are one. For me it's the opposite. That's because I don't do run of the mill web pages, my work instead is very specific and the so called "AI" (which is actually just googling with extra spice on top, I don't think I'll see true AI in my lifetime) is too stupid to do it. So I have to break it down into several sess…

I'm curious: could you give me an example of code that AI can't help with? I ask because I've worked across different domains: V8 bytecode optimizations, HPC at Sandia (differential equations on 50k nodes, adaptive mesh refinement heuristics), resource allocation and admission control for CI systems, custom network UDP network stack for mobile apps https://neumob.com/ . In every case in my memory, the AI coding tools…

Did you played Assassin's Creed Valhalla? In it there is a board game called Orlog. Go and make that game to be multiplayer so you can play with your spouse/son/friend. Come back to me once you're done and we see then how much time it took you.

Or remake the Gwent board game that is in Witcher 3.

Make either of that mobile game so you can enjoy in the same room with the person you love. Also make sure you can make multiple decks (for Gwent) / multiple starting God (for Orlog) and you just select the start and hit "ready to play" (or whatever). You'll know what I mean once you understand either of these games.

Good luck with having any of them made in one session and not breaking the big picture in million of pieces and you keep the big picture in your head.

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#108

Post by marxism »

unnouinceput wrote: post #107
marxism wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: could you give me an example of code that AI can't help with? I ask because I've worked across different domains: V8 bytecode optimizations, HPC at Sandia (differential equations on 50k nodes, adaptive mesh refinement heuristics), resource allocation and admission control for CI systems, custom network UDP network stack for mobile apps https://neumob.com/ . In every case in my memory, the AI coding tools…

Did you played Assassin's Creed Valhalla? In it there is a board game called Orlog. Go and make that game to be multiplayer so you can play with your spouse/son/friend. Come back to me once you're done and we see then how much time it took you. Or remake the Gwent board game that is in Witcher 3. Make either of that mobile game so you can enjoy in the same room with the person you love. Also make sure you can make mu…

I watched a youtube video showing off Orlog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rW3jtbsxZk.

Challenge accepted. If you get back to me I'll livestream this on Saturday.

I want to be crystal clear about what I'm claiming

My Claim: AI assistance has effectively eliminated specialized job skills as a barrier. Anyone can now accomplish what previously required domain expertise, in comparable time to what a pre-AI professional would take.

Specifically:

- I've never written a game. I've never used a browser rigid body physics library. Never written a WebGL scene with Three.js before. Zero experience. So I should fail write.

- I think I could recreate the full 3D scene, hand meshes, rigging, materials, lighting - everything you see in that screenshot - using AI assistance

- I'm not going to do ALL of that in a couple hours, because even a professional game developer couldn't do it all from scratch in a couple hours. They would have assets, physics engine, rendering engine, textures, etc all because they were creating Orlog inside a larger game that provides all these affordances.

- But I could do it in the same timeframe a professional would have taken pre-AI

My interpretation of your challenge:

You're claiming that writing the multiplayer networking and state management for a turn-based dice game is beyond what AI can help a -- what you called me "run of the mill coder camp wanna be programmer" -- accomplish in a reasonable timeframe. That even with a simple 2D UI, I lack the fundamental programming skills to write the multiplayer networking code and manage state transitions properly.

So here's what I'll build:

A multiplayer Orlog game with:

- Full game logic implementing all Orlog rules and mechanics

- two players can connect and play together

- observers can join and watch

- game state properly synced managed across clients.

- Real dice physics simulation (because otherwise the game feels boring and unsatisfying - I'll grant you that point). But I'll have a server pick the dice roll values to avoid cheating. (Easiest trick in the book, just run the physics offscreen first, find the face that lands up, remap the textures, replay on screen this time), but use a library for simple rigid body physics engine because you couldn't write one from scratch in 3 hours either.

- Visual approach: Simple 2D/indie game cartoon style UI, with dice rolling in a separate physics area (just compositing dice roll app at bottom of screen, results animate onto 2D board, reality is they are totally separate systems)

What I need from you:

1. Is this the right interpretation? You're claiming the networking/state management is beyond what AI can help me accomplish?

2. Time predictions:

   - How long would a competent game developer take to build what I've described?

   - How long will it take me?
3. At what point do I prove my point? What's the minimum deliverable you'd accept as having completed the challenge?

Are you willing to make concrete, falsifiable predictions about this specific challenge?

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#109

Post by marxism »

unnouinceput wrote: post #107
marxism wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: could you give me an example of code that AI can't help with? I ask because I've worked across different domains: V8 bytecode optimizations, HPC at Sandia (differential equations on 50k nodes, adaptive mesh refinement heuristics), resource allocation and admission control for CI systems, custom network UDP network stack for mobile apps https://neumob.com/ . In every case in my memory, the AI coding tools…

Did you played Assassin's Creed Valhalla? In it there is a board game called Orlog. Go and make that game to be multiplayer so you can play with your spouse/son/friend. Come back to me once you're done and we see then how much time it took you. Or remake the Gwent board game that is in Witcher 3. Make either of that mobile game so you can enjoy in the same room with the person you love. Also make sure you can make mu…

I'm trying to understand where our viewpoints differ, because I suspect we have fundamentally different mental models about where programming difficulty actually lives.

It sounds like you believe the hard part is decomposing problems - breaking them into subproblems, managing the "big picture," keeping the architecture in your head. That this is where experience and skill matter.

My mental model is the opposite: I see problem decomposition as the easy part - that's just reasoning about structure. You just keep peeling the onion until you hit algorithmically irreducible units. The hard part was always at the leaf nodes of that tree.

Why I think decomposition is straightforward:

People switch jobs and industries constantly. You move from one company to another, one domain to another, and you're productive quickly. How is that possible if decomposition requires deep domain expertise?

I think it's because decomposition is just observing how things fit together in reality. The structure reveals itself when you look at the problem.

Where I think the actual skill lived:

The leaf nodes. Not chipping away until you are left with "this is a min-cut problem" - anyone off the street can do that. The hard part was:

- Searching for the right algorithm/approach for your specific constraints

- Translating that solution into your project's specific variables, coordinate system, and bookkeeping

Those two things - search and translation - are precisely what AI excels at.

What I think AI changed:

I could walk into any building on Stanford campus right now, tap a random person (no CS required!) on the shoulder, and they could solve those leaf problems using AI tools. It no longer requires years of experience and learned skills.

I think this explains our different views: If you believe the skill is in decomposition (reasoning about structure), then AI hasn't changed much. But if the skill was always in search and translation at the leaf nodes (my view), then AI has eliminated the core barrier that required job-specific expertise.

Does this capture where we disagree? Am I understanding your position correctly?

Re: Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

#110

Post by unnouinceput »

marxism wrote: post #108
unnouinceput wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you played Assassin's Creed Valhalla? In it there is a board game called Orlog. Go and make that game to be multiplayer so you can play with your spouse/son/friend. Come back to me once you're done and we see then how much time it took you. Or remake the Gwent board game that is in Witcher 3. Make either of that mobile game so you can enjoy in the same room with the person you love. Also make sure you can make mu…

I watched a youtube video showing off Orlog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rW3jtbsxZk . Challenge accepted. If you get back to me I'll livestream this on Saturday. I want to be crystal clear about what I'm claiming My Claim: AI assistance has effectively eliminated specialized job skills as a barrier. Anyone can now accomplish what previously required domain expertise, in comparable time to what a pre-AI profession…

Go ahead and do it. Put the code at your convenience on github. I don't care about your livestream, you can do it whenever. What I want is an app that I can install on my smartphone, Android, and that I can have my son do it as well and we play together. I am giving you a generous one week, should be more than enough for your "AI can do it easier". I did it in a month, and I put like 120 hours during that time. You get close to those 120 hours or over, you fail this "challenge accepted". Have fun.
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