Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

It's draining. I think I've read more synthetic text in the last three years than all text I've ever encountered in life.

Not to suggest that analogies solve anything, but perhaps it adds large-scale context to mention that throughout history various (and frequent!) events of technological disruption have had similar effect upon particular fields of work.

I used to work in land surveying, entering that field around the turn of the millennium just as digitalisation was hitting the industry in a big way. A common feeling among existing journeymen was one of confusion. Fear and dislike of these threatening changes, which seemed to neutralise all the hard-won professional skills. Expertise with the old equipment. Understanding of how to do things closer to first-principles. Ability to draw plans by hand. To assemble the datasets in the complex and particular old ways. And of course, to mentor juniors in the same.

Suddenly, some juniors coming in were young computer whizzes. Speeding past their seniors in these new ways. But still only juniors, for all that - still green, no matter what the tech. With years and decades yet, to earn their stripes, their professionalism in all it's myriad aspects. And for the seniors, their human aptitudes (which got them there in the first place) didn't vanish. They absorbed the changes, stuck with their smart peers, and evolved to match the environment. Would they have rathered that everything in the world had stayed the same as before? Of course. But is that a valid choice, professionally speaking? or in life itself? Not really.

> If I can not persuade LLM my theory is nothing.

It's important to remember, at times like these, that the LLM is not thinking. You can't persuade it of anything; you're looking at a convincing response based on patterns in language.

I had this mindset at first. Then I found that it's fantastic at doing all the grunt work I didn't care for. I'm quite happy now that I've mostly automated away the truly boring stuff, leaving me with more time for the interesting problems.

I still find it’s only useful for writing code you don’t need to understand. I would never vibe code something that I needed to know how it worked.

It’s just going to take time for “best practice” to come around with this. It’s like outsourcing, for a while it seems like a good idea and it might be for very fixed tasks that you don’t really care about, but nobody does it now for important work because of the lack of control and understanding which is exactly where AI will end up. I think for coding tasks you can almost interchangeably use AI and outsourcing and preserve the meaning.