Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming? • Hacker News Board

rayxi271828 wrote: post #14

It’s quite the opposite for me. The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param” It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make” It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frame…

Strong agree. I've been making more progress on my passion project in the last few weeks than I have in a year, because it helped me break out of analysis paralysis.

I'm really, really, loving the agentic flow, where it digs itself out of syntax errors and the like.

Current tools: Visual Studio Code/GitHub ChatGPT5(Preview)

Re: Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?

#45

Post by ksherlock » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

Nah. Did modern porn make you lose interest in bumping uglies?

Re: Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?

#46

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?

#47

Post by arman_nocapro » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

This is exactly my experience. AI tools have completely transformed my relationship with code.

On one hand, they've eliminated the boilerplate I've hated for years. No more googling obscure syntax or writing the same utility functions for the nth time. There's a real joy in focusing purely on the creative aspects again.

But there's a catch. My role has shifted from writing code to managing the AI. It's like being the manager of a brilliant intern with zero memory. My day is now this constant cycle:

1. Crafting the perfect context window to prevent hallucinations 2. Engineering the right prompt 3. Context switching while waiting for responses 4. Painstakingly reviewing the output for subtle but critical errors

So has it killed my interest in programming? Partially. The craftsman's satisfaction of writing code has diminished. But it's sparked a new obsession: building better tooling. How do we reduce this cognitive load? How do we make AI-assisted development more structured and less chaotic?

I'm wondering if others feel the same - has your passion just moved up the abstraction stack like mine has?