Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 118 posts

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

#51

Post by tpoacher »

Not necessarily an identical thought to OP, but, anecdotally (n=1), my experience teaching the exact same course on Advanced Java Programming for the last 4 years has been that the students seem to be getting more and more cynical, and seem to think of programming as an art or as a noteworthy endeavour in itself less and less. Very few people have actually vocalised the "why do I even need to learn this if I can write a prompt" sentiment out loud, but it has been voiced, and even from those who don't say it there's a very definite 'vibe' that is all but screaming it.

Whereas the vibe in the lecture theatre 4 years ago was far more nerdy and enthusiastic. It makes me feel very sorry for this new generation that they will never get to enjoy the same feeling of satisfaction from solving a hard problem with code you thought and wrote from scratch.

Ironically, I've had to incorporate some AI stuff in my course as a result of needing to remain "current", which almost feels like it validates that cynical sentiment that this soulless way is the way to be doing things now.

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

#52

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Lots of various laments on this tip around here the last while (with mixed responses)

I do not want to be a programmer anymore

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45481490

I Don't Want to Code with LLM's

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332448

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

#53

Post by thom »

No, this is the exact opposite of my experience. I have little interest in the AI's code, it can be very illustrative but I find it ugly, unmaintainable (for either humans or itself after enough iterations) and regularly wrong. But it's so much better than Google at teaching me new things, and helping with the boring bits like debugging stack traces and making random throwaway visualisations. I ask it dumb questions until I'm sure I understand things, in ways I would never burden a co-worker with, or that would be impossible when faced with a narrow blog post. And I'm left to just concentrate on my craft. It doesn't feel too slow to me because there's no point arriving at the destination if I didn't enjoy the journey and turn up with the AI having forgotten to pack any trousers.

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

#54

Post by travisgriggs »

Web Programming has stolen satisfaction from programming. At least for me.

I've coded in win32, XWindows, GTK, UIKit, Logo, Smalltalk, QT, and others since 95. I had various (and sometimes serious) issues with any of these as I worked in them. No other mechanism of helping humans interact with computation has been more frustrating and disappointing than the web. Pointing out how silly it all is (really, I have to use 3 separate languages with different computation models, plus countless frameworks, and that's just on the client side???), never makes me popular with people who have invested huge amounts of time and energy into mastering etheral library idioms or modern "best practices" which will be different next month. And the documentation? Find someone who did a quick blog on it, trying to get their name out there. Good luck.

The fact that an AI is an efficient, but lossy compression of the big pile, to help me churn it faster, it's actually kind of refreshing for me. Any confidence that I was doing the Right Thing in this domain always made me wonder how "imagined" it was. That fact that I have a stochastic parrot with sycophantic confidence to help me hallucinate through it all? That just takes it to 11.

I thought when James Mickens wrote "To Wash It All Away" (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitalla...), maybe someday things would get better. 10 years later, the furniture has moved and changed color some, but its still the same shitty experience.

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

#55

Post by more_corn »

Don’t use AI in the fully automated, big picture dehumanizing way. (It will screw up if you do that and you won’t be able to catch and correct it)

Use it in the precise, augmenting, accelerating way.

Do your own design and architecture (it sucks at that anyway) and use AI to tab complete the work you already thought through and planned.

This can preserve your ability to reason about the project and troubleshoot, improve your productivity while not turning your brain off.

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

#56

Post by gordonhart »

I largely agree. Thinking through the business requirements, hammering out the design, testing against the requirements, and reviewing the code were never the fun parts, but they were usually The job now feels quite different than the one I signed up for a decade+ ago. The only options I see are to accept that with a sigh or reject automation of the fun part and lose employability (worst case) or be nagged by anxiety that eventually that’ll happen.

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

#57

Post by heavyset_go »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #26
themafia wrote: post #10

> That's the labor-saving promise. Where are the labor saving _measurements_? You said it yourself: > You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do. So why are we relying on "promises?" > If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine. And when you're experiencing an emergency and need to fix or patch it this comes back to haunt you. > So all credit flows to the…

> You will almost certainly find large parts of it, verbatim, inside of a github repository or on an authors webpage. AI takes the credit so you don't get blamed for copyright theft. Only if you're doing something trivial or highly common, in which case it's boilerplate that shouldn't be copyrighted. We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java. We already had the "just stochastic parrots" conversat…

> We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java.

"It's boilerplate therefore it isn't IP" isn't the argument that was made by Google, nor is it the argument that the case was decided upon.

It was decided that Google's use of the API met the four determining factors used by courts to ascertain whether use of IP is fair use. The court found that even though it was Oracle's copyrighted IP, it was still fair use to use it in the way Google did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

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

#58

Post by abnercoimbre »

tpoacher wrote: post #51

Not necessarily an identical thought to OP, but, anecdotally (n=1), my experience teaching the exact same course on Advanced Java Programming for the last 4 years has been that the students seem to be getting more and more cynical, and seem to think of programming as an art or as a noteworthy endeavour in itself less and less. Very few people have actually vocalised the "why do I even need to learn this if I can writ…

The OP said coding now feels like:

> import solution from chatgpt

Which reminded me of all the students in classes (and online forums) mocking non-nerds who wanted easy answers to programming problems. It would seem the non-nerds are getting their way now.

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

#60

Post by pakitan »

marxism wrote: post #19
alganet wrote: post #7

Think of it this way: if your problem can be solved by an LLM with the same quality, then it's not a problem worthy of a human to tackle. It probably never was in the first place, we just didn't knew. The only exception here is learning (solving a solved problem so you can internalize it). There are tons of problems that LLMs can't tackle. I chose two of those (polyglot programs, already worked on them before AI) and…

I actually agree with everything you said, and I see I failed to communicate my idea that's exactly why I'm so upset. You said "the only exception here is learning" - and that exception was my hobby . Programming simple things wasn't work for me. It was entertainment. It was what I did for fun on weekends. Reading a blog post about writing a toy database or a parser combinator library and then spending a Saturday aft…

> The feeling that it's "not worthy" has completely drained the joy out of it.

It was never "worthy". With the proliferation of free, quality, open source software, what's now a prompt away, has been a github repo away for a long time. It's just that, before, you chose to ignore the existence of github repos and enjoy your hobby. Now you're choosing to not ignore the AI.

Post reply on HN