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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?

#91

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

saulpw wrote: post #89
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #74

My satisfaction in programming since I started doing it professionally in 1996 was that companies with money let me exchange some of their money for my labor and I could take that money and then exchange it for goods and services to support my addiction to food and shelter. AI just like IDEs before it makes it easier for me to complete my labor and have money appear in my account. There are literally at least a dozen…

So how come you're here reading and commenting on Hacker News? Is this just down-time at work, or maybe you have some interest in computing technology beyond just the paycheck?

I am not going to ask you to go through my comments. But if you look at my submissions..

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=raw_anon_1111

You’ll see that I’m much more interested in business and industry trends than the technology itself - technology as an enabler to make money

But it’s more about giving my brain a break between exercising and my recent(ish) hobby of learning Spanish. My wife and I are planning to be in Costa Rica (or some other Spanish speaking country in us time zones) six-eight weeks every winter starting next year.

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

#92

Post by saxenaabhi »

mhaberl wrote: post #44

>The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. That’s the promise, but not the reality :) Try this: pick a random startup idea from the internet, something that would normally take 3–6 months to build without AI. Now go all in with AI. Don’t worry about enjoyment; just try to get it done. You’ll notice pretty quickly that it doesn’t get you very far. Some things…

That's not my experience. Over christmas I re wrote a restaurant POS application from laravel to vue/wrangler using bolt + chatgpt. My exact steps:

1) I took my db schema and got chatGPT to convert it to typescript types and stub data.

2) Uploaded these types to bolt and asked it one by one to create vue components to display this data(Catalog screen, Payment Dialogs, Tables page etc) and to use fetcher functions that return stub data.

3) Finally I asked it replace stub data with supabase.rpc calls, and create postgres functions to serve this data.

While I had most of the app done in a few days, testing, styling and adding bug fixing took a month.

Some minor stuff was done manually by me: Receipt printer integration integration because bolt wasn't good at epson xml or related libraries that time.

Finally we released early feb and we received extremely good feedback from our customers.

However now I'm using claude and even higher percentage of code is generated by it now. Our feature velocity is also great. After launch we have added following features in 6m

1) Split Table Payments 2) Payment Terminal Integration 3) Visual Floor plan viewer 4) Mobile POS for waiters without tablet 5) Reports, Dashboard, Import/Export 6) Loyalty programs with many different types of programs 7) Self-service Webshop with realtime group ordering 8) Improved tax handling 9) Multicourse orders("La'suite") 10) Many other smaller features

This would be very hard to achieve without AI for most one-person engineering teams. Although tbf not impossible.

> The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details. That's the labor-saving promise.

I think here the OP introduces a strawman since as many people have pointed out, the labour saving happens in automating menial tasks and no one sane should give up "understanding the details".

> >I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle.

On the contrary. Reading ToyDB[1] source code helped me understand MVCC and Isolation levels. That's knowledge that's valuable for a systems architect since at the end LLMs are just fancy word generators.

[1] https://github.com/erikgrinaker/toydb

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

#93

Post by eimrine »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #35
eimrine wrote: post #2

AI has stolen my satisfaction from Philosophy. Now there are not the times I need to be sure in my outcomes by the ideological reasons. If I can not persuade LLM my theory is nothing. If I can persuade LLM I use LLM's thesises instead of my own. How can I chose my political views and preferences if I need to consult about them with LLM?

> 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.

Well well well, suppose I have noticed that X is a pseudoscience, but most of Xists actively promotes it as a science. So if you ask LLM "is X a science" it tells you "X is a science developed by... using by..." because it just repeats any nonsence.

Then I add "is X a dogma considering..." and the miracle happens! And I never claimed it requires thinking, downvoters.

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

#94

Post by bobbyprograms »

Yes in some ways. But in other ways it makes new magic as it’s so cool to see the things I can build. I’m making a compiler with it and have learned so much that would have taken years otherwise. So it has taught me a lot and I’m better for it at least now.

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

#95

Post by jjav »

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 done. Which of course is how most people get their cabinets built.

But it's not woodworking, for sure. Which for someone who just wants a cabinet, that's cool. But for someone who enjoyed the woodworking part of it, not cool.

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

#96

Post by RamtinJ95 »

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.

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

#97

Post by baq »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #84
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…

I have no idea where this romanticism of software development comes from. I’ve been in the field professionally for 30 years across 10 jobs - everything from startups, to boring old enterprise companies, to small to midsize “lifestyle companies” and BigTech. Most people see the job as a vocation to make money and not a passion. Scott Hanselman talked about “Dark Matter Developers” in 2012. https://www.hanselman.com/b…

the art is in academics and in the hobby space, it was a cool feeling of accomplishment when you finally got something working. LLMs are very helpful here if you use them right - e.g. as a tutor if starting out.

in the business, it was always best to be value and result oriented, which very often has nothing to do with art and composed thought - shipping something that kinda works is priority 1. LLMs can significantly accelerate the already breakneck pace, but you need expertise to keep them in check, and this is where the gap between students and senior swes lies - and it's only getting bigger with every model release.

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

#98

Post by krapp »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #88
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.

Better woodworking analogy: If manual coding is a saw, using agentic AI coding is a table saw. It can make some work faster but there are still things done better with a manual saw. And if you don't learn how to use it well you can lose some fingers.

This analogy doesn't work because with a table saw you still decide where to cut.

The AI picks the wood, decides where and how to cut, and builds the table, and sometimes it decides the square table you told it to build has five legs. But you still call yourself a carpenter either way.

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

#100

Post by 1718627440 »

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.

It is accurate except that they never send all the parts so you need to create some yourself and then most of the sent parts don't fit either, so you end up creating most yourself.
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