Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

> I Lost Joy of Programming

I found the joy of making things.

As a technical person who is not a professional programmer, but finds or makes whatever I need, LLMs (Gemini) are dizzyingly powerful.

I've made so many things I never would never have even attempted without it: a change-based timelapse tool, virtual hand-controlled web-based theremin, automated sunrise and sunset webcam timelapse creator, healthy-eating themed shoot'em up, content-based podcast ad removal tool, virtual linescan camera, command line video echo effect, video player progress bar benchmark tool, watermark remover, irregular panoramic photo normalizer, QR code game of live, 3D terrain bike share usage map, movie "barcode" generator, tool to edit video by transcript, webcam-based window parallax effect, hidden-image mosaic generator, and all kinds of other toys I've already lost track of.

I take a hybrid approach. I will describe a simplified problem to the LLM, have it generate a well commented and reasonable approach for the problem. I then use that as a cheat sheet for implementing my actual code. This still gives me hands on codi and more control, without needing to agonize over the details of each coding technique.

I suspect that you never were truly interested in programming otherwise you wouldn't have preferred talking to several LLM models instead of writing code yourself.

Nobody forced you to switch LLM models until eventually one of them solve your problem.

Yea, a little. I think it's fun to see what it can do, but that gets old quick.

The real kick in the nuts is that people don't care about quality. Honestly they never have, but now it's just worse. People see productivity gains and that's literally all that matters. I guess they know they can ship bad stuff and still sell it. Only when retention numbers get bad do they complain - not even think about taking the time to do things proper of course - about it and demand higher quality.

I think there's going to be a high demand for AI slop fixers in the future. Don't get me wrong, it's not that AI itself is incapable, it's that people aren't putting any effort in.

I think we'll push the people who code for enjoyment away and they'll be replaced by people who aren't as senior.

I actually brought back some of the joy of programming for myself by leveraging LLMS

Context. I'm burnt out,doing web software development for business apps for 15 years now and going

I started to get into game development. I started to test out chatGPT and claude to assist and it's been going great. I make so much progress and the results are fun which makes the coding process fun. The LLM covers gaps in my knowledge of math and physics and game dev strategy and architecture. But since I know how to code I can take what it gives and accomplish all kinds of things that would be much more difficult going on my own.