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Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
91–100 of 142 posts
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#92Is AI genuinely that good for you all? I can't leave it to its own devices, I have to review everything because (from experience) I don't trust it. I think it's an amazing technological advancement, perhaps will go down as one of the top 10 in the history of our species. But I can't just "fire and forget". And that's not just because its output is often not the best, but also because by doing it myself it causes me t…
> it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong I'm in the same boat: I'm mostly doing C# in Visual Studio (classic) with co-pilot, and it very rarely gives useful code from prompts. Often times the auto-suggestions are hallucinations, and frequently they interfere with "normal" tab completion. I'm wondering if I'm using the wrong tool, or if Visual Studio (classic) co-pilot is just far behind industry norms?
Use it as someone you are working with / talking with. Not as auto complete. You need to reframe your work a bit to have best results interacting w/ llms
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#93Personally, I never really enjoyed coding.
I enjoyed building products and creating value with those products. Coding was just an implementation detail. It wasn’t even the hard part or the real work - the real work was understanding and clarifying business requirements.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a huge red flag that you have no idea what you're doing at the fundamental software architecture level imo. Or at least you have bad process (prior to LLMs). Particularly in the present. If any of the current models can consistently make senior-level decisions I'd like to know which ones they are. They're probably going to cross that boundary soon, but they aren't there yet. They go haywire too often. Anyon…
> They're probably going to cross that boundary soon How? There’s no understanding, just output of highly probable text suggestions which sometimes coincides with correct text suggestions. Correctness exists only in the understanding of humans. In the case of writing to tests there are infinite ways to have green tests and break things anyway.
> How?
The typical approach is to prompt an LLM model with an outline of what the problem is and let it write the code itself by giving it file (+ maybe some other things) access. You could look into software packages like Windsurf (as original post) or the Cline extension for VS Code which are both pretty good at this sort of thing.
They perform at what I'd estimate is a mid programmer's level right now and are rapidly improving in quality.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#95The problem is most software engineers are disconnected from why their work even matters. It's hard to be motivated when you can't see the impact your work has on others and you don't get any recognition for it.
I just wrote a new book about how engineering leadership has to change and this is one of the key problems. https://productdriven.com/book
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#96I can understand why you would feel this way.
As someone that enjoys the problem solving, creativity, learning, and sense of ownership that comes out of building software, I would feel less fulfillment if I hand over everything (or most tasks) to an LLM. It's like being a painter but not painting.
Hence I choose not to do that.
LLMs can be good if used responsibly and when it makes sense. It should not be at the cost of taking away something that matters to you.
I don't know your current situation. Maybe you are doing this at your workplace. Maybe you are under pressure of using LLMs. I get it. But you have a choice.
Now that you have come to this realization, you'll know what to do. Find the right balance.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#97May I suggest stop eating cats and the joy will come back.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#98I've had the opposite experience. Now I can give an LLM my requirements, ask it to create a plan, I'll review the plan, then I have it implement the plan. I have it add test cases before doing a refractor to make sure everything is still covered. I get to be an architect, a product owner. In this way I get to create and not have to worry about implementation too much. I'll just make tweaks with a review. It's been a joy to describe my end state and watch it get built.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#99If you see "programming" as "writing code" then I can see where that joy is lost. If you see "programming" as "creating software" then you can maintain that joy. I would argue the goal has always been to write less code. That has driven the design of programming languages for the past 50 years.
But if you see programming as creating the semantics of software, it's unclear whether being limited to design documents is satisfactory.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#100Technology is about efficiency, and for people to adopt it you need to be 10x more efficient. LLMs took a 15 years process of burning out, and shortened it to 1.5 years.
A lot of this reads like how my Dad reacted to Mobile phones and the internet.
Everything is so fast, no body gets an opportunity to do things slowly and better.