I fully concur, we've automated away the enjoyable and creative part of the job. I used Windsurf for a project recently, and while it was impressive, I don't feel I was notably more efficient at delivery. I often had to intercede to refactor what it had churned out to make the solution legible.
My takeaway was that AI coding is a fairly joyless experience, you're effectively writing JIRA tickets for it, and the labour switches to coaching and PRs. It feels like we're just accelerating the speed at which we build legacy code bases, which no-one will understand.
Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
111–120 of 142 posts
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#112Technology 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.
Cal Newport's book Deep Work gives excellent insights on how to break out of this pressure.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#113I think the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want is what's kept me from using AI at all so far
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#114Is 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…
What you’re doing wrong is you’re working on complex stuff.
I would love someone to do some research on attitudes towards how self-driving AI is, compared to factors like:
- Type of dev work (infra, frontend, backend, etc)
- Programming language
- Level of experience
- Quality expectations of project/work environment
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#115Funny enough, I’ve had the opposite experience. Using LLMs made me enjoy programming more. I spend less time on boilerplate and chasing down syntax quirks, and more time thinking about the bigger picture, what the system should do, how it should scale, where it might break.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#116Have you considered not doing that? It's not obligatory to have an LLM shit out unreviewed code for you, you're making a choice to do that, and you can make a choice not to. Review the code. Hell, maybe even write some code yourself. What you're describing is how I feel whenever I use an LLM for anything more than the most basic of tasks. I've gone from being a senior level software developer to managing a barely com…
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'll often get it to write failing tests for me and write the actual code myself.
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#117Maybe 20 years ago I read a book on Henrietta Leavitt who was a 'computer' in the 19th Century. Her and many other women did (mostly hand) calculations for a living. She analyzed photographic plates of stars. She discovered Cepheid stars. After I read that I thought 'Holy Shit'. That's what I do for a living - the moral equivalent of long division by hand on 20 digit numbers all day long - and someday this is going to be automated. People will one day say - I can't believe people coded by hand for living - how tedious. I just didn't think it would happen so fast.
That said, I have loved writing software for 40 years, but I too have lost some joy. I am retired now and am having trouble finding joy in my personal projects. I use the LLM's to write functions for me and I do the rest (and I like not having to deal with minutia any more - but one time I loved taking apart binary files by hand and getting paid well).
I liken it to too many choices. If you have 2 cars to choose from, you can feel good about your choice. But from 40, you are always saying, Hmmm, maybe I should have gotten that 17th choice instead of the 26th.
Back then. A C compiler, a linker, a manual and a couple books. Get to work. Create something by your own hand.
Now when I find the right project, usually music related, and it get's under my skin, I get those old vibes and I love it.
I guess I'm glad I'm out of the rat race - but in all honesty - I little envious too of the younger gen who embrace the new tech. Yea - I wish I had it back then!
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#118First, I get it.
Second, you can look at it differently.
AI is going to do most of the coding in a very short time. That's a fact. The opportunities are going to come to those who know how to prompt the AI and hold it accountable.
So yes, you're no longer going to be the hero for the code you type out.
But you CAN be the hero for being the Senior Developer or Project Manager who know what needs to be done and knows how to get the AI to do it right the first time.
I actually got out of coding a number of years ago because I was tired of keeping up with the latest changes in languages, standards, best practices, etc.
When AI became a thing over the past couple of years, I decided to try again ... and I'm actually enjoying it a whole lot more. I make a lot more progress a lot faster, which means I get to see faster results.
You can't control the direction that coding is going. It will go where it goes. But you can control how you think and feel about it. So what choice will you make?
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#119[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
#120Have you considered not doing that? It's not obligatory to have an LLM shit out unreviewed code for you, you're making a choice to do that, and you can make a choice not to. Review the code. Hell, maybe even write some code yourself. What you're describing is how I feel whenever I use an LLM for anything more than the most basic of tasks. I've gone from being a senior level software developer to managing a barely com…
"who's only redeeming skill is the ability to type really, really quickly" This really resonates. Here’s the hard truth: AI coding assistants are like giving devs a faster keyboard. Sure, they type faster—but typing was never the bottleneck.
And while AI often produces high-quality code on the surface, when things go wrong, they take longer to fix. MTTR for AI-generated code is much higher, especially when devs don’t fully grok the code they accepted. That undercuts a lot of the perceived velocity gains, especially in complex, evolving systems.