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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#201

Post by fartfeatures »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

You could make the same argument about the printing press. Some people like forming the letters by hand, others enjoy actually writing.

Re: Web development is fun again

#202

Post by iamflimflam1 »

freedomben wrote: post #160
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to…

I think, for a lot of people, solving the problem was always the fun part.

There is immense pleasure in a nice piece of code - something that is elegant, clever and simple at the same time.

Grinding out code to get something finished - less fun…

Re: Web development is fun again

#203

Post by master_crab »

jckahn wrote: post #194
bitwize wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.

Alternatively, just use a local model with zero restrictions.

This requires hardware in the tens of thousands of dollars (if we want the tokens spit out at a reasonable pace).

Maybe in 3-5 years this will work on consumer hardware at speed, but not in the immediate term.

Re: Web development is fun again

#204

Post by ori_b »

mentos wrote: post #199
ori_b wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you sit at home wearing boots and looking at photos of mountains. If you want to have boots, that's cool. But is replacing walking with ordering boots and photos making hiking fun again? Or were you only interested in the photos anyway? What part of the process of hiking do you enjoy? And why is it so hard to hear what part of the process of programming people enjoy?

But you’d agree it’s still hiking even if I didn’t tan the leather for the boots myself.

Yes, if you go out and walk. The same way I would agree it was programming if you designed the algorithms yourself.

Re: Web development is fun again

#206

Post by neals »

What are we all using as assistants? I tend to copy-paste my code into Gemini. I tried some VS-code assistants, but I can't get them to do the thing I want (like look at selected text or only do small things)...

Re: Web development is fun again

#207

Post by beginnings »

13415 wrote: post #170

I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to "vibe code" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun.

its also trading one problem for another. when manually coding you understand with little mental effort what you want to achieve, the nuances and constraints, how something interacts with other moving parts, and your problem is implementing the solution

when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly. its a different kind of work, but its still work, and its more annoying and less rewarding than just implementing the solution yourself

Re: Web development is fun again

#209

Post by arjie »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

Re: Web development is fun again

#210

Post by djaouen »

Web development is perhaps "fun" again if you consider PHP 4 and jQuery as "fun". A "problem" arises for those of us who prefer Ruby, Rails, and HotWire.

I'm not gonna lie, I use AI every day (in the form of Grammarly). But LLMs and so-called "agents" are less valuable to me, even if they would help me to produce more "output".

It will be interesting to me to discover the outcome of this bifurcation!

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