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AI made coding more enjoyable

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Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#51

Post by xaviervn »

furyofantares wrote: post #8

I love everything about coding. I love architecting a system, and I love tending all the little details. I love to look at the system as a whole or a block of code in isolation and find nothing I want to change, and take pride in all of it. I also love making products. LLM-agents have made making products, especially small ones, a lot easier, but sacrifice much of the crafting of details and, if the project is small…

Me too, and I'm glad to see that this point keeps being brought up. I noticed that what shapes my satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) about working with AI depends on whether have understanding of what's being built or not.

For a prototype, it's pretty amazing to generate a working app with one or two prompts. But when I get serious about it, it becomes such a chore. The little papercuts start adding up, I lose speed as I deal with them, and the inner workings of the app becomes a foreign entity to me.

It's counterintuitive, but what's helping me enjoy coding is actually going slower with AI. I found out that my productivity gains are not on building faster, but learning faster and in a very targeted way.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#53

Post by CuriouslyC »

matthewkayin wrote: post #30
danielvaughn wrote: post #4

The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil . Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce. edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether…

You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work. Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are. If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of…

You can remove a lot of toil from the writing process without taking away a writer's ability to do line edits. There's a lot of outlining, organization, bookkeeping and continuity work AI automates in the early draft/structural editing process.

Most writers can't even get a first draft of anything done, and labor under the mistaken assumption that a first draft is just a few minor edits away from being the final book. The reality is that a first draft might be 10% of the total time of the book, and you will do many rounds of rereading and major structural revision, then several rounds of line editing. AI is bad at line editing (though it's ok at finding things to nitpick), so even if your first draft and rough structural changes are 100% AI, you have basically a 0% chance of getting published unless you completely re-write it as part of the editing process.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#54

Post by inglor_cz »

I enjoy one specific fact about programming with Claude.

My work often entails tweaking, fixing, extending of some fairly complex products and libraries, and AI will explain various internal mechanisms and logic of those products to me while producing the necessary artifacts.

Sure my resulting understanding is shallow, but shallow precedes deep, and without an AI "tutor", the exploration would be a lot more frustrating and hit-and-miss.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#55

Post by [deleted] »

matthewkayin wrote: post #30
danielvaughn wrote: post #4

The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil . Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce. edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether…

You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work. Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are. If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of…

[deleted]

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#56

Post by slibhb »

munk-a wrote: post #42
slibhb wrote: post #23

AI led to me writing code outside of work for the first time in years. I completed a small project that would've taken me months in a couple weeks. I'm excited to work on more things that I've been curious about for a long time but didn't have the time/energy to focus on.

AI also led me to experiment a bit more. In my case it helped remove the barrier to getting that initial bare-bones skeleton of code in a new environment by helping setting up libraries and a compile chain I was unfamiliar with and then giving me a baseline to build off of. Did you find that AI helped you evenly all the way through the experience or was it more helpful earlier or later on?

It was probably most helpful early on when there was lots of code to write and stuff to configure. Context is an issue as time passes. But it's still quite helpful for tweaking things/adding features later on, as long as I provide it with the necessary context/point it to the right files to read.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#57

Post by antonvs »

matthewkayin wrote: post #30
danielvaughn wrote: post #4

The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil . Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce. edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether…

You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work. Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are. If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of…

I suspect there are different definitions of "toil" being used here.

Google defined "toil" as, very roughly, all the non-coding work that goes into building, deploying, managing a system: https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/ , https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ .

Quote: "Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."

Variations of this definition are widely used.

If we map that onto your writing example, "toil" would be related to tasks like getting the work published, not the writing process itself.

With this definition of toil, you can certainly remove the toil without removing the creative work.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#58

Post by co_king_5 »

zooi wrote: post #10

I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…

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Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#59

Post by [deleted] »

empath75 wrote: post #27
zooi wrote: post #10

I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…

I think you just have to give up ownership of the _code_ and focus on ownership of the _product_.

[deleted]
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