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AI made coding more enjoyable
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Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#22The creative vs toil split resonates, but I think there's a third category everyone misses: the connective tissue. The glue code, the error handling, the edge cases that aren't creative but teach you how things actually break.
I run 17 products as an indie maker. AI absolutely helps me ship faster — I can prototype in hours what used to take days. But the understanding gap is real. I've caught myself debugging AI-generated code where I didn't fully grok the failure mode because I didn't write the happy path.
My compromise: I let AI handle the first pass on boilerplate, but I manually write anything that touches money, auth, or data integrity. Those are the places where understanding isn't optional.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#23AI 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.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#24I 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 gain comprehension through the authoring process. I've always been weaker on the side of reviewing and only really gained an understanding of new tooling added by coworkers when I get to dig in and try to use it. This is absolutely a learning style thing and I have ADHD and have known since high-school that I am more engaged in the practical and have trouble with dry lecture style teaching - I have even excelled in pretty abstract and theoretical fields but it takes trying to work through problem solving, even if those problems are abstract and hard to mechanically represent.
So I am in the same boat, AI can write some good skeleton code for different purposes so I can get running faster but with anything complex and established it serves very little benefit. I'll end up spending more time trying to understand why and how it is doing something then I'd spend just doing it myself. When AI is a magical fix button that's awesome, but even in those circumstances I'm just buying LLM-debt - if I never need to touch that code again it's fine, but if I need to revise the code then I'll need to invest more time into understanding it and cleaning it up then I initially saved.
I'm not certain how much other folks are feeling this or if it's just me and the way my brain works, but I struggle to see the great savings outside of dead simple tasks.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#25I feel the same way. > That includes code outside of the happy path, like error handling and input validation. But also other typing exercises like processing an entity with 10 different types, where each type must be handled separately. Or propagating one property through the system on 5 different types in multiple layers. With AI, I feel I'm less caught up in the minutia of programming and have more cognitive space…
> explore new approaches and connect ideas faster This is the hidden super power of LLM - prototyping without attachment to the outcome. Ten years ago, if you wanted to explore a major architectural decision, you would be bogged down for weeks in meetings convincing others, then a few more weeks making it happen. Then if it didn't work out, it feels like failure and everyone gets frustrated. Now it's assumed you can…
That's only because no one understood agile or XP and they've become a "no one actually does that stuff" joke to many. I have first hand experience with prototyping full features in a day or two and throwing the result away. It comes with the added benefit of getting your hands dirty and being able to make more informed decisions when doing the actual implementation. It has always been possible, just most people didn't want to do it.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#26I suppose, in exactly the same way instant / frozen food makes cooking more enjoyable. If it was just a chore that you had to do, and now it's faster, sure, grab that cup-o-noodles. Knock yourself out.
Just don't expect to run a successful restaurant based on it.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#27I 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_.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#28AI made coding really enjoyable for me, for a subset of projects: Projects that I want, but don't really care about the design/implementation, or projects that has a lot of fiddly one-off configurations where it doesn't make sense to tuck in and learn all about the system if it is mostly set-it-and-forget-it. A lot of my home automation/home systems are now fully implemented by AI, because I don't really care how performant it is, or integrating all the various components, and it is very straight forward to tell if it works or if it doesn't work.
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#29I 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…
My favourite code to write used to be small clean methods perhaps containing ~20 lines of logic. And I agree, it's fun coming up with ways to test that logic and seeing it pass those tests.
I'm not sure I'll ever write this kind of code again now. For months now all I've done is think about the higher level architectural decisions and prompt agents to write the actual code, which I find enjoyable, but architectural decisions are less clean and therefore for me less enjoyable. There's often a very clear good and bad way to right a method, but how you organise things at a higher level is much less binary. I rarely ever get that, "yeah, I've done a really good job there" feeling when making higher level decisions, but more of "eh, I think this is probably a good solution/compromise, given the requirements".
Re: AI made coding more enjoyable
#30The 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 the program when you outsource those things to an agent. (And I would say, you sacrifice some quality as well).