Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
Small confession
I’ve been using Windsurf editor for about six months now, and it does most of the coding work for me.
Recently, I realized I no longer enjoy programming. It feels like I’m just going through the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want, then sitting and waiting for it to finish. If it fails, I just switch to another model—and usually, one of them gets the job done.
At this point, I’ve even stopped reviewing the exact code changes. I just keep pushing forward until the task is done.
On the bright side, I’ve gotten much better at writing design documents.
Anyone else feel the same?
90 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI feel the opposite. I appreciate the ability to iterate and prototype in a way which lowers friction. Sure I have to plan steps out ahead of time, but that's expected with any kind of software architecture. The stimulating part is the design and thought and learning, not digging the ditch.
If you're just firing off prompts all day with no design/input, yea I'm sure that sucks. You might as well "push the big red button" all day.
> If it fails, I just switch to another model—and usually, one of them gets the job done.
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).
"Add a sidebar to the side that tracks where we are in the document".
"Move all elements in area A into a split screen view with those elements at the left hand side and the remaining elements in the right hand side"
The above sort of thing can be painful to do manually. Changing a layout which can have 100's of elements and moving everything across to the new layout structure. Often you can waste a day tweaking it in various ways. LLMs are actually pretty amazing at it since it's a job where you "put old things from one context into a new context" and that's basically what they do. As in AI has saved me some of the biggest pain points and allowed me to focus on the meatier aspects of the code (which it's not so good at).
The majority of what I end up using langle mangles for is trivially verifiable but tedious to do things like "turn this Go struct into an OpenAPI Schema" or "take this protocol buffer definition and write the equivalent in Rust prost".
How is this the future of software engineering?
Sometimes I want to hunt it down and erase the lazy, lying, gas-lighting **** from existence.
Everything is so fast, no body gets an opportunity to do things slowly and better.
I usually start out with good intentions like
1. planning out work
2. crafting really good prompts
3. accepting bare miniumum code changes
4. reviewing and testing code changes
But most 'agentic code tools' are not really well aligned with this philosophy. They are always over eager and do more than what you ask them to. Like if you ask it to change button color, it goes and builds out a color picker .
They sneak in more and more code and vex you with all the extra junk that you slowly stop caring about extra stuff that's being snuk in and the whole thing spirals out of control. Now you are just doing pure vibe coding.
You don't? Sounds to me like you just don't enjoy prompting. Try doing some programming again. Engage your brain with a challenge and try to solve the problem itself not just explain it to an ai and never even look at the code. You enjoy the driving not the destination, getting a taxi there is removing your purpose.
You stopped reviewing the code..? You're not gonna make it.
You still need the visceral feel of writing the code, this builds the mental model in your head.
I've became very lazy. Most tasks, I explain to the LLM, and go browse the web while it computes. More often than not, it fails, and I re-iterate my prompt several times. Eventually, I need to review the changes before submitting it for review, which isn't very fun.
Overall, I feel I'm losing my skills and the competitive advantage I had at my role (I'm a decent coder, but don't care too much about product discussions). The way I'm using the tool right now, I'm pretty sure I'm not more productive.
We'll see how it goes. It's still a pretty new tech and I think I should learn when not to use it and try to have good hygiene with it.
And that's not just because its output is often not the best, but also because by doing it myself it causes me to think deeply about the problem, come up with a better solution that considers edge cases. Furthermore, it gives me knowledge in my head about that project that helps me for the next change.
I see comments here where people seem to have eliminated almost all of their dev work, and it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong.
Maybe it's more of a problem with your job and the tasks you're assigned?
Personally I have found that the sky is now the limit thanks to AI assistants! I was never the best coder out there, probably a median level programmer, but now I can code anything I imagine and it's tons of fun.
Find some creative projects you want to work on and code them up!
Why would you program in a non-joyus way if you're doing it for fun? For professional work I fully get why you'd want to optimize.
This isn't programming. Delete the AI stuff and start programming again. It's fine to use LLM's if you want but nobody is forcing you 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 competent junior developer who's only redeeming skill is the ability to type really, really quickly. I quit the management track some time ago because I hated doing all my software development via the medium of design documents which would then be badly implemented by people who didn't care, there's no way you're going to get me to volunteer for that.
Hits the nail on the head. For an actual junior developer, they'd at least learn over time. With LLM, open up a new chat and you start with a new hire.
I spend most of my time editing these files. It's as if I am training a junior dev.
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.
I can and have lead discovery sessions either virtually or hop on plane and do it in person, design the architecture, be a halfway decent project manager, tech lead, hands on development, take an empty AWS account and set up best practices from a security, networking, deployment pipelines, etc.
But I can’t do it all at once and there is still only so much I can do at once and no business would be happy with the length of time it would take me or any one person to do a complex implementation at scale. At some point, if you have big ideas, you have to lead projects.
However LLMs make a damn good and fast junior developer that can do it all especially on a green field project with clear requirements and the amount of work I can get done now by myself on each of those levels - post requirement gathering is at least 2x - 3x.
And I am not bragging - I’m old. I should be able to do all of things I mentioned.
Code is an implementation detail. My job has always been to get computers to do stuff to either make the computer money or to save the computer money either via my own hands or via leading a team.
This is definitely going to end well.
OP, take some time off and evaluate what you want.
(e.g. did you consider simply not using LLMs to write code and maybe just use them for rubberducking, cross-checking your code and as StackOverflow replacement?)