Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

AI has stolen my satisfaction from Philosophy. Now there are not the times I need to be sure in my outcomes by the ideological reasons. If I can not persuade LLM my theory is nothing. If I can persuade LLM I use LLM's thesises instead of my own.

How can I chose my political views and preferences if I need to consult about them with LLM?

> The entire premise of AI coding tools is that they automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to be able to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details.

This isn't accurate.

> So I feel pressure to always, always, start by info dumping the problem description to AI and gamble for a one-shot. Voice transcription for 10 minutes, hit send, hope I get something first try, if not hope I can iterate until something works.

These things have planning modes - you can iterate on a plan all you want, make changes when ready, make changes one at a time etc. I don't know if the "pressure" is your own psychological block or you just haven't considered that you can use these tools differently.

Whether it feels satisfying or not - that's a personal thing, some people will like it, some won't. But what you're describing is just not using your tools correctly.

Understanding (of various fields) is the only reason to do programming. I only use "AI" (really, LLMs) for code review, for this very reason.

LLM code is extremely "best practices" or even worse because of what it's trained on. If you're doing anything uncommon, you're going to get bad code.

To be honest the only time I got satisfaction out of programming in the past was when I programmed a really hard algorithm or created a really beautiful design, and the AI doesn't replace me there, it just automates the menial part of the work.

Think of it this way: if your problem can be solved by an LLM with the same quality, then it's not a problem worthy of a human to tackle. It probably never was in the first place, we just didn't knew.

The only exception here is learning (solving a solved problem so you can internalize it).

There are tons of problems that LLMs can't tackle. I chose two of those (polyglot programs, already worked on them before AI) and bootstrapping from source (AI can't even understand what the problem is). The progress I can get on those areas is not improved by using LLMs, and it feels good. I am sure there are many more of such problems out there.

> There's this constant background feeling that whatever I just did, someone else would've done it better and faster.

You're having imposter syndrome-type response to AI's ability to outcode a human.

We don't look at compliers and beat out fists that we can't write in assembly... why expect your human brain to code as easily or quickly as AI?

The problem you are solving now becomes the higher-level problem. You should absolutely be driving the projects and outcomes, but using AI along the way for programming is part of the satisfaction of being able to do so much more as one person.

> That's the labor-saving promise.

Where are the labor saving _measurements_? You said it yourself:

> You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do.

So why are we relying on "promises?"

> If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine.

And when you're experiencing an emergency and need to fix or patch it this comes back to haunt you.

> So all credit flows to the AI by default.

That's the point. Search for some of the code it "generates." You will almost certainly find large parts of it, verbatim, inside of a github repository or on an authors webpage. AI takes the credit so you don't get blamed for copyright theft.

> Am I alone in this?

I find the thing to be an overhyped scam at this point. So, no, not at all.

I'm more thrilled building software now than I have been in my ~35 years programming. I think that means I am satisfied.

I have multiple open source projects, maintaining them and coding fixes for mostly edge case bugs, as I hadnt really added new features, became tedious and I didnt want to maintain them anymore.

AI coding fixed that. Pre-AI I loved using all of the features of an IDE with an intention of speeding up my coding. Now with AI, it's just that much faster.

>The result: Nothing feels satisfying anymore. Every problem I solve by hand feels too slow. Every problem I solve with AI feels like it doesn't count. There's this constant background feeling that whatever I just did, someone else would've done it better and faster.

I've had so much satisfaction since ai coding. Ive had greater satisfaction.

to be honest i still feel satisfied but when it comes to making something useful, in the past i gave up programming because of the endless repetitive tasks, you want to build something cool but wait you first need to make a auth system and by the time you finish that the cool idea is already dead because of how boring and repetitive it all is, ai coding made it fun again

No, it didn't. The way you get your wow moment has changed. You get impressed by your skills in prompting, agentic stuff and your ability to squeeze out the best work from AI, fix its bugs, get it to review and fix your bugs and make the whole collaboration a grand success. That's not easy because now you are expected to deliver 10x output. It's the same hard work, or maybe more hard work.

Interesting, I have yet to feel like AI automates everything.

When I need something to work that hasn't been done before, I absolutely have to craft most of the solution myself, with some minor prompts for more boilerplate things.

I see it as a tool similar to a library. It solves things that are already well known, so I can focus on the interesting new bits.

> The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing

I'd disagree. For me, I direct the AI to implement my plan - it handles the trivia of syntax and boilerplate etc.

I now work kinda at the "unit level" rather than the "syntax level" of old. AI never designs the code for me, more fills in the gaps.

I find this quite satisfying still - I get stuff done but in half the time because it handles all the boring crap - the typing - while I still call the shots.

Hell no. I'm a full-time indie dev now, so maybe I would think differently if I were trading my time for a paycheck instead of working for results with 100% equity. But now I get to tackle features and ideas I've had for years but could never justify taking the time to investigate and attempt, in part because agents are slow enough that I must parallelize them which allows me to test ideas on the side while working on my primary objectives. I still review all code and provide close technical guidance.

I already learned to appreciate working with code from "others" by working in teams and leading teams in a past life. So I don't feel as personally attached to code that comes from my own fingertips anymore, or the need for the value of my work to be expressed that way.

Here is what has changed for me: I spend less time on tedious or solved work, and focus on the interesting parts. If there's some sort of algo that I think the AI could solve cleanly, but I want to refresh my skills, maybe I do that part myself.

Note: I don't vibe-code, or use agents. Just standard Jetbrain IDEs, and a GPT-5-thinking window open for C+P.

Can’t be disappointed if you don’t use it.

I’ve never met so many people that hate programming so much.

You get the same thing with artists. Some product manager executive thinks their ideas are what people value. Automating away the frustration of having to manage skilled workers is costly and annoying. Nobody cares how it was made. They only care about the end result. You’re not an artist if all you had to do was write a prompt.

Every AI-bro rant is about how capital-inefficient humans are. About how fallible we are. About how replaceable we are.

The whole aesthetic has a, “good art vs. bad art,” parallel to it. Where people who think for themselves and write code in service of their work and curiosity are displayed as inferior and unfit. Anyone who is using AI workflows are proper and good. If you are not developing software using this methodology then you are a relic, unfit, unstable, and undesirable.

Of course it’s all predicated in being dependent on a big tech firm, paying subscription fees and tokens to take a gamble at the AI slot machine in hopes that you’ll get a program that works the way you want it to.

Just don’t play the game. Keep writing useless programs by hand. Implement a hash table in C or assembly if you want. Write a parser for a data format you use. Make a Doom clone. Keep learning and having fun. Satisfaction comes from mastery and understanding.

Understanding fundamental algorithms, data structures, and program composition never gets old. We still use algebra today. That stuff is hundreds of years old.

If programming is woodworking, using AI is ikea assembly except they packed most the wrong parts in the box so I have to deal with customer service to go back and forth to get the right parts and the hardware parts don’t always function as intended leaving me to find my own.

It’s a different, less enjoyable, type of work in my opinion.

No. I can prototype in 20 mins things that would have taken me a day before.

I agree completely, you are not alone! I've heard the argument "if you don't like AI just don't use it" but there is this nagging feeling just as you describe. Like the mere existence of AI as a coding tool has sucked all the dopamine out of my brain.

Nope. I have the same dividing line as I had when I was leading development teams:

If this seems interesting to me, and I have time, I will do it.

If it is uninteresting to me, or turns out to be uninteresting, or the schedule does not fit with mine, someone else can do it.

Exactly the same deal with how I use AI in general, not just in coding.

No, it didn't. Or rather it did for run of the mill coder camp wanna be programmer. Like you sound you are one. For me it's the opposite. That's because I don't do run of the mill web pages, my work instead is very specific and the so called "AI" (which is actually just googling with extra spice on top, I don't think I'll see true AI in my lifetime) is too stupid to do it. So I have to break it down into several sessions giving only partial details (divide and conquer) otherwise will confabulate stupid code.

Before this "AI" I had to do the mundane tasks of boilerplate. Now I don't. That's a win for me. The grand thinking and the whole picture of the projects is still mine, and I keep trying to give it to "AI" from time to time, except each time it spits BS. Also it helps that as a freelancer my stuff gets used by my client directly in production (no manager above, that has a group leader, that has a CEO, that has client's IT department, that finally has the client as final user). That's another good feeling. Corporations with layers above layers are the soul sucking of programming joy. Freelancing allowed me to avoid that.

Honestly I'm not sure I ever really got satisfaction from the coding process itself. The output is what I care about. If it's a new and interesting output then it's still your idea. The code not being written by you doesn't detract from that.

Aside from regular arguments and slinging insults at chatgpt, I've been enjoying being able to be way more productive on my personal projects.

I've been using agentic AI to explore ESP32 in Arduino IDE. I'm learning a ton and I'm confident I could write some simpler firmware at this point and I regularly make modifications to the code myself.

But damn if it isn't amazing to have zero clue how to rewrite low level libraries for a little known sensor and within an hour have a working rewrite of the library that works perfectly with the sensor!

I'll say though, this is all hobby stuff. If my day job was professional chatgpt wrangler I think I'd be pretty over it pretty quickly. Though I'm burnt out to hell. So maybe it's best.

It took the satisfaction out of it in the sense that I can no longer be laid to do it.

For side projects no, but I use it at the level that feels like it enhances my workflow and manually write the other bits since I don’t have productivity software tracking if I’m adopting AI hard enough

It’s the opposite for me. I can get so much more of what I want done built quicker, and if I’m not familiar with a framework, it isn’t an issue anymore unless we’re talking about the bleeding edge.

It's draining. I think I've read more synthetic text in the last three years than all text I've ever encountered in life.