Typing is not fun. It robs me of my craft of holding my pencil and feeling it press against the paper with my hand... LLMs are merely a tool to achieve a similar end result. The different aspects of software development are an art. But even with LLMS, I critique and care about the code just as much as if I were writing it line by line myself. I have had more FUN being able to get all of my ideas on paper with LLMs than I have had over years of banging my head against a keyboard going down the rabbit hole on production bugs.
I find posts like this very brave and courageous, and it makes me feel a lot of respect for the author and their personal integrity.
There's currently an enormous pressure on developers to pay lip service to loving AI tools. Expressing a differing opinion easily gets someone piled on for being outdated or not understanding things, from people who sometimes mainly do it to virtue-signal and perform their own branding exercise.
Open self-expression takes guts, and is hard to substitute for with AI assistance.
> For me, the joy of programming is understanding a problem in full depth, so that when considering a change, I can follow the ripples through the connected components of the system.
>The joy of management is seeing my colleagues learn and excel, carving their own paths as they grow. Watching them rise to new challenges. As they grow, I learn from their growth; mentoring benefits the mentor alongside the mentee.
I fail to grasp how using LLMs precludes either of these things. If anything, doing so allows me to more quickly navigate and understand codebases. I can immediately ask questions or check my assumptions against anything I encounter.
Likewise, I don’t find myself doing less mentorship, but focusing that on higher-level guidance. It’s great that, for example, I can tell a junior to use Claude to explore X,Y, or Z design pattern and they can get their own questions answered beyond the limited scope of my time. I remember seniors being dicks to me in my early career because they were overworked or thought my questions were beneath them. Now, no one really has to encounter stuff like that if they don’t want to.
I’m not even the most AI-pilled person I know or on my team, but it just seems so staggeringly obvious how much of a force multiplier this stuff has become over the last 3-6 months.
If you understand their limitations, they are quite helpful and fun already. If you expect what the tech bros who can't code anything(tm) say they are, not so much. But I do expect them to improve because the market opportunity for getting anywhere close to the grandiose hype is huge. What isn't fun is the clueless C-suite force feeding them down the chain in hopes of a Hail Mary Pass to profits.
Edit: I know, I know, blink 3 times to signal SOS. I clearly only wrote the above under duress and threats from my managers. There's simply nothing fun about interacting with an entity that would be the stuff of science fiction just 5 years ago, no sir!
How people derive utility from programming varies from person to person and I suspect is the root cause of most AI generation pipeline debates, creative and code-wise. There are two camps that are surprisingly mutually exclusive:
a) People who gain value from the process of creating content.
b) People who gain value from the end result itself.
I personally am more of a (b): I did my time learning how to create things with code, but when I create things such as open-source software that people depend on, my personal satisfaction from the process of developing is less relevant. Getting frustrated with code configuration and writing boilerplate code is not personally gratifying.
Recently, I have been experimenting more with Claude Code and 4.5 Opus and have had substantially more fun creating utterly bizarre projects that I suspect would have more frustration than fun implementing the normal way. It does still require brainpower to QA, identify problems, and identify potential fixes: it's not all vibes. The code quality, despite intuition, has no issues or bad code smells that is expected of LLM-generated code and with my approach actually runs substantially more performantly. (I'll do a full writeup at some point)
LLMs are great if you don't care about every little detail being correct nor having control of how everything works so that you can change it whenever the situation warrants it.
Turns out that a lot of code is fine with this. Some parts of the industry still have more stringent standards however.
Ultimately capitalism doesn't care if a job is fun or not. The vast majority aren't I've realized. It's an odd bit of coincidence that coding with flow is hugely enjoyable but it seems like that amazing job at this rate will be a momentary bit of history where profit making and fun had a non zero intersection for a strange reason.
There's a version of this that's about control vs. collaboration. Compilers do what you say. Teammates grow with you. LLMs do neither. They're confident strangers who (sometimes) get it right. That's a new category of relationship, and maybe we don't have the emotional toolkit for it yet?
LLM enable me to extend the limited number of my individual thoughts. Sometimes they help me connect the dots faster. The only condition is: I do the main job. The final choice is always mine. I never let LLM be a blackbox independent agent.
I have been programming for over 30 years now, and I have been re-energized by using LLMs for programming. I am having SO MUCH FUN building things with AI.
For me, the fun part of programming is having the freedom to get my computer to do whatever I want. If I can't find a tool to do something, I can write it myself! That has been a magical feeling since I first discovered it all those years ago.
LLMs gives me the ability to do even more things I want, faster. I can conceptualize what I want to create, I can specify the details as much as I want, and then use an LLM to make it happen.
It is truly magical. I feel like I am programming in Star Trek, with the computer as an ally instead of as the a receptacle for my code.
I have become a general and a master of multitude of skeleton agents. my attention to the realm of managing effectively the unreproducible result of running the same incantations.
As the sailor through the waters of the coastline he have roamed plenty of times, the currents are there, yet the waves are new everyday.
Whatever limitation is removed, I should approach the market and test my creations swiftly and enrich myself, before the first legion of lich kings appear. they, better masters than I would ever be.
I see post after post like this on different parts of the web. What is always clear to me is these authors feel threatened, put too much of their personal identity and self-esteem into knowing the "secret tongue" of the machines. Generally are introverted and write software for themselves and people like them, not for normal folks.
People like this have a great deal to personally lose from LLMs. It makes them substantially less "special". Or so they think, but it is actually not true at all.
I think some of them resent having to level up again to stay relevant. Like when video games add more levels to a game you though you already beat. Fair enough, but such is life and natural competition.
When they come at LLMs with this attitude (gritting their teeth while prompting) it is no wonder they are grossly offended and disgusted by its outputs.
I've been tempted at times to hold these attitudes myself but my approach for now is to see how much I can learn about this tool and use it for as much as I can while tokens are subsidized. Either it all pops with the bubble or I have gained new, marketable skills. And no your hand coding skills don't just evaporate. In fact, I now I have a new found love of hand coding as a hobby since that part of my brain is no longer used up by the end of the day with coding tasks for Work.
I was recently talking to a colleague I went to school with and they said the same thing, but for a different reason. We both did grad studies with a focus on ML, and at the time ML as a field seemed to be moving so fast. There was a lot of excitement around AI again finally after the 'AI winter'. It was easy to participate in bringing something new to the field, and there was so many unique and interesting models coming about every day. There was genuine discussion about a viable path to AGI.
Now, basically every new "AI" feature feels like a hack on top of yet another LLM. And sure the LLMs seem to keep getting marginally better, but the only people with the resources to actually work on new ones anymore are large corporate labs that hide their results behind corporate facades and give us mere mortals an API at best. The days of coding a unique ML algorithm for a domain specific problem are pretty much gone -- the only thing people pay attention to is shoving your domain specific problem into an LLM-shaped box. Even the original "AI godfathers" seem mostly disinterested in LLMs these days, and most people in ML seem dubious that simply scaling up LLMs more and more will be a likely path to AGI.
It seems like there's more excitement around AI for the average person, which is probably a good thing I suppose, but for a lot of people that were into the field they're not really that fun anymore.
In terms of programming, I think they can be pretty fun for side projects. The sort of thing you wouldn't have had time to do otherwise. For the sort of thing you know you need to do anyway and need to do well, I notice that senior engineers spend more time babysitting them than benefitting from them. LLMs are good at the mechanics of code and struggle with the architecture / design / big picture. Seniors don't really think much about the mechanics of code, it's almost second nature, so they don't seem to benefit as much there. Juniors seem to get a lot more benefit because the mechanics of the code can be a struggle for them.
> For me, the joy of programming is understanding a problem in full depth, so that when considering a change, I can follow the ripples through the connected components of the system … using LLMs undercuts [that]
If you’re letting the LLM do things you aren’t spending the time to understand in depth, you are shirking your professional responsibilities
100% this! The main fun in development for me is typing and getting something to run, and seeing the feature finally work after figuring out how to get to it. The finished product is almost irrelevant to that. LLMs steal that feeling of achievement, like rushing through a book of sudoku with a solver.
I strongly agree with the author to be honest. I can see the various perspectives in the comments here. In my view, some people care about shipping products (i.e, seeing their idea come to life). Some people enjoy solving the problems more than the shipping.
I'm in the second camp, and I think the author is as well. For those of us, LLMs are kind of boring.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not saying LLMs are 'bad'. I'm not saying they are not useful. But to me personally they take out the fun parts from my profession.
My role changes from coming up with solutions to babysitting a robotic intern. Not 100% of course. And of course an agent can be useful like 'intellisense on steroids'. Or an assistant who 'ripgreps' for me. There are advantages for sure. But for me the advantages don't match the disadvantages. LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself.
I'm only half convinced the LLMs will become as important to coding as they seem . And I'm hoping a sane balance will emerge at the other end of the hype. But if it goes where OpenAI etc. want it to go I think I'll have to re-school to become an electrician or something...
51 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 56.5 ms ] threadBut, if you are in a work situation where LLM's are forced upon you in very high doses, then yes -- I understand the feeling.
There's currently an enormous pressure on developers to pay lip service to loving AI tools. Expressing a differing opinion easily gets someone piled on for being outdated or not understanding things, from people who sometimes mainly do it to virtue-signal and perform their own branding exercise.
Open self-expression takes guts, and is hard to substitute for with AI assistance.
>The joy of management is seeing my colleagues learn and excel, carving their own paths as they grow. Watching them rise to new challenges. As they grow, I learn from their growth; mentoring benefits the mentor alongside the mentee.
I fail to grasp how using LLMs precludes either of these things. If anything, doing so allows me to more quickly navigate and understand codebases. I can immediately ask questions or check my assumptions against anything I encounter.
Likewise, I don’t find myself doing less mentorship, but focusing that on higher-level guidance. It’s great that, for example, I can tell a junior to use Claude to explore X,Y, or Z design pattern and they can get their own questions answered beyond the limited scope of my time. I remember seniors being dicks to me in my early career because they were overworked or thought my questions were beneath them. Now, no one really has to encounter stuff like that if they don’t want to.
I’m not even the most AI-pilled person I know or on my team, but it just seems so staggeringly obvious how much of a force multiplier this stuff has become over the last 3-6 months.
Edit: I know, I know, blink 3 times to signal SOS. I clearly only wrote the above under duress and threats from my managers. There's simply nothing fun about interacting with an entity that would be the stuff of science fiction just 5 years ago, no sir!
a) People who gain value from the process of creating content.
b) People who gain value from the end result itself.
I personally am more of a (b): I did my time learning how to create things with code, but when I create things such as open-source software that people depend on, my personal satisfaction from the process of developing is less relevant. Getting frustrated with code configuration and writing boilerplate code is not personally gratifying.
Recently, I have been experimenting more with Claude Code and 4.5 Opus and have had substantially more fun creating utterly bizarre projects that I suspect would have more frustration than fun implementing the normal way. It does still require brainpower to QA, identify problems, and identify potential fixes: it's not all vibes. The code quality, despite intuition, has no issues or bad code smells that is expected of LLM-generated code and with my approach actually runs substantially more performantly. (I'll do a full writeup at some point)
Turns out that a lot of code is fine with this. Some parts of the industry still have more stringent standards however.
For me, the fun part of programming is having the freedom to get my computer to do whatever I want. If I can't find a tool to do something, I can write it myself! That has been a magical feeling since I first discovered it all those years ago.
LLMs gives me the ability to do even more things I want, faster. I can conceptualize what I want to create, I can specify the details as much as I want, and then use an LLM to make it happen.
It is truly magical. I feel like I am programming in Star Trek, with the computer as an ally instead of as the a receptacle for my code.
I have become a general and a master of multitude of skeleton agents. my attention to the realm of managing effectively the unreproducible result of running the same incantations.
As the sailor through the waters of the coastline he have roamed plenty of times, the currents are there, yet the waves are new everyday.
Whatever limitation is removed, I should approach the market and test my creations swiftly and enrich myself, before the first legion of lich kings appear. they, better masters than I would ever be.
People like this have a great deal to personally lose from LLMs. It makes them substantially less "special". Or so they think, but it is actually not true at all.
I think some of them resent having to level up again to stay relevant. Like when video games add more levels to a game you though you already beat. Fair enough, but such is life and natural competition.
When they come at LLMs with this attitude (gritting their teeth while prompting) it is no wonder they are grossly offended and disgusted by its outputs.
I've been tempted at times to hold these attitudes myself but my approach for now is to see how much I can learn about this tool and use it for as much as I can while tokens are subsidized. Either it all pops with the bubble or I have gained new, marketable skills. And no your hand coding skills don't just evaporate. In fact, I now I have a new found love of hand coding as a hobby since that part of my brain is no longer used up by the end of the day with coding tasks for Work.
Absolutely disagree. I use LLM to speed up the process and ONLY accept code that I would write myself.
Now, basically every new "AI" feature feels like a hack on top of yet another LLM. And sure the LLMs seem to keep getting marginally better, but the only people with the resources to actually work on new ones anymore are large corporate labs that hide their results behind corporate facades and give us mere mortals an API at best. The days of coding a unique ML algorithm for a domain specific problem are pretty much gone -- the only thing people pay attention to is shoving your domain specific problem into an LLM-shaped box. Even the original "AI godfathers" seem mostly disinterested in LLMs these days, and most people in ML seem dubious that simply scaling up LLMs more and more will be a likely path to AGI.
It seems like there's more excitement around AI for the average person, which is probably a good thing I suppose, but for a lot of people that were into the field they're not really that fun anymore.
In terms of programming, I think they can be pretty fun for side projects. The sort of thing you wouldn't have had time to do otherwise. For the sort of thing you know you need to do anyway and need to do well, I notice that senior engineers spend more time babysitting them than benefitting from them. LLMs are good at the mechanics of code and struggle with the architecture / design / big picture. Seniors don't really think much about the mechanics of code, it's almost second nature, so they don't seem to benefit as much there. Juniors seem to get a lot more benefit because the mechanics of the code can be a struggle for them.
If you’re letting the LLM do things you aren’t spending the time to understand in depth, you are shirking your professional responsibilities
I'm in the second camp, and I think the author is as well. For those of us, LLMs are kind of boring.
My role changes from coming up with solutions to babysitting a robotic intern. Not 100% of course. And of course an agent can be useful like 'intellisense on steroids'. Or an assistant who 'ripgreps' for me. There are advantages for sure. But for me the advantages don't match the disadvantages. LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself.
I'm only half convinced the LLMs will become as important to coding as they seem . And I'm hoping a sane balance will emerge at the other end of the hype. But if it goes where OpenAI etc. want it to go I think I'll have to re-school to become an electrician or something...