alt Hacker NewsThe feeling of dissatisfaction is something I can relate to. My story:
I only recently started using aider[1].
My experience with it can be described in 3 words.
Wow!
Oh wow!
It was amazing. I was writing a throwaway script for one time use (not for work). It wrote it for me in under 15 minutes (this includes my time getting familiar with the tool!) No bugs.
So I decided to see how far I could take it. I added command line arguments, logging, and a whole bunch of other things. After a full hour, I had a production ready script - complete with logs, etc. I had to debug code only once.
I may write high quality code for work, but for personal throwaway scripts, I'm sloppy. I would not put a command line parser, nor any logging. This did it all for me for very cheap!
There's no going back. For simple scripts like this, I will definitely use aider.
And yeah, there was definitely no satisfaction one would derive from coding. It was truly addictive. I want to use it more and more. And no matter how much I use it and like the results, it doesn't scratch my programmer's itch. It's nowhere near the fun/satisfaction of SW development.
I tried Aider recently to modify a quite small python + HTML project, and it consistently got "uv" commands wrong, ended up changing my entire build system because it didn't think the thing I wanted to do was supported in the current one (it was).
They're very effective at making changes for the most part, but boy you need to keep them on a leash if you care about what those changes are.