I love coding but I also love AI.

I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there.

You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly.

Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have AI write things we don't understand. But neither has to be the case.

With better tools, we'll be able to do more ambitious things.

Right, just how back in the day, people who loved writing assembly hated high level languages and people who found assembly too tedious loved compilers.

Cant one enjoy both? After all, coding with AI in practice is still coding, just with a far higher intensity.

What if I prefer to have a clone of me doing my coding, and then I throw my clone under the bus and start to (angrily) hyperfocus explore and change every piece to be beautiful? Does this mean I love coding or I hate coding?

It's definitely a personality thing, but that's so much more productive for me, than convincing myself to do all the work from scratch after I had a design.

I guess this means I hate coding, and I only love the dopamine from designing and polishing my work instead of making things work. I'm not sure though, this feels like the opposite of hate coding.

yeah i definitely enjoy the craft and love of writing boilerplate or manually correcting simple errors or looking up functions /s. i hate how it's even divided into "two camps", it's more like a big venn diagram.

I replaced "code" for "singing" to make a point.

> This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love singing and thus hate AI-assisted singing, and people who hate singing and thus love AI-assisted singing.

> Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their singing, are probably the singers who are already outputting the worst singing right now.

The point is: just because you love something, doesn't mean you're good at it. It is of course positively correlated with it. I am in fact a better singer because I love to sing compared to if I never practiced. But I am not a good singer, I am mediocre at best (I chose this example for a reason, I love singing as well as coding! :-D)

And while it is easier to become good at coding than at singing - for professional purposes at least - I believe that the effect still holds.

I started “coding” in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e and by the time I graduated from college, I had experience with 4 different processor families - 65C02, 68K, PPC and x86. I spent the first 15 years of my career programming in C and C++ along with other languages.

Coding is just a means to an end - creating enough business value to convince the company I’m working for to give me money that I can exchange for food and shelter.

If AI can help me do that faster, I’m going to use it. Neither do I want to spend months procuring hardware and managing building out a server room (been there done that) when I can just submit some yaml/HCL and have it done for me in a few minutes.

I like solving problems but I hate coding. Wasting 20 minutes because you forgot a semicolon or something is not fun. AI let's me focus on the problem and not bother with the tedious coding bit.

I love coding and don't love questioning AI and checking responses.

But the simple fact is I'm much more productive with AI and I believe this is likely true for most programmers once they get adjusted.

So for production, what I love the most doesn't really matter, otherwise I'd be growing tomatoes and guiding river rafting expeditions. I'm resigned to the fact the age of manually writing "for loops" is largely over, at least in my case.

Every PR I have to review with an obviously LLM-generated title stuffed with adjectives, and a useless description containing an inaccurate summary of the code changes pushes me a little bit more into trying to make my side projects profitable in the hope that one takes off. It usually only gets worse from there.

Documentation needs to be by humans for humans, it's not a box that's there to be filled with slop.

See my reply to another comment - I don't think the divide is as stark as you claim.

(And I don't enjoy the value judgement)

If devs would learn how to document their work properly then there'd be much less use for AI and more people who enjoyed coding.

>Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding

Alright, please stop using SDK's, google, stackoverflow, any system libraries. You prefer to do it for yourself right?

> Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding

Have we forgotten that we advanced in software by building on the work of others?