> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun.

Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time.

I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast without it and enjoy the process this author callously calls "wrestling with computers."

Of course this isn't going to help with the whole "making me fast at things I don't know" but that's another can of worms.

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.

I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer”

Indeed, of all the possible things to say!

AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

Fun is a feeling, so one can't really have an argument that something is fun or not - that would be a category error no?

You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name.

I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference in our present moment, of course, is that the "assistants" are mechanical ones.

(as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then also, I don't enjoy writing grunt code / boilerplate etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, - and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun

AI is more fun for programmers that should've gone into management instead, and prefer having to explain things in painstaking detail in text, rather than use code. In other words, AI is for people that don't like programming that much.

Why would you even automate the most fun part of this job? As a freelance consultant, I'd rather have a machine to automate the whole boring business side so I could just sit in front of my computer and write stuff with my own hands.

->...it's commissioning.

I like this. I'm going to see if my boss will go for me changing my title from Solutions Architect to Solutions Commissioner. I'll insist people refer to me as "Commissioner ajcp"

Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.

Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.

I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

If you have to work in a language or framework with a lot of arbitrary-seeming features, ugly or opaque translation layers, or a lot of boiler-plate, then I absolutely understand the sentiment.

Programming a system at a low-level from scratch is fun. Getting CSS to look right under a bunch of edge cases - I won't judge that programmer too harshly for consulting the text machine.

This is especially true considering it's these shallow but trivia-dominated tasks which are the least fun and also which LLMs are the most effective at accomplishing.

It’s more like saying you love painting, but you’re glad you no longer have to hike into the wilderness, crush minerals, boil oils, and invent pigments from scratch before you can put brush to canvas.

I don't care about technology for what it is. I care about it for what it can do. If I can achieve what I want by just using plain English, I'm going to achieve what I want faster and more thoroughly enjoy the process. Just my two cents.

And the thing I don't get about how excited people are is that if what LLMs really do is change software development from coding to code review, which is the part of software development that is universally hated.

People have given most of the answers, but here's another one: At work, when I write code, I spend a lot of time designing it, making good interfaces, good tests, etc. It gave me joy to carefully craft it.

At home, I never had the time/will to be as thorough. Too many other things to do in life. Pre-LLMs, most of my personal scripts are just - messy.

One of the nice things with LLM assisted coding is that it almost always:

1. Gives my program a nice interface/UI

2. Puts good print/log statements

3. Writes tests (although this is a hit or miss).

Most of the time it does it without being asked.

And it turns out, these are motivation multipliers. When developing something, if it gives me good logs, and has a good UI, I'm more likely to spend time developing it further. Hence, coding is now more joyful.

And it turns out, these tend to

There are some things that I think become more fun, like dealing with anything you don't actually find interesting. I recently made a quick little web app and I hand-coded the core logic since I find that part fun. But I vibe-coded the front-end, especially the CSS, because I just don't find that stuff very interesting and I'm less picky about the visuals. Letting the AI just do the boring parts for me made the overall project more fun I think.

I love building things with computers. I'm not particularly interested in the coding.

I've coded professionally for 30 years (ergh!). I'm ok at it.

But I love building things with AI. I haven't had this much fun since the early 2000s.

But it’s not really an argument, it’s a statement about feelings. Some people really do prefer coding with AI. Is that so strange? Often we’ve spent 1 or 2 decades writing code and in our day jobs we don’t see a lot of novel problems come our way at the level of the code anymore (architecture, sure, still often novel). We’ve seen N number of variations on the same thing; we are good at doing them but get little joy in doing them for the N + 1th time. We find typing out api serializers and for loops and function definitions and yaml boilerplate just a little boring, if we already have a picture in our head of what we want to do. And we like being able to build faster and ship to our users without spending hours and extra brain cycles dealing with low-level complexity that could be avoided.

I am happy to accept that some people still prefer to write out their code by hand… that’s ok? Keep doing it if you want! But I would gently suggest you ask yourself why you are so offended by people that would prefer to automate much of that, because you seem to be offended. Or am I misreading?

And hey, I still enjoy solving interesting problems with code. I did advent of code this year with no LLM assistance and it was great fun. But most professional software development doesn’t have that novelty value where you get to think about algorithms and combinatorical puzzles and graphs and so on.

Before anyone says it, sure, there is a discussion to be had about AI code quality and the negative effects of all this. A bad engineer can use it to ship slop to production. Nobody is denying that. But I think that’s a separate set of questions.

Finally, I’m not sure painting is the best analogy. Most of us are not creating works of high art here. It’s a job, to make things for people to use, more akin to building houses than painting the Sistine Chapel. Please don’t sneer at use if we enjoy finding ways to put up our drywall quicker.

Who's actually coding?

You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart.

Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation?

Most of the time it's wasting time learning some bs framework or implementing some other poorly designed system that some engineer that no longer works at the company created. In fact the entire industry is basically just one poorly designed system with technological debt that grows increasingly burdensome year by year.

It's very rarely about actual programming or actual computation or even "engineering". But usually just one giant kludge pile.

I have been developing for 30 years professionally and 10 years before that as a hobbyist or in school

Development is solely to exchange labor for money.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since 1992. I did it for my degree between 1992-1996 while having fun in college and after that depending on my stage in life, dating, hanging out with friends, teaching fitness classes and doing monthly charity races with friends, spending time with my wife and (step)kids, and now enjoying traveling with my wife and friends, and still exercising

I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end.

It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful.

Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!

One can have fun with all manner of things. Take wood-working for example. One can have fun with a handsaw. One can also have fun with a table saw. They're both fun, just different kinds

What part of making a movie is fun? Acting, costumes, sets, camerawork, story, dialogue, script, sound effects, lighting, editing, directing, producing, marketing?

Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.

Most master painters of the past had teams organized as workshops where the majority of the painting was NOT done by the master.

The “lone genius” image is largely a modern romantic invention.

It shaves yaks for me. I appreciate that.

I have zero desire to go hunt down and create a wrapper to avoid some kernel bug because what I want to do can’t be implemented because of an edge case of some CPU-package incompatibility.

I have found in my software writing experience that the majority of what I want to write is boiler plate with small modifications but most of the problems are insanely hard to diagnose edge cases and I have absolutely no desire nor is it a good use of time in my opinion to deal with structural issues in things that I do not control.

The vast majority of code you do not control because you aren’t the owner of the framework or library your language or whatever and so the Bass majority of software engineering is coming up with solutions to foundational problems of the tools you’re using

The idea that this is the only true type of software engineering is absurd

True software engineering is systems, control and integration engineering.

What I find absolutely annoying is that there’s this rejection of the highest level Hofstetter level of software architecture and engineering

This is basically sneered at over the idea of “I’m gonna go and try to figure out some memory management module because AMD didn’t invest in additional SOC for the problems that I have because they’re optimized for some Business goals.”

It’s frankly junior level thinking

Well, washing cloths has definitely become "more fun" since the invention of washing machines... Cleaning your flat has become "more fun" since vacuum cleaners. Writing has become "more fun" since editors overtook typewriters. Bedroom studios power most of the clubs I know. Navigating a city as a blind pedestrian has definitely become more fun since the introduction of the oh-so-evil-screentime-bad smartphone. I could go on forever. Moving has become more fun since the invention of the wheel... See?

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> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.

What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist?

What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Florence --- is it not architecture? Is it not art?

Thinking the same thing, nobodies calling the Pope a painter because he paid Michelangelo to paint a chapel.

In b4 someone mentions some famous artists had apprentices under them.

I might start watching golf, and everytime someone else get's the ball in the hole i'll take credit for it. "Did you see what did there? "