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kace91yesterday at 11:19 AM2 repliesview on HN

>Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched.

I wonder if I’m the odd one out or if this is a common sentiment: I don’t give a shit about building, frankly.

I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a complex system. “Look at all the things I created in a weekend” sounds to me like “look at all the weight I moved by bringing a forklift to the gym!”. Even ignoring the part that there is barely a “you” in this success, there is not really any interest at all for me in the output itself.

This point is completely orthogonal to the fact that we still need to get paid to live, and in that regard I'll do what pays the bills, but I’m surprised by the amount of programmers that are completely happy with doing away with the programming part.


Replies

simonwyesterday at 12:05 PM

Interestingly, I read "I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a complex system." and thought that you were about to argue in favor of AI-assisted programming!

I enjoy those things about programming too, which is why I'm having so much fun using LLMs. They introduce new layers of complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I was able to without them.

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falloutxyesterday at 11:24 AM

Learning, solving puzzles and understanding something was a bigger desire for me than building another to-do list. In fact, most of my building effort has been used by corporations to make software worse for users.