alt Hacker NewsThat's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems like there are three joys in coding:
1. Creating something
2. Solving puzzles
3. Learning new things
If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get an output so much quicker.
If your enjoyment comes from solving hard puzzles, digging into algorithms, how hardware works, weird machine quirks, language internals etc... then you're going to lose nearly all of that fun.
And learning new things is somewhere in the middle. I do think that you can use agentic coding to learn new technologies. I have found llms to be a phenomenal tool for teaching me things, exploring new concepts, and showing me where to go to read more from human authors. But I have to concede that the best way to learn is by doing so you will probably lose out on some depth and stickiness if you're not the one implementing something in a new technology.
Of course most people find joy in some mix of all three. And exactly what they're looking for might change from project to project. I'm curious if you were leaning more towards 2 and 3 in your recent project and that's why you were so unsatisfied with Claude Code.
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I can see where this idea is coming from, but I don't agree with the conclusion at all. As someone who loves solving puzzles and learning new things, AI has been a godsend. I also very much like creating things, but even more than that, I like doing all three at once.
I think of AI like a microdose of Speed Force. Having super speed doesn't mean you don't like running; it just means you can run further and more often. That in turn justifies a greater amount of time spent running.
Without the Speed Force, most of the time you were reliant on vehicles (i.e. paying for third-party solutions) to get where you needed to go. With the Speed Force, not only can you suddenly meet a lot more of your transportation needs by foot, you're able to run to entirely new destinations that you'd never before considered. Eventually, you may find yourself planning trips to yet unexplored faraway harsh terrains.
If your joy in running came from attempting to push your biological physical limits, maybe you hate the Speed Force. If you enjoy spending time running and navigating unfamiliar territory, the Speed Force can give you more of that.
Sure, there are also oddballs who don't know how to run, yet insist on using the Speed Force to awkwardly jump somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of their destination. No one's saying they don't exist, but that's a completely different crowd from experienced speedsters.
> If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent
As someone who enjoys technology, and using it, and can just barely sort-of code but really not, agentic coding must be wonderful. I have barely scratched the surface with a couple of scripts. But simply translating "here's what I want, and how I would have done it the last time I used Linux 20 years ago, show me how to do it with systemd" is so much easier than digging through years of forum posts and trying to make sure they haven't all been obsoleted.
None of it is new. None of it is fancy. I do regret that people aren't getting credit for their work, but "automount this SMB share from my NAS" isn't going to make anyone's reputation. It's just going to make my day easier. I really did learn enough to set up a NAT system to share a DSL connection with an office in the late 1990s on OpenBSD. It took a long time, and I don't have that kind of free time anymore. I will never git gud. It's this, or just be another luser who goes without.
I think I'd add a #4 to this list, and that's helping people. I like making things that people can use to make their life easier. That's probably my number one.
The "creating something" idea... That's more complex. With agentic coding something can be created, but did I create it? Using agentic coding feels like hiring someone to do the work for me. For example, I just had all the windows in my house replaced. A crew came out at did it. The job is done, but I didn't do anything and felt no pride or sense of accomplishment in having these new windows. It just happened. Contrast that to a slow drain I had in my bathroom. I took the pipes apart, found the blockage, cleared it out, and reassembled the drain. When I next used the sink and the water effortlessly flowed away, I felt like I accomplished something, because I did it, not some plumber I hired.
So it isn't even about learning or solving puzzles, it's about being the person who actually did the work and seeing the result of that effort.
I find there are still opportunities to solve puzzles. Claude Code might build something in an unsatisfying or inelegant way, and you can suggest a better approach. You can absolutely write core components — the fun parts you crave — of the code and give it to an LLM to flesh out the rest.
One of the recent joys I’ve had is having CC knit together separate notebooks I’d been updating for a couple of years into a unified app. It can be a fulfilling experience.
I'm squarely into #1, but it usually requires #2 (at a high level) and has #3 as a side effect. But there's also #0 which kicks it all off: the triggering problem/question.
Like just yesterday I started to notice the increasing pressure of an increasingly hard-to-navigate number of Claude chats. So I went searching for something to organize them. I did find an extension, but it's for Chrome, and I'm a Firefox person, so I had Claude look at it with the initial idea of porting to Firefox. Then in the analysis, Claude mentioned creating an extension from scratch, and that's what I went for.
I've never really used JavaScript, let alone created a Firefox extension before, but in a few minutes I was iterating on one, figuring out how I wanted it to work with Claude, and now I have a very nice and featureful chats organizer. And I haven't even peeked at the code. I also now have a firm idea of this general spec of how I want arbitrary list-organizing UI to look+behave going forward.
I think your comment really captures some of the reasons behind the differences between people’s reactions to Claude pretty well.
I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the coding I do in my day job as a staff engineer, it’s pretty rare for me to encounter deeply interesting puzzles and really interesting things to learn. It’s not like I’m writing a compiler or and OS kernel or something; this is web dev and infra at a mid sized company. For 95% of coding tasks I do I’ve seen some variation already before and they are boring. It’s nice to have Claude power through them.
On system design and architecture, the problems still tend to be a bit more novel. I still learn things there. Claude is helpful, but not as helpful as it is for the code.
I do get the sense that some folks enjoy solving variations of familiar programming puzzles over and over again, and Claude kills that for them. That’s not me at all. I like novelty and I hate solving the same thing twice. Different tastes, I guess.
You're forgetting that (1) brings a sense of pride. "I built this". That's not true in many ways if you ask something else to do it
I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product.
I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this matters less, but that model has always made me a little queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I could possibly give.
Relying on AI code denies me the deep knowledge I need to feel that level of pride and confidence. And if I'm going to take the time to read, test and verify the AI code to that level, then I might as well write most of it unless it's really repetitive.