alt Hacker News> Sure, we're all more productive now, but…
I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experiencing the reward of seeing what I’ve built by hand working for the first time.
Do people really have fun managing a fleet of agents that generate the code instead? Or is it just the rush of producing something extremely quickly, much more quickly than you might be able to alone, regardless of how well (or poorly) it might work? For me, being able to move quickly was never the fun part.
It’s one thing to utilize AI to lessen the drudgework, the boilerplate, but I look at people who have gone all in on agentic development and it just really makes me wonder.
Replies
2 types of people:
People who use coding as a means to an end, producing a product
People who enjoy process over product and coding is the enjoyable part, not the end product
Company executives fall into bucket 1. Even if you love your cushy air-conditioned job, doesn’t mean the people above you don’t see you as a means to an end, a better product.
Solo founders and small startups are in bucket 1 as well but that doesn’t mean that don’t enjoy coding, just the product being made is much more satisfying.
I use Ai to remove large amounts of code from our code base. Do refactorings that would not have made business sense before.
I also use Ai to be more ambitious. Online evaluation for our in app flows instead of offline.
So for us the entire quality of the product has been increased a lot.
> I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for?
Many devs here have stated that the fun part for them is seeing the end product, not the act of creating it. Using AI is an act of need satisfaction.
Unfortunately, cloning a GitHub repository or downloading a Squarespace template doesn't hit the spot, because you can see exactly where the code came from, so your brain knows you were not the one responsible. AI's greatest feature is that it obfuscates provenance. You can now happily clone that repository or download that template without the feeling that you're cloning someone else's repository or downloading someone else's template.