alt Hacker News> but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent.
Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software.
"I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.
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We're just getting used to the invention of the washing machine. All clothes are equally cleansed on average, with good enough results even if afterwards some particular pieces need a bit of extra care, while before we had to clean them all one by one and paying attention to minutia and details on each piece's needs. Nowadays you just control a couple buttons and hope for the best.
Better to find joy in other parts of the process! Hanging clothes out is still a widespread practice in Europe, and some enjoy it. Likewise for software quality controls, testing, and full product lifecycle.
I used to get overjoyed and would tell my partner how amazing programmer I am every time I built something that felt difficult at the beginning.
Now for every problem I know Claude/Codex will do it, and they do. I just don't get that feeling on finishing 10 features now.
When my wife has a thing she says she needs to do and I can help, I now ask “do you want this done or do you want to do it?”. I think this is a similar kind of split.
Sometimes I want to cook, that’s a thing I want to actively do. Sometimes I cook because I want to put dinner out, dinner being out is the thing I want and cooking is just a required step.
Sometimes I want to solve a problem, sometimes I want a problem solved.
Here’s the tricky part for me now and I think others are hitting it - when a machine can solve the problem does that devalue the feeling of doing it by hand? Solving a sudoku feels good even though I know I have multitudes of machines in my house that could solve it faster than I could pick up the pen. Games that place a dollar value on some item I can also achieve makes me feel like the effort is only worth $ though. This isn’t logical but I’m ok being human.
So for a personal project do I get the same feeling doing it by hand? Will it feel like I’ve just made my life harder for no reward or will it be a nice satisfying thing?
As the models get so much better the goalposts shift too, the less I direct the less I was needed.
It’s a weird time. Fascinating, exciting and definitely useful - but so much of what I’ve learned is rapidly becoming less and less important for many tasks. Still, I’ve argued for many years that more people should code because it’s such a powerful tool even used basically, I guess I’ve got my wish (and that side I genuinely love, seeing people make things with their domain knowledge and not having to learn exactly how brackets work in order to automate something)