I think part of it though is that LLMs (especially in novice hands) create code that is more difficult to review and has subtler bugs. Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.

Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.

Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.

I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.

These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.

All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.

Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.

The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.

This is not strictly true.

I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it

This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.

I enjoy molding hyper specific software across my whole eco system of tech through prose with LLMs. Iterating over time to hone the right solutions based on very abstract reactions to the results I get. I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.

I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the same hobby just different entry points and doing it the least automated way doesn't make your work more or less than anyone else's.

I think for those of us who got into software initially for the end result -- being the only way for the thing in your head to ever exist -- enjoying the engineering part was a nice, incidental surprise.

So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.

Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.

I think this is why that I limit the use of LLM in my hobbyist project, but not in my work. I found LLM particularly useful of generating say VSCode configuration JSON files and it saved me a lot of headaches. It is also very good at finding the right tool for the job (e.g. which binary to use to write a floppy image).

> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.

It's an age-old debate in every hobby.

Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with.

In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.

Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.

LLMs let you generate code quickly. This seems to have very little relevance to the end result.

I don't think this is correct.

What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.

> LLMs expedite achieving the end result.

Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)

"LLMs expedite achieving the end result" prove it?

LLMs can generate lots of code quickly there's no evidence they actually speed up the dev process e2e.