What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less.

I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks.

Do you actually believe that people don’t know whether they are enjoying a task or not?

"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."

I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.

If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.

Holy projection what a sad small little outlook

> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.

I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)

But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).

Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.

So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.

(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)

You're going to probably be downvoted because the truth is hard and the collective human ego is self-reinforcing, but I think you are correct.

'Quality' is a function of filling in the gaps of the new tools, not eschewing them entirely.