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Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it"

I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight.

The only context I have is my friend in HVAC from many years ago that went to a school that taught everything manually because they wanted people to have a deep understanding of it. What happens to code in the future when people don't have a deep understanding?

16 comments

I enjoy getting into the zone while listening to synthwave and banging out code. But I'm not going to ignore that I can code most programs 100x as fast using claude code. I don't enjoy coding so much that I will spend 8 hours getting a side project together when I could get more done in 30 minutes with AI.

Speaking only for myself, I _love_ coding. But I haven't done refactoring by applying a needle (with a steady hand) to a roll of magnetic tape in _YEARS_ /snark.

I love monkey-patching some python or js. But never have I ever suggested that anyone would should do it. Writing everything in Haskell sounds lovely but I wouldn't advise that either.

I honestly don't care what language I'm writing in. LLMs bring us back to the smalltalk days: your code is data and your data is code. LLMs bring a translation layer so that even if you're writing some high-level language, some DSL that exists only on some 1-off platform that no one else is aware of, _everybody_ has access to a self-bootstrapping codebase.

I feel more empowered to _code_ than ever: now, every single input carries semantic weight that gets carried through the "compiler." Every claim of determinism can much more easily be fuzz-tested and made more robust. "'sup, this broke, fix yo" and "Would you be so kind as to fix this error?" contain semantic context that actually affects the output of the generated code. That restores empowerment around code _authorship_ while still preserving the guarantees we want from the published artifact.

"Deep understanding" doesn't disappear when you gain the ability to be more expressive. "Deep understanding" disappears when people become incurious.

I personally love coding! unfortunately for me the agents are much faster at it and often more correct, especially after iteration. Guiding AI is more efficient currently.

There are certain things I enjoy coding by hand, in exactly the same way I like using a manual coffee grinder. Coding can be enjoyable.

But most of the time coding is a means to an end. I bet your friend in HVAC was not told to use a manual drill to have a deeper understanding of how to make holes for installation. AI is simply a power tool.

> AI is simply a power tool

I could not disagree more strongly

Using a power tool does not erode your ability to think about how to build a shelf.

Using AI to write for you absolutely erodes your ability to think about what you're writing, be it software or blog posts

People have said this about virtually every new writing technology, from pencils to typewriters, from computers to spell-check.

Personally I would never use AI for writing, but it's absolutely a power tool for coding. I still need to think about what needs to be generated, and why. For now, I still need to guide the model based on my experience. And in the end, I'm on the hook to approve what's created. If anything, I have more time to think about what I'm making, because I'm not busy building the CRUD for a web app for the 100th time.

> People have said this about virtually every new writing technology, from pencils to typewriters, from computers to spell-check.

Do you think it is a coincidence that literacy rates among the younger generations are lower than previous generations right now?

Imagine making the same argument for text to speech. "You don't need to learn how to read or write because you'll always have a voice activated AI assistant to read stuff for you"

Maybe that doesn't bother you. I think it would represent a horrifying backslide of society into ignorance

I have a wrist pain from typing a lot. I prefer to generate and then audit. Just make changes one file at a time and then review and commit.

So I go from typing to prompting and reviewing diffs.

There is no way I install an agent on my laptop so I stick to web UI

You probably install all sorts of unverified crap on your laptop already, and since you are aware of this risk, you are in a good position to mitigate it. Sandboxes are a thing.

Nah, finally I got a clean fedora install with barely anything. No crap for now!

Just because everyone is profitmaxxing anthropic by running all the agents, I don't have to.

ok but a lot of coding used to be fighting package managers, discovering bugs in dependencies, dealing with deploy baloney, etc, not just "solving puzzles" or "architecting the backend"

Yeah the rose colored glasses some people seem to have about how fun doing everything by hand was in the past and how well most people did those things continues to astonish me

I enjoy building things. I do not enjoy the act typing out code by hand.

> Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question

To follow this debate through, to maximize coding enjoyment, shouldn't we be avoiding compilers? They take away a lot of the code we need to write. Frameworks as well?

I don't think the joy of coding comes simply from writing lots of code. It's the act of precisely expressing one's internal thoughts into an physical medium, and watching it take effect. Using AI as an intermediary makes it less enjoyable. It's like a painter telling his speedy assistant what he wants to paint, and reviewing every attempt until it looks like what he was aiming for. Obviously the painter won't find that as fulfilling and meaningful. And a skilled painter probably won't be quite as happy as if they'd done it personally. The act of painting is a primary driver, not just having a finished painting at the end.

The problem with your argument is that it's the same argument machine coders used against high level languages :)

High level languages are analogous to airbrushes or paint rollers, not assistants. They let you paint faster, at the cost of making some things impossible that you would be able to do with a fine paintbrush. Unlike the assistant/LLM, they do not make artistic decisions for you, and their behavior is predictable.

That's your interpretation after being used to high level languages. The assembly purists were not happy back in the days and made the same/similar arguments.

Yes and no. I think it's perfectly legitimate for someone to enjoy coding in assembly but not Python. And if someone comes over and talks about how much faster they can build things in C, it's fair enough for them to question whether that person had enjoyed writing assembly in the first place.

Aside: there's a clip on YouTube of Linus responding to someone asking if he'd consider using other languages for Linux. His response is that he likes to be close to the metal, and he likes C because you can look at C code and know well enough what the compiled assembly code will look like. You can't really say that with LLMs. You can understand C and you can understand the prompt for building a program in C which will achieve xyz. But you can't actually know what the output of the prompt will look like.

Idk, when you have nothing to prove just let the assistant do it. As the painter I can give direction then take a nap since I'm not getting any younger.

Compilers don't take away the code we need to write; they translate it into a different formal language that emphasizes and de-emphasizes various aspects of its meaning.

LLMs are categorically a different thing. Instead of soundly translating between formal languages, they adjust how you interact with the formal language.

The enjoyment people get from coding has absolutely nothing to do with the pure volume of code they produce, to the point that this has long been a cliche!

> LLMs are categorically a different thing. Instead of soundly translating between formal languages, they adjust how you interact with the formal language.

Yeah, equating LLMs with compilers is sloppy thinking (though, I'm sure some sloppy thinkers will defend to death). It's an over-eager pattern match, not everything that takes input and produces output is the same kind of thing.

I bet in our new AI utopia, we'll get more sloppy thinking. All kinds of people will be talking about how they used to think, but now they "no longer have to do it."

I usually like to write elegant code using Python and frameworks like Django.

The pleasure comes from the "the only right lines of code" instead of "the most lines of code".

Thanks for the honesty and I think I get it. The AI doing the code leap frogs you to a finished product which is the reward. I do worry about craftmanship in that scenario though.

The finished product alone does not have to be the reward. The reward can still be building a great tool, a great application, etc. With AI we can build it 100x faster, freeing us up to think deeper about our test coverage, our design, our scaling, our observability.

There is no excuse for lazy execution using AI, that is, IMO, equivalent to shoddy software engineering. it's just faster and more accessible now. "AI slop" is just poor execution delivered more quickly.

The onus is still on the human in the drivers seat to deliver quality outcomes.

How can building an application feel like a reward when you're not the one who built it?

And before you post the obvious response, no, if you're truly "100x faster", you're not reading or even thinking about anything the AI is outputting. The time math doesn't add up.

You seem to have a narrow definition of "build it". LLMs don't have agency. If I build software using an LLM I built it. Just like if I build a house out of lumber from a lumber mill, I built it even though I didn't hand carve the 2x4s.

Now, what if you order a construction crew for building your house? What if you also hire an architect to design the plan? And an overseer who manages everything?

Surely at some point you would stop saying "I built this house", even if you ordered and financed it?

This is getting a bit off-topic, but there are certainly people who will still say that they built it. That is, in a nutshell, how people try to reconcile desert theory with the existence of the super-wealthy.

I love coding and I always have - arguably moreso now, if you can still call it coding.

For me, it is not about the syntax nor the mechanics of typing though. My enjoyment comes from thinking about problems and breaking them down, or thinking about what architecture would best serve them. I guess I'm meant to be a systems design guy, so I'm lucky that AI-coding fits this well (AI models have limited context windows, relative to the size of codebases, so doing the big picture thinking is still important, and fun for me).

> arguably moreso now, if you can still call it coding

I pretty strongly think it doesn't resemble coding even a little

Yes - I think that's fair. I'm happy to concede the term coding - I still enjoy the process of telling my computer to build something I've envisioned. It's now much faster, and I get to do more of the big-picture thinking and ideation, which I thoroughly enjoy.

Depends on the writer.

You can frame setting up AI such that some of that activity is similar to some coding activities you like, or that some of that activity releases you from some of the coding activities you don't like.

It's a really personal thing; some of what you like can be getting some kinds of results quickly, for example. The answer to "What is it like to code?" or "What do you like about coding?" cannot be overly generalized or reductionist since it depends as much on personal preferences as it does classifying activities.

Really if you think about it AI will know everything and you can quickly get the answer for whatever right from inside your smart glasses.

We all become knowledge experts especially when the data we see inside our glasses is always 100% correct. This could take Years but that's where we are heading and Im sure no one now likes the sound of it.

Does a sculptor enjoy the act of chiseling stone more than be driven and desperate enough to uncover the statue within. Both are valid ways of thinking. Who am I to say otherwise? One just has more social rewards associated.

I code the parts that are new and interesting. However after 30+ years of programming most code is something I have done before so I love getting Claude Code to do it :)

I don’t know but to me it seems a bunch of people should learn proper typing. There is no way in world that AI is faster in solving/writing problems than you are when you can maneuver your idea/vim properly and have proper domain knowledge and mental model of your codebase. I think it’s genuinely 10x as fast. Just on execution and then if you write it you keep mental model, decide details and you don’t lose context.

Like honestly I’m losing my mind, when people claim I haven’t written code in a year. You had the wrong job your whole life and whilst you think you are so frontier now by using agenst your market value is actually decreasing.

Imagine a painter saying, I’m so happy I don’t have to paint anymore. Or a tennis player. I’m so happay that I don’t have to play tennis anymore.

wtf is going on?

Obviously I'm just one guy, but I maintain what I said w/ typing happily at 120+wpm. I think I could break 150 if I switched to colemak or dvorak, which I've been considering.

I don't think my job was ever to type fast, nor do I make any claim that I'm ontologically better than someone writing code by hand - but for what I need to do, I'm way faster now.

You might think he's an AI shill, but I was pretty compelled by simonw's post and idea - "your job is to deliver code that works" [1]. I think I can deliver more code that I can prove to work, faster now. The productivity is nice, but as I've said on other parts of the thread, it's also just fun to spend more time thinking, less time hitting the semicolon on my keyboard?

[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

Edit: should have used [1] in the first place instead of an asterisk.

I’m using NEO layout with all the coding keys on layer 3. I’m using both pinkys to jump into layer 3. I can therefore code a lot on home row. I use intellij with two two stroke keybinds (f.e. => Alt + E -> M => Extract Method) and vim motions in editor. I use ai next edit and autocomplete inside editor as I’m right on the loop.

Most changes I need to do are few lines of codes or big architectural changes. I’m at 40k lines of code after 24 months of working that’s 1.5k lines per month and 50 lines a day. If you can write 50 lines a day would you let AI write those or write them yourself.

I challenge anyone to show me a project with a good codebase where the actual loc output is so high that a human couldn’t write it in one hour a day.

I’m not working for a company so my job is to deliver a platform that works for users not to get a paycheck.

Coding for other people is like playing tennis for other people. You're signed as a tennis player to win. If a robot could play for you and win more games for you, you might consider using it. Now, I'm not saying AI tools let you "win," but I am saying a lot of people don't code "for the love of the game;" they code to keep the lights on.

Also the jury's out on if they're losing market value. We have yet to see which way the wind blows, but I personally think the genie might be out of the bottle on this one.

Full disclosure: I'm personally working up the courage to quit, take a fat paycut (maybe) and do something bucholic with the rest of my working life. I don't find much enjoyment in the tech landscape anymore (I'm 37).

> I don’t know but to me it seems a bunch of people should learn proper typing

There is no way your hands can produce code faster than a machine.

Even before AI, I used a custom code generator for years. It generated about 90% of the code needed for large business applications in seconds, including support for multiple protocols, database adapters (Oracle, SQLite, in-memory, etc.), and programming languages such as C++, TypeScript, and Java.

Writing the same amount of code by hand would have taken even the fastest developer months. The machine did it in seconds, and it did it consistently and bug free.

Sorry but you are just wrong. Perhaps if you are working on tiny problems in very small projects. Beyond that AI is simply many times faster regardless of how fast you type.

It’s exactly the opposite. On small projects I can use heavily because maintanability doesn’t matter on big projects you’ll end up in a deadlock. That’s why we have so many dead projects. People end up with 10x the needed LOCs and changes get incredible slow and tedious.

If i want to have a script that does sth trivial I’m happy to let AI do it, but if I’m building a house that doesnt break hell no.

> The only context I have is my friend in HVAC from many years ago that went to a school that taught everything manually because they wanted people to have a deep understanding of it. What happens to code in the future when people don't have a deep understanding?

What happen is that their boss gets a 3 page email screed with pictures of how they fucked up the thermostat wiring in trying to gerry-rig a new heat pump/air handler that supports only electric resistance backup heat into my house which has an oil boiler for backup. And I get shit from my wife about why our $10k new heat pump is blowing cold air on her during defrost cycles.

There's parts I enjoy, parts I dislike and parts I hate with a passion.

However, I love putting something in front of users, seeing them use it and get value out of it. And AI lets me get there 10x faster.

Yes, but it’s like walking. I enjoy walking, but I’d rather drive to get to another town.

to stress that analogy even further, i don't want to drive, i don't even have a drivers license. i rather arrange my life in such a way that i don't ever need to get to another town if driving is the only way to get there. translation: i'd rather not build an app at all if an LLM is the only way for me to achieve it.