Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

Is AI genuinely that good for you all? I can't leave it to its own devices, I have to review everything because (from experience) I don't trust it. I think it's an amazing technological advancement, perhaps will go down as one of the top 10 in the history of our species. But I can't just "fire and forget".

And that's not just because its output is often not the best, but also because by doing it myself it causes me to think deeply about the problem, come up with a better solution that considers edge cases. Furthermore, it gives me knowledge in my head about that project that helps me for the next change.

I see comments here where people seem to have eliminated almost all of their dev work, and it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong.

I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. Some shops just have very low quality bars where they can ship things that are to be frank, broken. I tend to use Sonnet 4 these days, and use it for tasks that aren’t too important or ones that require prototyping and iteration over perfection.

I find it’s really great for augmenting specific kinds of concentrated tasks. But just like you, I have to review everything it creates. Even Claude Opus 4 on MAX produces many bugs on a regular basis that I fix before merging in a change. I don’t mind it though, as I can choose to use it on the most annoying areas, and leave the ones I enjoy to work on myself.

I think it depends on your niche and model. Gemini pro worked amazing for me in when doing (relatively simple) graph algorithms in python, but completely sucked when I switched to (relatively complicated) latex layouts.

> it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong

I'm in the same boat: I'm mostly doing C# in Visual Studio (classic) with co-pilot, and it very rarely gives useful code from prompts. Often times the auto-suggestions are hallucinations, and frequently they interfere with "normal" tab completion.

I'm wondering if I'm using the wrong tool, or if Visual Studio (classic) co-pilot is just far behind industry norms?

The main problem I have with auto-suggestions is that they distract my flow of thinking. Suddenly, I go from thinking about my code carefully, to reviewing someone else's code. To the point where I get a bit stressed typing, worrying that if I go too slow, the suggestion will pop up. As you may guess, I therefore have them turned off :)

I am playing with Zed now though, and it has a "subtle" mode for suggestions which is great. When I explicitly want to see them, I press option key. Otherwise, I don't see them.

I felt the same way until I tried Claude Code. Moving from an autocomplete-based workflow to a conversation-based workflow changed everything. I find traditional Copilot useless by comparison.

These people arent being honest or they arent dealing with any real level of complexity.

Youre 100% being dishonest or not dealing with any sort of complexity.

Use it as someone you are working with / talking with. Not as auto complete. You need to reframe your work a bit to have best results interacting w/ llms

What you’re doing wrong is you’re working on complex stuff.

I would love someone to do some research on attitudes towards how self-driving AI is, compared to factors like:

- Type of dev work (infra, frontend, backend, etc)

- Programming language

- Level of experience

- Quality expectations of project/work environment