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Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

94 points Eatcats | 1 comments | 08 Jul 25 11:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source

Small confession

I’ve been using Windsurf editor for about six months now, and it does most of the coding work for me.

Recently, I realized I no longer enjoy programming. It feels like I’m just going through the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want, then sitting and waiting for it to finish. If it fails, I just switch to another model—and usually, one of them gets the job done.

At this point, I’ve even stopped reviewing the exact code changes. I just keep pushing forward until the task is done.

On the bright side, I’ve gotten much better at writing design documents.

Anyone else feel the same?

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Winsaucerer ◴[08 Jul 25 13:00 UTC] No.44499546[source]▶
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.

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1. vinnymac ◴[08 Jul 25 13:23 UTC] No.44499731[source]▶
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.