Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

Have you considered not doing that? It's not obligatory to have an LLM shit out unreviewed code for you, you're making a choice to do that, and you can make a choice not to.

Review the code. Hell, maybe even write some code yourself.

What you're describing is how I feel whenever I use an LLM for anything more than the most basic of tasks. I've gone from being a senior level software developer to managing a barely competent junior developer who's only redeeming skill is the ability to type really, really quickly. I quit the management track some time ago because I hated doing all my software development via the medium of design documents which would then be badly implemented by people who didn't care, there's no way you're going to get me to volunteer for that.

Not OP, but you nailed my feelings perfectly. I did not like managing for precisely this reason, and it never got better. The trenches are for me.

Re LLMs I love collaborative coding because I can sometimes pick up or teach new tricks. If I'm too tired to type the boilerplate I sometimes use an LLM. These are the only two redeeming values of LLM agents: they produce code or designs I can start from when I ask them too. I rarely do.

I hope OP can find a balance that works. It's sad to see the (claimed) state of the art be a soulless crank we have to turn.

I’ve been writing oversized shell scripts for ages, often just for the moment in Bash.

Then if I need something similar for a Dockerfile, I’d write that also. The duplication is a sad feeling.

So I described what I wanted, /bin/sh with posix, detailed what both scripts do, and it merged both scripts without ever seeing their full codebases! (Both for work and my own code, I never share code unless it’s already in a public repository)

I fired up ShellCheck linter and zero issues. At work I Replaced both tech-debt laden scripts with a repo and people said they’d use it too, NICE cleanup, and how long did it take? :-)