Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now.

I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding.

It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it.

For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN.

Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.

Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track.

So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.

I also am enjoying LLMs, but I get no joy out of just prompting them again and again. I get so incredibly bored, with a little side of anxiety that I don’t really know how my program works.

I’ll probably get over it, but I’ve been realizing how much fun I get out building something as opposed to just having be built. I used to think all I cared about was results, and now I know that’s not true, so that’s fun!

Of course for the monotonous stuff that I’ve done before or don’t care a lick about, hell yeah I let em run wild. Boilerplate, crud, shell scripts, CSS. Had claude make me a terminal based version of snake. So sick

I've always felt building something was close to artistry. You create something out of your thoughts, you shape it how you want and you understand how it works to the most minute detail. The amount of times I've shown something seemingly simple to someone and went "but wait this is what is actually happening in the background!" and started explaining something I thought was cool or clever are great memories to me. AI is turning renaissance paintings into mass-market printing. There's no pride, no joy, just productivity. It's precisely those repetitive, annoying tasks that lead you to create a faster alternative, or to think outside the box and find different ways. I just don't get the hype.

> There's no pride, no joy, just productivity.

This is exactly what bothers me about the present moment. Not that the pride of craftsmanship is everything, but dialing it down to zero with extreme pressure to stay that way is a bit sad.

But we’ve clearly gone through this with other mediums before, perhaps someday people will appreciate hand written code the way we appreciate hand carved wood. Or perhaps we were all wasting time in this weird middle ground in the march of progress. I guess we’ll find out in 5-15 years.

I think the audience who can appreciate handcrafted code will be vastly smaller than the audience who appreciates hand carved wood.