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Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

97 points marxism | 3 comments | 13 Oct 25 19:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.62s | source

I've been trying to articulate why coding feels less pleasant now.

The problem: You can't win anymore.

The old way: You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do. Then write the code. Understanding was mandatory. You solved it.

The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details. That's the labor-saving promise.

So I feel pressure to always, always, start by info dumping the problem description to AI and gamble for a one-shot. Voice transcription for 10 minutes, hit send, hope I get something first try, if not hope I can iterate until something works. And when even something does work = zero satisfaction because I don't have the same depth of understanding of the solution. Its no longer my code, my idea. It's just some code I found online. `import solution from chatgpt`

If I think about the problem, I feel inefficient. "Why did you waste 2 hours on that? AI would've done it in 10 minutes."

If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine. When I show it to anyone, the implicit response is: "Yeah, I could've prompted for that too."

The steering and judgment I apply to AI outputs is invisible. Nobody sees which suggestions I rejected, how I refined the prompts, or what decisions I made. So all credit flows to the AI by default.

The result: Nothing feels satisfying anymore. Every problem I solve by hand feels too slow. Every problem I solve with AI feels like it doesn't count. There's this constant background feeling that whatever I just did, someone else would've done it better and faster.

I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle. It bothers me that my reaction to these blog posts has changed so much. 3 years ago I would be bookmarking a blog post to try it out for myself that weekend. Now those 200 lines of simple code feels only one sentence prompt away and thus waste of time.

Am I alone in this?

Does anyone else feel this pressure to skip understanding? Where thinking feels like you're not using the tool correctly? In the old days, I understood every problem I worked on. Now I feel pressure to skip understanding and just ship. I hate it.

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gooodvibes ◴[13 Oct 25 19:14 UTC] No.45572197[source]▶
> The entire premise of AI coding tools is that they automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to be able to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details.

This isn't accurate.

> So I feel pressure to always, always, start by info dumping the problem description to AI and gamble for a one-shot. Voice transcription for 10 minutes, hit send, hope I get something first try, if not hope I can iterate until something works.

These things have planning modes - you can iterate on a plan all you want, make changes when ready, make changes one at a time etc. I don't know if the "pressure" is your own psychological block or you just haven't considered that you can use these tools differently.

Whether it feels satisfying or not - that's a personal thing, some people will like it, some won't. But what you're describing is just not using your tools correctly.

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1. marxism ◴[13 Oct 25 19:32 UTC] No.45572408[source]▶
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying I don't know how to use planning modes or iterate on solutions.

Yes, you still decompose problems. But what's the decomposition for? To create sub-problems small enough that the AI can solve them in one shot. That's literally what planning mode does - help you break things down into AI-solvable chunks.

You might say "that's not real thinking, that's just implementation details." Look who came up the the plan in the first place << It's the AI! Plan mode is partial automation of the thinking there too (improving every month)

Claude Code debugs something, it's automating a chain of reasoning: "This error message means execution reached this file. That implies this variable has this value. I can test this theory by sending this HTTP request. The logs show X, so my theory was wrong. Let me try Y instead."

replies(2): >>45572466 #>>45573437 #
2. malux85 ◴[13 Oct 25 19:38 UTC] No.45572466[source]▶
> When I stop the production line to say "wait, let me understand what's happening here," the implicit response is: "Why are you holding up progress? It mostly works. Just ship it. It's not your code anyway."

This is not a technical problem or an AI problem, it’s a cultural problem where you work

We have the opposite - I expect all of our devs to understand and be responsible for AI generated code

3. gooodvibes ◴[13 Oct 25 21:18 UTC] No.45573437[source]▶
> But what's the decomposition for?

To get it done correctly, that's always what it's been about.

I don't feel that code I write without assistance is mine, or some kind of achievement to be proud of, or something that inflates my own sense of how smart I am. So when some of the process is replaced by AI, there isn't anything in me that can be hurt by that, none of this is mine and it never was.