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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: 0.001s | 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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themafia ◴[13 Oct 25 19:39 UTC] No.45572486[source]▶
> That's the labor-saving promise.

Where are the labor saving _measurements_? You said it yourself:

> You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do.

So why are we relying on "promises?"

> If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine.

And when you're experiencing an emergency and need to fix or patch it this comes back to haunt you.

> So all credit flows to the AI by default.

That's the point. Search for some of the code it "generates." You will almost certainly find large parts of it, verbatim, inside of a github repository or on an authors webpage. AI takes the credit so you don't get blamed for copyright theft.

> Am I alone in this?

I find the thing to be an overhyped scam at this point. So, no, not at all.

replies(1): >>45572695 #
1. LordDragonfang ◴[13 Oct 25 20:00 UTC] No.45572695[source]▶
> You will almost certainly find large parts of it, verbatim, inside of a github repository or on an authors webpage. AI takes the credit so you don't get blamed for copyright theft.

Only if you're doing something trivial or highly common, in which case it's boilerplate that shouldn't be copyrighted. We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java. We already had the "just stochastic parrots" conversation too, and concluded it's a specious argument.

replies(2): >>45572825 #>>45572931 #
2. themafia ◴[13 Oct 25 20:11 UTC] No.45572825[source]▶
> in which case it's boilerplate that shouldn't be copyrighted

Let's say it's boilerplate code filled with comments that are designed to assist in understanding the API being written against. Are the comments somehow not covered because they were added to "boilerplate code?" Even if they're reproduced verbatim as well?

> We already had the "just stochastic parrots" conversation too

Oh, I was not part of those conversations, perhaps you can link me to them? The mere stated existence of them is somewhat underwhelming and entirely unconvincing. Particularly when it seems easy to ask an LLM to generate code and then to search for elements of that code on the Internet. With that methodology you wouldn't need to rely on conversations but on actual hard data. Do you happen to know if that is also available?

3. heavyset_go ◴[13 Oct 25 20:22 UTC] No.45572931[source]▶
> We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java.

"It's boilerplate therefore it isn't IP" isn't the argument that was made by Google, nor is it the argument that the case was decided upon.

It was decided that Google's use of the API met the four determining factors used by courts to ascertain whether use of IP is fair use. The court found that even though it was Oracle's copyrighted IP, it was still fair use to use it in the way Google did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...