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Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

97 points marxism | 1 comments | 13 Oct 25 19:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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.

1. qq99 ◴[13 Oct 25 20:42 UTC] No.45573131[source]▶
I absolutely love it. I find it empowers me more than ever before, and my satisfaction is at all time highs. I'm even building projects now (videogames) that I probably wouldn't have started before.

Here's where I'm at:

- Your subjective taste will become more important than ever, be it graphic design, code architecture, visual art, music, and so on for each domain that AI becomes good at. People with better taste will produce better results. If you have bad taste, you can't steer _any_ tool (AI or otherwise) into producing good outputs. So refining your taste and expanding it will become more important. re: "Yeah, I could've prompted for that too.", I see a parallel to Stable Diffusion visual art. Sure, anyone _can_ make _anything_, but getting certain types of artistic outputs is still an exercise in skill and knowledge. Without the right skill expression, they won't have the same outputs.

- Delegating the things where "I don't have time to think about that right now" feels really good. As an analog, e.g., importing lodash and using one of their functions instead of writing your own. With AI, it's like getting magical bespoke algorithms tailored exactly to your needs (but unlike lodash, I actually see the underlying src!). Treat it like a black box until it stops working for you. I think "use AI vs not" is similar to "use a library or not": you kinda still have to understand what you need to do before picking up the tool. You don't have to understand any tool perfectly to make effective use out of it.

- AI is a tremendous help at getting you over blockers. Previous procrastination is eliminated when you can tell AI to just start building and making forward progress, or if you ask it for a high level overview on how something works to demystify something you previously perceived as insurmountable or tough.

> Nothing feels satisfying anymore

You still have to realize that were it not for you guiding the process, the thing in question would not exist. e.g., if you vibecode a videogame, you start to realize that there's no way (today) that a model is 1-shotting that. At least, it isn't 1-shotting it exactly to your vision. You and AI compile an artifact together that's greater than the sum of both of you. I find that satisfying and exciting. Eventually you will have to fix it (and so come to understand parts you neglected to earlier).

It's incredibly satisfying when AI writes the tedious test cases for things I write personally (including all edge cases) and I just review and verify they are correct.

I still find I regret in the long term cases where I vibe-accept the code it produces without much critical thought, because when I need to finesse those, I can see how it sometimes produces a fractal of bad designs/implementations.

In a real production app with stakes and consequences you still need to be reading and understanding everything it produces imo. If you don't, it's at your own peril.

I do worry about my longterm memory though. I don't think that purely reading and thinking is enough to drill something into your brain in a way that allows you to accurately produce it again later. Probably would screw me over in a job interview without AI access.