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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: 0.617s | 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. gngoo ◴[14 Oct 25 03:02 UTC] No.45575810[source]▶
I really like building products, and with AI now I can just offload huge parts of the technical duties, and do the actual product building much faster. For me this is where the real satisfaction is. Yes of course, there was a lot of satisfaction with doing it myself, fixing a bug, problem or finally implementing something after a long grind.

But honestly I do not miss it at all. The further AI coding advances, the easier it becomes to build and iterate over small products (even if they just start out as MVPs). And the more I actually feel in my element. I understand why people dislike it, but it feels as if these tools where specifically made for me; and I am getting more and more exited while these keep getting better.

In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.

replies(1): >>45576962 #
2. jjav ◴[14 Oct 25 06:45 UTC] No.45576962[source]▶
> In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.

To use the woodworking analogy of the (current) top comment, the woodworking equivalent of this is to call someone to build you a cabinet and come back home after they're done. Which of course is how most people get their cabinets built.

But it's not woodworking, for sure. Which for someone who just wants a cabinet, that's cool. But for someone who enjoyed the woodworking part of it, not cool.

replies(1): >>45579184 #
3. raw_anon_1111 ◴[14 Oct 25 12:22 UTC] No.45579184[source]▶
I am a staff cloud consultant at a 3rd party AWs company specializing in software development + cloud architecture. My day job consists of.

1. Working with sales to land clients

2. Doing management consulting style projects where I tell the client what they should do.

3. Designing the architecture from the infra side and code.

4. Leading implementations and on smaller projects doing the hands on keyboard work by myself and on larger projects, leading a team

I don’t use AI agents. What I will do is use ChatGPT as a junior developer where I tell it the context of the problem, diagrams, and I will build up the pieces with the abstractions, modules etc I want. While the architect of a building may not build everything themselves and they definitely won’t be building the cabinets, they should have a vision of how everything is built and guide how it works together.