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97 points marxism | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | 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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loveparade ◴[] No.45574431[source]
Reading HN I seem to be in the minority but AI has made programming a lot more fun for me. I've been an engineer for nearly 25 years and 95% of the work is rather mindless boilerplate. I know exactly what I need to do next, it just takes time and iteration.

The "you think about the problem and draw diagrams" part of you describe probably makes up less than 5% of a typical engineering workflow, depending on what you work on. I work in a scientific field where it's probably more than for someone working in web dev, but even here it's very little, and usually only at the beginning of a project. Afterwards it's all about iteration. And using AI doesn't change that part at all, you still need to design the high level solution for an LLM to produce anything remotely useful.

I never encountered the problem of not understanding details of the AI's implementation that people here seem to describe. I still review all the code and need to ask the LLM to make small adjustments if I'm not happy with it, especially around not-so-elegant abstractions.

Tasks that I actively avoided previously because they seemed like a hassle, like large refactorings, I no longer avoid now because I can ask an AI to do most of it. I feel so much productive and work is more satisfying because I get to knock out all these chores that I had resistance to before.

Brainstorming with an AI about potential solutions to a hard problem is also more fun for me, and more productive, than doing research the old ways. So instead of drawing diagrams I now just have conversations.

I can't say for certain whether using LLMs has made me much more productive (overall it likely has but for certain tasks it hasn't), but it definitely has made work more fun for me.

Another side effect has been that I'm learning new things more frequently when using AI. When I brainstorm solutions with an AI or ask for an implementation, it sometimes uses libraries and abstractions I have not seen before, especially around very low level code that I'm not super familiar with. Previously I was much more likely to use or do things the one way I know.

replies(1): >>45579247 #
1. raw_anon_1111 ◴[] No.45579247[source]
I said more in another comment. But after 20+ years in the industry as of 2018 and and before that 10 years as a hobbyist, coding had become a grind. I started liking solving business problems, talking to customers, mentoring etc and even the high level architect of the code.

AI has made a world of difference. I don’t use agents, I build the system up using ChatGPT as a junior developer with hand holding.