13 ms·

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (be

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing) 3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev: 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day) 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code! But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!
- zqna 1y ago
  It's like saying I never like carpentering, but hey that great ikea thing (or 3d printer), we all now can have nice furniture for pennies! Except it's not nice furniture, it's not for pennies and you still really need carpenters for building houses.
  - sitkack 1y ago
    You ignored what they said, put words in their mouth and made a cheap shot.
radicalbyte 1y ago
I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities). I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.
- hakunin 1y ago
  I haven't seen many folks who actually hands-on programmed this long willingly and grown to hate it. Instead one is usually trying to become something else (CTO, executive, etc) but due to financial difficulties, struggle to make connections and promote themselves, had to keep writing code. Are you sure this wasn't more of your case? That said, I haven't programmed for 35 years yet (approaching 30 in my case), so I don't know how I might feel when I get there.
  - lenkite 1y ago
    It can happen if you develop health issues like carpal tunnel or Sciatica due to extended sitting. Programming then gets mentally associated with pain.
  - radicalbyte 1y ago
    Nope not at all. The first ~10 years were as a kid, so not professionally. Professionally I'm at the top of my niche and decided to work as a consultant instead of starting doing my own startup or starting an agency as I wasn't able to commit and have a family, and I loved writing code (and was bloody good at it, and at making my teams much much better by leading by example & helping them grow). I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time. Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do). With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)
weego 1y ago
I'm in the ~25 years group and my only AI pleasure is the f**ing boilerplate that some libs and frameworks insist on still pushing onto the developer that is almost always the same but not quite. I actually get to do the job I love which is problem solving.
lodovic 1y ago
To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.
- hakunin 1y ago
  I was going to include "people who use verbose programming languages/environments" :), but perhaps it's more of a likelihood scale across all groups. The more verbose the language, the more drawn to AI you will be.
  - Rexxar 1y ago
    AI help us to do faster what we shouldn't have to do at all if our tools where better.
gavinray 1y ago
I think you might have to get more granular than: > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions. But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things.
- hakunin 1y ago
  That's what I mean by product-building vs programming (3rd group).
- jakelazaroff 1y ago
  To me this is sort of like saying about music "The guitar was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things." That's true, but there's something qualitatively different about writing a song on a guitar vs. prompting to create a song in Suno. The guitar (or piano/Ableton/whatever) is an instrument, whereas Suno is… I'm not really sure. But that difference makes me totally disinterested in using Suno to produce music. And in the same way — even though I also consider code "just a means to an end" — I'm also totally disinterested in using Claude Code to produce software.
  - gavinray 1y ago
    I'm probably in the minority here, but I also produce House music as a hobby and I love the idea of generative AI as a production tool. I paid $10 to try the latest Suno 4.5 model and one of the songs it produced was incredible (to me) and sounded so much like the music from my Pandora station I'd never have known it was AI. https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA I'm excited for the future of "Infinite Personal Jukebox" where you can hear an endless stream of music tailored exactly to your taste, and never hear the same song twice.
    - jakelazaroff 1y ago
      I'm trying hard not to judge, but the "Infinite Personal Jukebox" sounds nightmarish to me — and I don't just mean to me, personally, but for humanity as a whole. You are describing a world in which music is devoid of any social context. No sharing songs with friends, no replaying the first song you danced to with a loved one, no seeing live performances, no researching who inspired your favorite artists — because in this world "inspiration" doesn't exist. Nothing will ever force you to reevaluate a genre you'd written off, or ponder tough questions — in fact, no media will ever challenge or surprise you in any way. That is a world in which one of our most primal connective threads has been robbed of its social and emotional value. It's just elevator music for our own private elevators.
MattGaiser 1y ago
If you have a process and pattern you like to follow, I imagine that your experience with AI agents will be frustrating. I have had to be willing to change how I structure code to get AI dev to work really well for me.
monkey26 1y ago
I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions. I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain. Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.
- hakunin 1y ago
  We are in a similar length of experience, but weirdly as I got older, it's the opposite for me: I got more particular about clarity, readability, especially in the context of handling edge cases. The 10% of situations that require 90% of effort. My new hobby is a codebase that can read as a business rulebook.
  - monkey26 1y ago
    I’m grateful for the likes of you out there.
sitkack 1y ago
I got into this industry as a side gig from science, I love solving problems. I am pretty ok at code, but code is a problem in the way of another problem. Sometimes it is easy to get distracted by a cute puzzle or a new game, but my purpose is to solve larger problems not play games (I didn't intend for this to be HN rhetorical combat). The people most against AI assistance are those that define themselves by what they do, have invested a lot into honing their craft and enjoy the execution of that craft. I have been getting paid to program for over 35 years, agentic coding is a fresh breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1F9C1D01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1...
peab 1y ago
I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it. Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days. I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.
- echelon 1y ago
  I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems. But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.
  - prmph 1y ago
    > But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would. You cannot and never will, because of shannon entropy. How many non-trivially distinct programs are definable by the few words of the prompt on such a button?
    - echelon 1y ago
      I'm not so sure. "Todo app" has a pretty recognizable shape. As does "photo app", "music streaming app", etc. If you're not happy and if you incrementally add more constraints, that's no different from human elicitation. Imagine engineering the interface for some kind of magical app factory. It'll probably be like that.
- sitzkrieg 1y ago
  no one uses ai to one shot system design because they cant. it will fuck up in any moderate sized project
- osigurdson 1y ago
  Is there really a large delta between computer programming, coding, computer science and software engineering?
zqna 1y ago
To the first list also add the typical mediocre developer who has struggled for their entire career, never investing in acquiring deep understanding of how things work, and who is making guesses when attempting to fix things, later blaming the magic behind them. For those people the magic of LLMs is just the same, they are comfortable with it, and will be giving the same excuses that they are used to, even more so now.
benreesman 1y ago
I'm squarely in the latter group and I just don't think of it in like/dislike terms: I think of it as a rapidly changing (though beginning to converge) set of new tools in a toolbox that only ever grows. In particular its in the code generation / code validation subtoolbox that already included IDL compilers, emacs macros, type systems / proof assistants, code review, and others. It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier. This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.
Aurornis 1y ago
There are multiple vocal groups on the Internet about vibe coding. I don’t think any of them really capture the average use case. Most of the people I know use use AI coding tools do so selectively. They pick the right tool for the job and they aren’t hesitant to switch or try different modes. Whenever I see someone declare that the other side is dead or useless (manual programming or AI coding) it feels like they’re just picking sides in a personal preference or ideology war.
Kiro 1y ago
I didn't understand which group was supposed to be which until the very last point, so I don't think you're correct. In my personal network, the most senior people with lots of programming experience have the most positive attitude and seem to be more pragmatic about it in general.
- iamflimflam1 1y ago
  This is my experience as well. Occasionally when using code tools - I do actually feel like a 10x engineer. I’ve got sufficient experience to know what I want and to correct course when needed. And I can dive into the code and help when needed. It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
- hakunin 1y ago
  Couple of questions: the most senior people in your personal network — are they hands-on _lately_? And are they ~>25y experience? If it's a no to either, I took those into account.
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more. Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later. I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.
- yahoozoo 1y ago
  The models themselves seem to be plateauing with the companies behind them shifting to additional products on top of them. It seemed like a weekly occurrence we would get a new model from the top dogs.
  - MattGaiser 1y ago
    The models are plateauing, but unlike humans, a certain amount of brute force testing of their output is fine. They can just iterate until they succeed.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Kinda. While it's possible to do that, you've got an exponential cost increase for linear improvements — scale from a case where an AI makes 1 mistake to 2, double the output cost, 3 mistakes double again, 4 mistakes double again, etc.
      - serf 1y ago
        Smart caching fixes a lot of the issues there. If a fork is marked somehow as successful then presumably the cache lookup next time will be less painful/costly. Of course that's dependent on how caching gets implemented/where/when/how, but it's not unsolvable for common occurrence questions/answers. As for getting the SOTA questions wrong : we as humans would likely also go through an iterative feedback loop until initial success and experience, too.
crawshaw 1y ago
I first got paid to code 25 years ago. I have been programming since I was a kid, and always will. I love making computers do things. I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI). It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them. But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.
kasey_junk 1y ago
I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai. Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts? Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine? I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.
tjr 1y ago
I am finding that I really like AI for tasks I don't want to do, and am annoyed by it for tasks I enjoy. A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork. (I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)
msgodel 1y ago
I love programming but I don't really enjoy figuring out how to consume other people's APIs. The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained. When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.
fragmede 1y ago
It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.) So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have. As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.
KoolKat23 1y ago
Not development related but I have plenty of colleagues that take pleasure in the mundane. Small easy dopamine hits I guess.
ben_w 1y ago
I don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata. I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of. Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1]. [0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that. [1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.
- karmakurtisaani 1y ago
  > They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it. With an attitude like this, they would suck as a colleague regardless of profession.
ok123456 1y ago
I genuinely enjoy programming, but I don't enjoy doing maintenance programming on other people's horrible code. This is the sort of thing no one wants to do and leads to burnout. The AI won't get burnt out going through a static analysis output and simplifying code, running tests, then rerunning the analysis for hours and hours at a time.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  Unfortunately we have no agreed upon metrics for simplified code. And we have no realistic way of taking a drastically refactored application that was the result of hours of changes by an LLM and being confident that it doesn’t introduce bugs or remove load bearing bugs. Static analysis and test suites aren’t good enough for pushing very large changes to production.
  - ok123456 1y ago
    We have metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, the number of arguments, and the number of lines in a given method/function/file. These are usually fine to find the festering portions. We also have no realistic way of being confident that letting a coworker/junior/intern make hours of changes will confidently not introduce bugs or load-bearing bugs.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      Reducing cyclomatic complexity says very little about what we care about when we talk about simple code. It’s very possible, even likely to produce code with fewer branches that is much harder to reason about. Cyclomatic complexity says almost nothing about architectural complexity. There’s a reason talking about cyclomatic complexity fell out of favor 20-30 years ago. We tried using it as a software quality metric and it failed. There are no good, widely agreed upon metrics for software quality. An optimizer that tries to reduce lines of code per function or file is going to overfit to the specific version of the system at the expense of readability and maintainability. Both of these metrics will likely ensure you do the exact opposite of what you’d really want when you say you want to simplify the code. >coworker/junior/intern I would never in a million years allow anyone to go off by themselves and spend hours and hours unsupervised changing tens of thousands of lines of code with no goal but to simplify the code.
hakunin 1y ago
I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.
bdangubic 1y ago
I am both 1) and 2) and totally in love with AI dev… I am just one soul of course, your general observation might be right. With 3 decades under my belt in the industry I can tell you on trait that THE BEST SWEs ALL have - laziness… if I had to manually do something 3 times, that shit is getting automated… AI dev took automation of mundane parts of our work to another level and I don’t think I could ever code without it anymore
unshavedyak 1y ago
I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it. I use Claude Code for two primary reasons: 1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind. 2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea. Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.
Swizec 1y ago
> To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev: > 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day) > 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) > I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups. I’ve been programming for almost 30 years. Started when I was 9 years old and I’ve been looking at code pretty much every day since then. I love AI coding and leading teams. Because I love solving big problems. Bigger than I can do on my own. For me htat’s the fun part. The code itself is just a tool.
bgwalter 1y ago
OP is not a programmer and the comment is the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811 There's nothing wrong with not being a programmer, but it is still kind of funny that "hackers" and their backers approve the script kiddie way by voting. I don't think the 2) category is universal. There are many people in that category who know that following corporate hype will be rewarded, but I'm not sure they all like vibe coding.
stavros 1y ago
It's not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.
- hakunin 1y ago
  You're probably right, but this dividing line only became prominent now that AI coding agents polarized the community across it. This in itself is interesting to me.
  - stavros 1y ago
    Yes, definitely, I just mean that all the groups can be condensed down to those two.
    - hakunin 1y ago
      I guess there are some who would've enjoyed coding, but circumstances pulled them away from it. The word "intimacy" comes to mind. If you lose intimate relationship with code writing (or never gain one), you will be more okay with AI. Perhaps I'm trying to point out that sometimes you lose it accidentally, while still instinctively thinking that you enjoy writing code.
serf 1y ago
like any attempt to categorize humans, it falls shorts on many exceptions. I've been at what I do for 32+ years now, I love programming and I havent stopped since I started. I love claude code. Why? It increases discoverability in ways far and beyond what a search engine would normally do for me. It gets rid of the need to learn a new documentation format and API for every single project that has different requirements. It makes it less painful to write and deal with languages that represent minor common current trends that will be gone by next year. I no longer have to think about what a waste of time onboarding for ReactCoreElectronChromium is when it'll be gone next year when Googlesoftzon Co folds and throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Melatonic 1y ago
I would say somewhat correct but your own bias might be coming through a tiny bit here :-) I think it more comes down to one of your last points. It's not necessarily a difference specifically in who likes to use "AI" or not - in my experience there's just a different class of tech workers between new and old. On one extreme you have the old greybeard maintaining mainframe systems with obscure COBOL niches that LLMs won't ever have insight into. On the other end you have people working on the latest shiny thing. I don't think it comes down to money or love for the actual work - I know plenty of people invested in the math behind AI and how it might help them be more efficient coders. The divide (if we should even call it that) already existed in the way these two groups approach tech - AI and LLMs has just made it more obvious.
groby_b 1y ago
I think you're wrong with those groups. I'll use myself as counterexample, but I know a sufficiently large number of people like me who also love AI to suggest the pattern's wrong. Programming for 4 decades, happy to language lawyer with my C++ compiler, and love puzzle solving. And yet, I see AI as a tremendous gift. It's brought back the early exploratory feeling and joy. It's also taken care of a lot of tedium (no, migrating to a new library/api never was fun) And, best of all, how to use AI well/correctly to produce prod quality code is one of the biggest puzzles out there. It's a great time! But I don't think your characterization is entirely wrong, because the 'Ugh! AI!" continent is indeed strong in your second group. Specifically, people who have that long seniority and enjoyed being "the expert" - i.e more knowledgeable about a topic than many. AI is compressing that gap.
attackula 1y ago
I'd agree with this assessment overall. It's got flavors of an age-old debate that comes up any time a new efficiency arises between the people who value the efficiency and those who value the process (eat a nutrition bar vs. cook a meal, drive instead of walk, etc.) People quickly divide into camps, but I think the healthiest (albeit boring) view is that the tech is good for certain efficiencies, and you have to choose if you prefer the speed you gain over joy of the activity, which probably varies day-to-day. I love the walk to my local grocery store in the mornings because I enjoy the sunshine and exercise. I'm getting in my car the second I'm in a rush though. In the same way I love programming and software engineering, so if I've got the time I'm going to dig into coding. Under deadline to do an annoying legacy migration from an obscure language? Hello Claude Code :)

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code! But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!

zqna 1y ago
It's like saying I never like carpentering, but hey that great ikea thing (or 3d printer), we all now can have nice furniture for pennies! Except it's not nice furniture, it's not for pennies and you still really need carpenters for building houses.
- sitkack 1y ago
  You ignored what they said, put words in their mouth and made a cheap shot.

radicalbyte 1y ago

I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities). I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.

hakunin 1y ago
I haven't seen many folks who actually hands-on programmed this long willingly and grown to hate it. Instead one is usually trying to become something else (CTO, executive, etc) but due to financial difficulties, struggle to make connections and promote themselves, had to keep writing code. Are you sure this wasn't more of your case? That said, I haven't programmed for 35 years yet (approaching 30 in my case), so I don't know how I might feel when I get there.
- lenkite 1y ago
  It can happen if you develop health issues like carpal tunnel or Sciatica due to extended sitting. Programming then gets mentally associated with pain.
- radicalbyte 1y ago
  Nope not at all. The first ~10 years were as a kid, so not professionally. Professionally I'm at the top of my niche and decided to work as a consultant instead of starting doing my own startup or starting an agency as I wasn't able to commit and have a family, and I loved writing code (and was bloody good at it, and at making my teams much much better by leading by example & helping them grow). I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time. Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do). With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)

weego 1y ago

I'm in the ~25 years group and my only AI pleasure is the f**ing boilerplate that some libs and frameworks insist on still pushing onto the developer that is almost always the same but not quite. I actually get to do the job I love which is problem solving.

lodovic 1y ago

To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.

hakunin 1y ago
I was going to include "people who use verbose programming languages/environments" :), but perhaps it's more of a likelihood scale across all groups. The more verbose the language, the more drawn to AI you will be.
- Rexxar 1y ago
  AI help us to do faster what we shouldn't have to do at all if our tools where better.

gavinray 1y ago

I think you might have to get more granular than: > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions. But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things.

hakunin 1y ago
That's what I mean by product-building vs programming (3rd group).
jakelazaroff 1y ago
To me this is sort of like saying about music "The guitar was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things." That's true, but there's something qualitatively different about writing a song on a guitar vs. prompting to create a song in Suno. The guitar (or piano/Ableton/whatever) is an instrument, whereas Suno is… I'm not really sure. But that difference makes me totally disinterested in using Suno to produce music. And in the same way — even though I also consider code "just a means to an end" — I'm also totally disinterested in using Claude Code to produce software.
- gavinray 1y ago
  I'm probably in the minority here, but I also produce House music as a hobby and I love the idea of generative AI as a production tool. I paid $10 to try the latest Suno 4.5 model and one of the songs it produced was incredible (to me) and sounded so much like the music from my Pandora station I'd never have known it was AI. https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA I'm excited for the future of "Infinite Personal Jukebox" where you can hear an endless stream of music tailored exactly to your taste, and never hear the same song twice.
  - jakelazaroff 1y ago
    I'm trying hard not to judge, but the "Infinite Personal Jukebox" sounds nightmarish to me — and I don't just mean to me, personally, but for humanity as a whole. You are describing a world in which music is devoid of any social context. No sharing songs with friends, no replaying the first song you danced to with a loved one, no seeing live performances, no researching who inspired your favorite artists — because in this world "inspiration" doesn't exist. Nothing will ever force you to reevaluate a genre you'd written off, or ponder tough questions — in fact, no media will ever challenge or surprise you in any way. That is a world in which one of our most primal connective threads has been robbed of its social and emotional value. It's just elevator music for our own private elevators.

MattGaiser 1y ago

If you have a process and pattern you like to follow, I imagine that your experience with AI agents will be frustrating. I have had to be willing to change how I structure code to get AI dev to work really well for me.

monkey26 1y ago

I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions. I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain. Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.

hakunin 1y ago
We are in a similar length of experience, but weirdly as I got older, it's the opposite for me: I got more particular about clarity, readability, especially in the context of handling edge cases. The 10% of situations that require 90% of effort. My new hobby is a codebase that can read as a business rulebook.
- monkey26 1y ago
  I’m grateful for the likes of you out there.

sitkack 1y ago

I got into this industry as a side gig from science, I love solving problems. I am pretty ok at code, but code is a problem in the way of another problem. Sometimes it is easy to get distracted by a cute puzzle or a new game, but my purpose is to solve larger problems not play games (I didn't intend for this to be HN rhetorical combat). The people most against AI assistance are those that define themselves by what they do, have invested a lot into honing their craft and enjoy the execution of that craft. I have been getting paid to program for over 35 years, agentic coding is a fresh breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1F9C1D01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1...

peab 1y ago

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it. Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days. I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.

echelon 1y ago
I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems. But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.
- prmph 1y ago
  > But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would. You cannot and never will, because of shannon entropy. How many non-trivially distinct programs are definable by the few words of the prompt on such a button?
  - echelon 1y ago
    I'm not so sure. "Todo app" has a pretty recognizable shape. As does "photo app", "music streaming app", etc. If you're not happy and if you incrementally add more constraints, that's no different from human elicitation. Imagine engineering the interface for some kind of magical app factory. It'll probably be like that.
sitzkrieg 1y ago
no one uses ai to one shot system design because they cant. it will fuck up in any moderate sized project
osigurdson 1y ago
Is there really a large delta between computer programming, coding, computer science and software engineering?

zqna 1y ago

To the first list also add the typical mediocre developer who has struggled for their entire career, never investing in acquiring deep understanding of how things work, and who is making guesses when attempting to fix things, later blaming the magic behind them. For those people the magic of LLMs is just the same, they are comfortable with it, and will be giving the same excuses that they are used to, even more so now.

benreesman 1y ago

I'm squarely in the latter group and I just don't think of it in like/dislike terms: I think of it as a rapidly changing (though beginning to converge) set of new tools in a toolbox that only ever grows. In particular its in the code generation / code validation subtoolbox that already included IDL compilers, emacs macros, type systems / proof assistants, code review, and others. It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier. This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.

Aurornis 1y ago

There are multiple vocal groups on the Internet about vibe coding. I don’t think any of them really capture the average use case. Most of the people I know use use AI coding tools do so selectively. They pick the right tool for the job and they aren’t hesitant to switch or try different modes. Whenever I see someone declare that the other side is dead or useless (manual programming or AI coding) it feels like they’re just picking sides in a personal preference or ideology war.

Kiro 1y ago

I didn't understand which group was supposed to be which until the very last point, so I don't think you're correct. In my personal network, the most senior people with lots of programming experience have the most positive attitude and seem to be more pragmatic about it in general.

iamflimflam1 1y ago
This is my experience as well. Occasionally when using code tools - I do actually feel like a 10x engineer. I’ve got sufficient experience to know what I want and to correct course when needed. And I can dive into the code and help when needed. It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
hakunin 1y ago
Couple of questions: the most senior people in your personal network — are they hands-on _lately_? And are they ~>25y experience? If it's a no to either, I took those into account.

NitpickLawyer 1y ago

I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more. Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later. I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.

yahoozoo 1y ago
The models themselves seem to be plateauing with the companies behind them shifting to additional products on top of them. It seemed like a weekly occurrence we would get a new model from the top dogs.
- MattGaiser 1y ago
  The models are plateauing, but unlike humans, a certain amount of brute force testing of their output is fine. They can just iterate until they succeed.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Kinda. While it's possible to do that, you've got an exponential cost increase for linear improvements — scale from a case where an AI makes 1 mistake to 2, double the output cost, 3 mistakes double again, 4 mistakes double again, etc.
    - serf 1y ago
      Smart caching fixes a lot of the issues there. If a fork is marked somehow as successful then presumably the cache lookup next time will be less painful/costly. Of course that's dependent on how caching gets implemented/where/when/how, but it's not unsolvable for common occurrence questions/answers. As for getting the SOTA questions wrong : we as humans would likely also go through an iterative feedback loop until initial success and experience, too.

crawshaw 1y ago

I first got paid to code 25 years ago. I have been programming since I was a kid, and always will. I love making computers do things. I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI). It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them. But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.

kasey_junk 1y ago

I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai. Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts? Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine? I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.

tjr 1y ago

I am finding that I really like AI for tasks I don't want to do, and am annoyed by it for tasks I enjoy. A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork. (I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)

msgodel 1y ago

I love programming but I don't really enjoy figuring out how to consume other people's APIs. The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained. When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.

fragmede 1y ago

It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.) So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have. As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.

KoolKat23 1y ago

Not development related but I have plenty of colleagues that take pleasure in the mundane. Small easy dopamine hits I guess.

ben_w 1y ago

I don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata. I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of. Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1]. [0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that. [1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.

karmakurtisaani 1y ago
> They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it. With an attitude like this, they would suck as a colleague regardless of profession.

ok123456 1y ago

I genuinely enjoy programming, but I don't enjoy doing maintenance programming on other people's horrible code. This is the sort of thing no one wants to do and leads to burnout. The AI won't get burnt out going through a static analysis output and simplifying code, running tests, then rerunning the analysis for hours and hours at a time.

sarchertech 1y ago
Unfortunately we have no agreed upon metrics for simplified code. And we have no realistic way of taking a drastically refactored application that was the result of hours of changes by an LLM and being confident that it doesn’t introduce bugs or remove load bearing bugs. Static analysis and test suites aren’t good enough for pushing very large changes to production.
- ok123456 1y ago
  We have metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, the number of arguments, and the number of lines in a given method/function/file. These are usually fine to find the festering portions. We also have no realistic way of being confident that letting a coworker/junior/intern make hours of changes will confidently not introduce bugs or load-bearing bugs.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    Reducing cyclomatic complexity says very little about what we care about when we talk about simple code. It’s very possible, even likely to produce code with fewer branches that is much harder to reason about. Cyclomatic complexity says almost nothing about architectural complexity. There’s a reason talking about cyclomatic complexity fell out of favor 20-30 years ago. We tried using it as a software quality metric and it failed. There are no good, widely agreed upon metrics for software quality. An optimizer that tries to reduce lines of code per function or file is going to overfit to the specific version of the system at the expense of readability and maintainability. Both of these metrics will likely ensure you do the exact opposite of what you’d really want when you say you want to simplify the code. >coworker/junior/intern I would never in a million years allow anyone to go off by themselves and spend hours and hours unsupervised changing tens of thousands of lines of code with no goal but to simplify the code.

hakunin 1y ago

I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.

bdangubic 1y ago

I am both 1) and 2) and totally in love with AI dev… I am just one soul of course, your general observation might be right. With 3 decades under my belt in the industry I can tell you on trait that THE BEST SWEs ALL have - laziness… if I had to manually do something 3 times, that shit is getting automated… AI dev took automation of mundane parts of our work to another level and I don’t think I could ever code without it anymore

unshavedyak 1y ago

I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it. I use Claude Code for two primary reasons: 1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind. 2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea. Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.

Swizec 1y ago

> To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev: > 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day) > 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) > I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups. I’ve been programming for almost 30 years. Started when I was 9 years old and I’ve been looking at code pretty much every day since then. I love AI coding and leading teams. Because I love solving big problems. Bigger than I can do on my own. For me htat’s the fun part. The code itself is just a tool.

bgwalter 1y ago

OP is not a programmer and the comment is the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811 There's nothing wrong with not being a programmer, but it is still kind of funny that "hackers" and their backers approve the script kiddie way by voting. I don't think the 2) category is universal. There are many people in that category who know that following corporate hype will be rewarded, but I'm not sure they all like vibe coding.

stavros 1y ago

It's not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.

hakunin 1y ago
You're probably right, but this dividing line only became prominent now that AI coding agents polarized the community across it. This in itself is interesting to me.
- stavros 1y ago
  Yes, definitely, I just mean that all the groups can be condensed down to those two.
  - hakunin 1y ago
    I guess there are some who would've enjoyed coding, but circumstances pulled them away from it. The word "intimacy" comes to mind. If you lose intimate relationship with code writing (or never gain one), you will be more okay with AI. Perhaps I'm trying to point out that sometimes you lose it accidentally, while still instinctively thinking that you enjoy writing code.

serf 1y ago

like any attempt to categorize humans, it falls shorts on many exceptions. I've been at what I do for 32+ years now, I love programming and I havent stopped since I started. I love claude code. Why? It increases discoverability in ways far and beyond what a search engine would normally do for me. It gets rid of the need to learn a new documentation format and API for every single project that has different requirements. It makes it less painful to write and deal with languages that represent minor common current trends that will be gone by next year. I no longer have to think about what a waste of time onboarding for ReactCoreElectronChromium is when it'll be gone next year when Googlesoftzon Co folds and throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Melatonic 1y ago

I would say somewhat correct but your own bias might be coming through a tiny bit here :-) I think it more comes down to one of your last points. It's not necessarily a difference specifically in who likes to use "AI" or not - in my experience there's just a different class of tech workers between new and old. On one extreme you have the old greybeard maintaining mainframe systems with obscure COBOL niches that LLMs won't ever have insight into. On the other end you have people working on the latest shiny thing. I don't think it comes down to money or love for the actual work - I know plenty of people invested in the math behind AI and how it might help them be more efficient coders. The divide (if we should even call it that) already existed in the way these two groups approach tech - AI and LLMs has just made it more obvious.

groby_b 1y ago

I think you're wrong with those groups. I'll use myself as counterexample, but I know a sufficiently large number of people like me who also love AI to suggest the pattern's wrong. Programming for 4 decades, happy to language lawyer with my C++ compiler, and love puzzle solving. And yet, I see AI as a tremendous gift. It's brought back the early exploratory feeling and joy. It's also taken care of a lot of tedium (no, migrating to a new library/api never was fun) And, best of all, how to use AI well/correctly to produce prod quality code is one of the biggest puzzles out there. It's a great time! But I don't think your characterization is entirely wrong, because the 'Ugh! AI!" continent is indeed strong in your second group. Specifically, people who have that long seniority and enjoyed being "the expert" - i.e more knowledgeable about a topic than many. AI is compressing that gap.

attackula 1y ago

I'd agree with this assessment overall. It's got flavors of an age-old debate that comes up any time a new efficiency arises between the people who value the efficiency and those who value the process (eat a nutrition bar vs. cook a meal, drive instead of walk, etc.) People quickly divide into camps, but I think the healthiest (albeit boring) view is that the tech is good for certain efficiencies, and you have to choose if you prefer the speed you gain over joy of the activity, which probably varies day-to-day. I love the walk to my local grocery store in the mornings because I enjoy the sunshine and exercise. I'm getting in my car the second I'm in a rush though. In the same way I love programming and software engineering, so if I've got the time I'm going to dig into coding. Under deadline to do an annoying legacy migration from an obscure language? Hello Claude Code :)