20 ms·

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. That's my "fire". But I've met so many people who doesn't care an iota about sharing what they built with others, it matters nothing to them. I guess the conclusion is, not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.

frizlab 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. Exactly me.
- amelius 10mo ago
  Same. However, for me the fun in programming was always a kind of trap that kept me from doing more challenging things. Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
  - DrewADesign 10mo ago
    You might be surprised to find out how much of your motivation to do any of it at all was tied to your enjoyment, and that’s much more difficult to overcome than people realize.
  - hxugufjfjf 10mo ago
    My problem was the exact opposite. I wanted to deliver but the dislike of the actual programming / typing code prevented me from doing so. AI has solved this for me.
  - 12_throw_away 10mo ago
    > Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work. This is a very sad, bleak, and utilitarian view of "work." It is also simply not how humans operate. Even if you only care about the product, humans that enjoy and take pride in what they're doing almost invariably produce better products that their customers like more.
- judahmeek 10mo ago
  That's because physical programming ing is a ritual. I'm not entirely sure what that means myself, so please speak up if my statement resonates with you.
  - hackable_sand 10mo ago
    Corporations trying to "invent" agi is like that boss in bloodborne
  - kaffekaka 10mo ago
    It resonates. But as I see it, that kind of ritual I rather devote myself to at home. At work, the more efficient and rapidly we can get stuff dobe, the better. Drawing and painting is a ritual to me as well. No one pays me for it and I am happy about that.
- tarsinge 10mo ago
  Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.
- etra0 10mo ago
  Same for me, sadly. One of the reasons why I learned vim was because I enjoy staying in the keyboard; I'm a fast typer and part of the fun is typing out the code I'm thinking. I can see how some folks only really like seeing the final product rather than the process of building it but I'm just not cut for that — I hate entrepreneurship for the same reason, I enjoy the building part more than the end. And it's the part that's killing me with all this hype.
martin-t 10mo ago
> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's about the self-improvement.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. Well, it's both, for different people, seemingly :) I also like the understanding and solving something difficult, that rewards a really strong part of my brain. But I don't always like to spend 5 hours in doing so, especially when I'm doing that because of some other problem I want to solve. Then I just want it solved ideally. But then other days I engage in problems that are hard because they are hard, and because I want to spend 5 hours thinking about, designing the perfect solution for it and so on. Different moments call for different methods, and particularly people seem to widely favor different methods too, which makes sense.
- svara 10mo ago
  We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as challenging as a maths textbook. It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work. It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the basic concepts. Many projects do have a kernel of non-obvious innovation, some have a lot of it, and by all means, do think deeply about these parts. That's your job. But if an LLM can do the clerical work for you? What's not to celebrate about that? To make it concrete with an example: the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate. I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding and I would consider doing that myself a terrible use of my time considering all the other things I could be doing. The alternative wasn't to have a much better TUI, but to not have any.
dist-epoch 10mo ago
It's just a reiteration of the age-old conflict in arts: - making art as you thing it should be, but at the risk of it being non-commercial - getting paid for doing commercial/trendy art choose one
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Yeah, but I guess wider. It's like the discussion would turn into "Don't use oil colors, then you don't get to do the fun process of mixing water and color together to get it just perfect" while maybe some artists don't think that's the fun process, and all the other categories, all mixed together, and everyone think their reason of doing it is the reason most people do it.
- FergusArgyll 10mo ago
  It's not. It's: - Making art because you enjoy working with paint - Making art because you enjoy looking at the painting afterward
  - krapp 10mo ago
    [flagged]
- smokel 10mo ago
  I've given this quite some thought and came to the conclusion that there is actually no choice, and all parties fall into the first category. It's just that some people intrinsically like working on commercial themes, or happen to be trendy. Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions, and for these a little nudging towards either might influence things. But for most artists, their ideas or techniques are simply not relevant to a larger audience.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > and all parties fall into the first category [...] Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions I'm not sure what your background is, but there are definitly artists out there drawing, painting and creating art they have absolutely zero care for, or even actively is against or don't like, but they do it anyways because it's easier to actually get paid doing those things, than others. Take a look in the current internet art community and ask how many artists are actively liking the situation of most of their art commissions being "furry lewd art", vs how many commissions they get for that specific niche, as just one example. History has lots of other examples, where artists typically have a day-job of "Art I do but do not care for" and then like the programmer, hack on what they actually care about outside of "work".
loubbrad 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer... Reminds me of this excerpt from Richard Hamming's book: > Finally, a more complete, and more useful, Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) was devised—after more years than you are apt to believe during which most programmers continued their heroic absolute binary programming. At the time SAP first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff”, and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly. Yes! Programmers wanted no part of it, though when pressed they had to admit their old methods used more machine time in locating and fixing up errors than the SAP program ever used. One of the main complaints was when using a symbolic system you do not know where anything was in storage—though in the early days we supplied a mapping of symbolic to actual storage, and believe it or not they later lovingly pored over such sheets rather than realize they did not need to know that information if they stuck to operating within the system—no! When correcting errors they preferred to do it in absolute binary addresses.
- layer8 10mo ago
  I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that. You can’t reason with precision anymore about how what you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that removes the “fun” for a substantial portion of the developer workforce.
  - convolvatron 10mo ago
    its not not about fun. when I'm going through the actual process of writing a function, I think about design issues. about how things are named, about how the errors from this function flow up. about how scheduling is happening. about how memory is managed. I compare the code to my ideal, and this is the time where I realize that my ideal is flawed or incomplete. I think alot of us dont get everything specced out up front, we see how things fit, and adjust accordingly. most of the really good ideas I've had were not formulated in the abstract, but realizations had in the process of spelling things out. I have a process, and it works for me. Different people certainly have other ones, and other goals. But maybe stop telling me that instead of interacting with the compiler directly its absolutely necessary that instead I describe what I want to a well meaning idiot, and patiently correct them, even though they are going to forget everything I just said in a moment.
zahlman 10mo ago
Indeed. My response was: actually, no, if I think about it I really don't think it was "building" at all. I would have started fewer things, and seen them through more consistently, if it were about "building". I think it has far more to do with personal expression. ("Solving a problem for others" also resonates, but I think I implement that more by tutoring and mentoring.)
phicoh 10mo ago
The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Depends on what you do. When I'm using LLMs to generate code for projects I need to maintain (basically, everything non-throw-away-once-used), I treat it as any other code I'd write, tightly controlled with a focus on simplicity and well-thought out abstractions, and automated testing that verify what needs to be working. Nothing gets "merged" into the code without extensive review, and me understanding the full scope of the change. So with that, I can change the code by hand afterwards or continue with LLMs, it makes no difference, because it's essentially the same process as if I had someone follow the ideas I describe, and then later they come back with a PR. I think probably this comes naturally to senior programmers and those who had a taste of management and similar positions, but if you haven't reviewed other's code before, I'm not sure how well this process can actually work. At least for me, I manage to produce code I can maintain, and seemingly others to, and they don't devolve into hairballs/spaghetti. But again, requires reviewing absolutely every line and constantly edit/improve.
  - phicoh 10mo ago
    We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI. The problem is, that code would require a massive amount of cleanup. I took a brief look and some code was in the wrong place. There were coding style issues, etc. In my experience, the easy part is getting something that works for 99%. The hard part is getting the architecture right, all of the interfaces and making sure there are no corner cases that get the wrong results. I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help with the rest?
    - simonw 10mo ago
globalnode 10mo ago
yep theres all types of people. i get hung up on the structure and shape of a source file, like its a piece of art. if it looks ugly, even if it works, i dont like it. ive seen some llm code that i like the shape of but i wouldnt like to use it verbatim since i didnt create it.
skybrian 10mo ago
I think it’s true that people get enjoyment from different things. Also, I wonder if people have fixed ideas about how coding agents can be used? For example, if you care about what the code looks like and want to work on readability, test coverage, and other “code health” tasks with a coding agent, you can do that. It’s up to you whether you ask it to do cleanup tasks or implement new features. Maybe there are people who are about literally typing the code, but I get satisfaction from making the codebase nice and neat, and now I have power tools. I am just working on small personal projects, but so far, Claude Opus 4.5 can do any refactoring I can describe.
omnicognate 10mo ago
> do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer and from the first line of the article: > I love writing software, line by line. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck. Last time I commented this on HN, I said something like "if an AI could pluck these abstract ideas from my head and turn them into code, eliminating the typing part, I'd be an enthusiastic adopter", to which someone predictably said something like "but that's exactly what it does!". It absolutely is not, though. When I "program" away from the keyboard I form something like a mental image of the code, not of the text but of the abstract structure. I struggle to conjure actual visual imagery in my head (I "have aphantasia" as it's fashionable to say lately), which I suspect is because much of my visual cortex processes these abstract "images" of linguistic and logical structures instead. The mental "image" I form isn't some vague, underspecified thing. It corresponds directly to the exact code I will write, and the abstractions I use to compartmentalise and navigate it in my mind are the same ones that are used in the code. I typically evaluate and compare many alternative possible "images" of different approaches in my head, thinking through how they will behave at runtime, in what ways they might fail, how they will look to a person new to the codebase, how the code will evolve as people make likely future changes, how I could explain them to a colleague, etc. I "look" at this mental model of the code from many different angles and I've learned only to actually start writing it down when I get the particular feeling you get when it "looks" right from all of those angles, which is a deeply satisfying feeling that I actively seek out in my life independently of being paid for it. Then I type it out, which doesn't usually take very long. When I get to the point of "typing" my code "line by line", I don't want something that I can give a natural language description to. I have a mental image of the exact piece of logic I want, down to the details. Any departure from that is a departure from the thing that I've scrutinised from many angles and rejected many alternatives to. I want the exact piece of code that is in my head. The only way I can get that is to type it out, and that's fine. What AI provides, and it is wildly impressive, is the ability to specify what's needed in natural language and have some code generated that corresponds to it. I've used it and it really is very, very good, but it isn't what I need because it can't take that fully-specified image from my head and translate it to the exact corresponding code. Instead I have to convert that image to vague natural language, have some code generated and then carefully review it to find and fix (or have the AI fix) the many ways it inevitably departs from what I wanted. That's strictly worse than just typing out the code, and the typing doesn't even take that long anyway. I hope this helps to understand why, for me and people like me, AI coding doesn't take away the "line-by-line part" or the "typing". We can't slot it into our development process at the typing stage. To use it the way you are using it we would instead have to allow it to replace the part that happens (or can happen) away from the keyboard: the mental processing of the code. And many of us don't want to do that, for a wide variety of reasons that would take a whole other lengthy comment to get into.
jt2190 10mo ago
> … not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side. Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with fewer employees, and we’ve been seeing an outsized correction for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better; quite the opposite. But I guess managers will only realize this when it's too late: and of course they won't take any responsibility for this.
  - jt2190 10mo ago
    > I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better… That is your definition of “better”. If we’re going to trade our expertise for coin, we must ask ourselves if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care?
    - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
      > if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care? This is exactly the phenomenon of markets for "lemons": > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons (for the HN readers: a related concept is "information asymmetry in markets"). George Akerlof (the author of this paper), Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz got a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
zjzkshz 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters Do people actually spend a significant time typing? After I moved beyond the novice stage it’s been an inconsequential amount of time. What it still serves is a thorough review of every single line in a way that is essentially equivalent to what a good PR review looks like.
- zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
  Yes, for the type of work LLMs are good at (greenfield projects or lots of boilerplate).
  - hackable_sand 10mo ago
    Novice work
- conradfr 10mo ago
  Do people actually enjoy reviewing PRs? See, that also works.
AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
Dead on and well said Almost more importantly is: the people who pay you to build software, don’t care if you type or enjoy it, they pay you for an output of working software Literally nothing is stopping people from writing assembly in their free time for fun But the number of people who are getting paid to write assembly is probably less than 1000
zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.
- wpm 10mo ago
  I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output. When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse.
  - mirror_neuron 10mo ago
    I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sauercrowd 10mo ago
    > and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output. I can recommend for that problem to make the "jumps" smaller, e.g. "Add a react component for the profile section, just put a placeholder for now" instead of "add a user profile". With coding LLMs there's a bit of a hidden "zoom" functionality by doing that, which can help calibrating the speed/involvment/thinking you and the LLM does.
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will remain true. Because programming is a direct generator of business value, it has also become the backbone of many people’s livelihoods. Mortgages, families, social status, and long term security are tied to it. When a skill reliably converts into income, it stops being just a skill. It becomes a profession. And professions tend to become identities. People do not merely say “I write code.” They say “I am a software engineer,” in the same way someone says “I am a pilot” or “I am a police officer.” The identity is not accidental. Programming is culturally associated with intelligence, problem solving, and exclusivity. It has historically rewarded those who mastered it with both money and prestige. That combination makes identity attachment not just likely but inevitable. Once identity is involved, objectivity collapses. The core of the anti AI movement is not technical skepticism. It is not concern about correctness, safety, or limitations. Those arguments are surface rationalizations. The real driver is identity threat. LLMs are not merely automating tasks. They are encroaching on the very thing many people have used to define their worth. A machine that can write code, reason about systems, and generate solutions challenges the implicit belief that “this thing makes me special, irreplaceable, and valuable.” That is an existential threat, not a technical one. When identity is threatened, people do not reason. They defend. They minimize. They selectively focus on flaws. They move goalposts. They cling to outdated benchmarks and demand perfection where none was previously required. This is not unique to programmers. It is a universal human response to displacement. The loudest opponents of AI are not the weakest programmers. They are often the ones most deeply invested in the idea of being a programmer. The ones whose self concept, status, and narrative of personal merit are tightly coupled to the belief that what they do cannot be replicated by a machine. That is why the discourse feels so dishonest. It is not actually about whether LLMs are good at programming today. It is about resisting a trend line that points toward a future where the economic value of programming is increasingly detached from human identity. This is not a moral failing. It is a psychological one. But pretending it is something else only delays adaptation. AI is not attacking programming. It is attacking the assumption that a lucrative skill entitles its holder to permanence. The resistance is not to the technology itself, but to the loss of a story people tell themselves about who they are and why they matter. That is the real conflict. HN is littered with people facing this conflict.
BananaaRepublik 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer... This sounds like an alien trying and failing to describe why people like creating things. No, the typing of characters in a keyboard has no special meaning, neither does dragging a brush across a canvas or pulling thread through fabric. It's the primitive desire to create something by your own hands. Have people using AI magically lost all understanding of creativity or creation, everything has to be utilitarian and business?
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  My entire point is that people are different. For some people (read through the other comments), it's quite literally about typing of characters, or dragging a brush across the canvas. Sure, that might not be the point for you, but my entire point of my comment is that just because it's "obviously because of X" for you, that doesn't mean it's like that for others. Sometimes I like to make music because I have an idea of the final results, and I wanna hear it like that. Other times, I make music because I like the feeling of turning a knob, and striking keys at just the right moment, and it gives me a feeling of satisfaction. For others, they want to share an emotion via music. Does this mean someone of us are "making music for the wrong reasons"? I'd claim no.
  - card_zero 10mo ago
    I bet you also sometimes like to make music because the final result emerges from your intimate involvement with striking keys, no? That's the suggestion.
  - Izkata 10mo ago
    No, they're right. Your description is what you get from outsiders who don't understand what they're seeing. In a creative process, when you really know your tools, you start being able to go from thought to result without really having to think about the tools. The most common example when it comes to computers would be touch-typing - when your muscle memory gets so good you don't think about the keyboard at all anymore, your hands "know" what to do to get your thoughts down. But for those of us with enough experience in the programming languages and editor/IDE we use, the same thing can happen - going from thought to code is nearly effortless, as is reading code, because we don't need to think about the layers in between anymore. But this only works when those tools are reliable, when we know they'll do exactly what we expect. AI tooling isn't reliable: It introduces two lossy translation layers (thought -> English and English -> code) and a bunch of waiting in the middle that breaks any flow. With faster computers maybe we can eliminate the waiting, but the reliability just isn't there. This applies to music, painting, all sorts of creative things. Sure there's prep time beforehand with physical creation like painting, but when someone really gets into the flow it's the same: they're not having to think about the tools so much as getting their thoughts into the end result. The tools "disappear". > Other times, I make music because I like the feeling of turning a knob, and striking keys at just the right moment, and it gives me a feeling of satisfaction. But I'll bet you're not thinking about "I like turning this knob" at the moment you're doing it, I'll bet you're thinking "Increase the foo" (and if you're like me it's probably more liking knowing that fact without forming the words) and the knob's immediate visceral feedback is where the satisfaction comes from because you're increasing the foo without having to think about how to do it - in part because of how reliable it is.
a022311 10mo ago
I think both of you are correct. LLMs do empower you (and by "you" I mean the reader or any other person from now on) to actually complete projects you need in the very limited free time and have available. Manually coding the same could take months (I'm speaking from experience developing a personal project for about 3 hours every Friday and there's still much to be done). In a professional context, you're being paid to ship and AI can help you grow an idea to an MVP and then to a full implementation in record-breaking time. At the end of the day, you're satisfied because you built something useful and helped your company. You probably also used your problem solving skills. Programming is also a hobby though. The whole process matters too. I'm one of the people who feels incredible joy when achieving a goal, knowing that I completed every step in the process with my own knowledge and skills. I know that I went from an idea to a complete design based on everything I know and probably learned a few new things too. I typed the variable names, I worked hard on the project for a long time and I'm finally seeing the fruits of my effort. I proudly share it with other people who may need the same and can attest its high quality (or low quality if it was a stupid script I hastily threw together, but anyway sharing is caring —the point is that I actually know what I've written). The experience of writing that same code with an LLM will leave you feeling a bit empty. You're happy with the result: it does everything you wanted and you can easily extend it when you feel like it. But you didn't write the code, someone else did. You just reviewed an intern's work and gave feedback. Sometimes that's indeed what you want. You may need a tool for your job or your daily life, but you aren't too interested in the internals. AI is truly great for that. I can't reach a better conclusion than the parent comment, everyone is unique and enjoys coding in a different way. You should always find a chance to code the way you want, it'll help maintain your self-esteem and make your life interesting. Don't be afraid of new technologies where they can help you though.
Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. I've "vibe coded" a ton of stuff and so I'm pretty bullish on LLMs, but I don't see a world where "coding by hand" isn't still required for at least some subset of software. I don't know what that subset will be, but I'm convinced it will exist, and so there will be ample opportunities for programmers who like that sort of thing. --- Why am I convinced hand-coding won't go away? Well, technically I lied, I have no idea what the future holds. However, it seems to me that an AI which could code literally anything under the sun would almost by definition be that mythical AGI. It would need to have an almost perfect understanding of human language and the larger world. An AI like that wouldn't just be great at coding, it would be great at everything! It would be the end of the economy, and scarcity. In which case, you could still program by hand all you wanted because you wouldn't need to work for a living, so do whatever brings you joy. So even without making predictions about what the limitations of AI will ultimately be, it seems to me you'll be able to keep programming by hand regardless.
- esafak 10mo ago
  I don't see how an AGI coder will end scarcity; it will simply debase knowledge work. Physical things we need, like housing, are still scarce.
  - Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
    The AGI can build robots that build houses. It has a virtually unlimited amount of working time to dedicate to the robotics engineering problems. We'd still be limited to some extent by raw materials and land but it would be much less significant.
    - esafak 10mo ago
      That can trim costs but not drive it to zero. If you assume that the computer is going to do all the work, won't your salary erode, making it harder for you to afford scarce things?
jcheng 10mo ago
> For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.
- senordevnyc 10mo ago
  Yeah, I'd put myself in this camp. My trust is slowly going up, and coupled with improved guardrails (more tests, static analysis, refactoring to make reviewing easier), that increasing trust is giving me more and more speed at going from thought ("hmm, I should change how this feature works to be like X") to deployment into the hands of my customers.
irthomasthomas 10mo ago
In my feed 'AI hype' outnumbers 'anti-AI hype' 5-1. And anti-hype moderates like antirez and simonw are rare. To be a radical in ai is to believe that ai tools offer a modest but growing net positive utility to a modest but growing subset of hackers and professionals
- kaffekaka 10mo ago
  Well put. AI obviously brings big benefits into the profession. We just have not seen exactly what they are just yet. How it will unfold. But personally I feel that a future of not having to churn out yet another crud app is attractive.
  - catlifeonmars 10mo ago
    In theory “not having to churn out yet another crud app” doesn’t require AI, any ol code generator will do. AI is a really expensive way (in terms of gpus/tpus) to generate boilerplate, but as long as that cost is massively subsidized by investors, you may as well use it.
    - kaffekaka 10mo ago
      I agree, we (or I) should have gotten out of this earlier. Shame on me, really. But LLM:s have lowered the threshold.
- never_inline 10mo ago
  The only AI bloggers who don't have something to sell seems to be simonw, the flask guy, and this redis guy. Any other blog recommendations from HN?
  - erk__ 10mo ago
    tbh I think it is just a question about time before flask guy has something to sell: https://earendil.com/ https://earendil.com/
tracerbulletx 10mo ago
For me its the feeling of true understanding and discovery. Not just of how the computer works, but how whatever problem domain I'm making software for works. It's model building and simulation of the world. To the degree I can use the LLM to teach me to solve the problem better than I could before I like it, to the degree it takes over and obscures the understanding from me, I despise it. I don't love computers because of how fast I can create shareholder value, that's for sure.
colordrops 10mo ago
The split I'm seeing with those around me is: 1. Those who see their codebase as a sculpture, a work of art, a source of pride 2. Those who focus on outcomes. They are not contradictory goals, but I'm finding that if your emphasis is 1, you general dislike LLMs, and if your emphasis is 2, you love them, or at least tolerate them.
- epolanski 10mo ago
  Why would you dislike LLMs for 1? I have my personal projects where every single line if authored by hand. Still, I will ask LLMs for feedback or look for ideas when I have the feeling something could be rearchitected/improved but I don't see how. More often than not, they fluke, but occasionally they will still provide valid feedback which otherwise I'd missed. LLMs aren't just for the "lets dump large amounts of lower-level work" use case.
  - colordrops 10mo ago
    I don't disagree with you - LLMs are not at odds with quality code if you use them correctly. But many people who take excessive pride in their code don't even bother to look and see what can be done with them. Though, in the last couple months, I have seen several of the (1) types around me finally try them.
jacquesm 10mo ago
> For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. Talk about a good thing coming from bad intentions! Congratulations on shaking that demon.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- nuky 10mo ago
  [dead]
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  It's pointless these days because most web sites are pre-ruined. ;)
singingbard 10mo ago
[dead]
notatoad 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer but luckily for us, we can still do that, and it's just as fun as it ever was. LLMs don't take anything away from the fun of actually writing code, unless you choose to let them. if anything the LLMs make it more fun, because the boring bits can now be farmed out while you work on the fun bits. no, i don't really want to make another CRUD UI, but if the project i'm working on needs one i can just let claude code do that for me while i go back to working on the stuff that's actually interesting.
- rowanajmarshall 10mo ago
  I think the downside is the developers who love the action of coding managed to accomplish several things at once - they got to code, and create things, and get paid lots for doing it. AI coding makes creating things far more efficient (as long as you use AI), and will likely mean you don't get paid much (unless you use AI). You can still code for the fun of it, but you don't get the ancillary benefits.
paulcole 10mo ago
Who’s saying you can’t enjoy the typing of letters, numbers, and symbols into a computer? The issue is that this is getting to be a less economically valuable activity. You wouldn’t say, “It’s not that they hate electricity it’s just that they love harpooning whales and dying in the icy North Atlantic.” You can love it all you want but people won’t pay you to do it like they used to in the good old days.
abustamam 10mo ago
I think all programmers are like LEGO builders. But different programmers will see each brick as a different kind of abstraction. A hacker kind of programmer may see each line of code as a brick. An architect kind of programmer may see different services as a brick. An entrepreneur kind of programmer may see entire applications as a brick. These aren't mutually exclusive, of course. But we all just like to build things, the abstractions we use to build them just differ.
- MattSayar 10mo ago
  This is exactly the way I see it. You can always get better performance at lower levels of abstraction, but there are trade-offs. Sometimes the trade-offs are worth it (like building bigger things), and sometimes they aren't (it's a buggy mess).
pxc 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer. I don't think this is really it for many people (maybe any); after all, you can do all of that when writing a text message rather than a piece of code. But it inches closer to what I think is the "right answer" for this type of software developer. There are aspects of software development that are very much like other forms of writing (e.g., prose or poetry). Like other writing, writing code can constitute self-expression in an inherently satisfying way, and it can also offer the satisfaction of finding "the perfect phrase". LLMs more or less eliminate both sources of pleasure, either by eliminating the act of writing itself (that is, choosing and refining the words) or through their bland, generic, tasteless style. There are other ways that LLMs can disconnect the people using them from what is joyful about writing code, not least of all because LLMs can be used in a lot of different ways. (Using them as search tools or otherwise consulting them rather than having them commit code to simply be either accepted/rejected "solves" the specific problems I just mentioned, for instance.) There is something magical about speaking motion into existence, which is part of what has made programming feel special to me, ever since I was a kid. In a way, prompting an LLM to generate working code preserves that and I can imagine how, for some, it even seems to magnify the magic. But there is also a sense of essential mastery involved in the wonderful way code brings ideas to life. That mastery involves not just "understanding" things in the cursory way involved in visually scanning someone else's code and thinking "looks good to me", but intimately knowing how the words and abstractions and effects all "line up" and relate to each other (and hopefully also with the project's requirements). That feeling of mastery is itself one of the joys of writing code. Without that mastery, you also lose one of the second-order joys of writing code that many here have already mentioned in these comments: flow. Delegation means fumbling in a way that working in your own context just doesn't. :-\
catlifeonmars 10mo ago
I’m better at code than prose, so coding via an agent is frustrating. Rather than multiple attempts to achieve the desired results, I’d rather just write in once, with the precision and nuance that I want. I’d be interested to try a “dueling pianos” style approach where I can cooperate with an agent indirectly through the code, rather than a lower fidelity option.
gspr 10mo ago
> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. I know you didn't mean to, but I think that description is a mischaracterization. I'd wager most of us "I control the computer" people who enjoy crafting software don't really care for the actual imputation of symbols. That is just the mechanism by which we move code from our heads to the computer. What LLMs destroy – at least for me – is the creation of code in my head and its (more-or-less) faithful replication inside the computer. I don't particularly enjoy the physical act of moving my fingers across a piece of plastic, but I do enjoy the result executing my program on my computer. If an LLM is placed in the middle, two things happen: first, I'm expressing the _idea_ of my program not to a computer, but to an LLM; and second, the LLM expresses its "interpretation" of that idea to the computer. Both parts destroy joy for me. That's of course not important to anyone but myself and likeminded people, and I don't expect the world to care. But I do also believe that both parts come with a whole host of dangers that make the end result less trustworthy and less maintainable over time. I'm definitely warming to the role of LLMs as critics though. I also see value in having them write tests – the worst a bad or unmaintainable test will provide is a false error.
barrenko 10mo ago
Yeah, not all painters were happy with the transition to photography.
matwood 10mo ago
Good points. I'm a 'solve the problem' person, so rarely get into language wars, editor wars, etc... I just don't care as long as the problem is solved in a way that meets the needs of the user. I've worked with all the types, and no type is wrong. For example, I can certainly appreciate the PL researcher type who wants to make everything functional, etc... I won't fight against it as long as it doesn't get in the way of solving the problem. I've also found that my style works well with the other styles because I have way of always asking "so does this solve the problem??" which is sometimes forgotten by the code is beautiful people, etc...
lelanthran 10mo ago
> For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. For the latter two, that's a minimum-wage job when LLMs produce your software, if that.
notnullorvoid 10mo ago
For me it's not the typing that is satisfying, but rather building the program in my head first, and internally validating. Describing to an LLM how to output the program I built in my head just isn't possible without taking more time than it does to write the code myself.

frizlab 10mo ago

amelius 10mo ago
Same. However, for me the fun in programming was always a kind of trap that kept me from doing more challenging things. Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  You might be surprised to find out how much of your motivation to do any of it at all was tied to your enjoyment, and that’s much more difficult to overcome than people realize.
- hxugufjfjf 10mo ago
  My problem was the exact opposite. I wanted to deliver but the dislike of the actual programming / typing code prevented me from doing so. AI has solved this for me.
- 12_throw_away 10mo ago
  > Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work. This is a very sad, bleak, and utilitarian view of "work." It is also simply not how humans operate. Even if you only care about the product, humans that enjoy and take pride in what they're doing almost invariably produce better products that their customers like more.
judahmeek 10mo ago
That's because physical programming ing is a ritual. I'm not entirely sure what that means myself, so please speak up if my statement resonates with you.
- hackable_sand 10mo ago
  Corporations trying to "invent" agi is like that boss in bloodborne
- kaffekaka 10mo ago
  It resonates. But as I see it, that kind of ritual I rather devote myself to at home. At work, the more efficient and rapidly we can get stuff dobe, the better. Drawing and painting is a ritual to me as well. No one pays me for it and I am happy about that.
tarsinge 10mo ago
Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.
etra0 10mo ago
Same for me, sadly. One of the reasons why I learned vim was because I enjoy staying in the keyboard; I'm a fast typer and part of the fun is typing out the code I'm thinking. I can see how some folks only really like seeing the final product rather than the process of building it but I'm just not cut for that — I hate entrepreneurship for the same reason, I enjoy the building part more than the end. And it's the part that's killing me with all this hype.

martin-t 10mo ago

> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's about the self-improvement.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. Well, it's both, for different people, seemingly :) I also like the understanding and solving something difficult, that rewards a really strong part of my brain. But I don't always like to spend 5 hours in doing so, especially when I'm doing that because of some other problem I want to solve. Then I just want it solved ideally. But then other days I engage in problems that are hard because they are hard, and because I want to spend 5 hours thinking about, designing the perfect solution for it and so on. Different moments call for different methods, and particularly people seem to widely favor different methods too, which makes sense.
svara 10mo ago
We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as challenging as a maths textbook. It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work. It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the basic concepts. Many projects do have a kernel of non-obvious innovation, some have a lot of it, and by all means, do think deeply about these parts. That's your job. But if an LLM can do the clerical work for you? What's not to celebrate about that? To make it concrete with an example: the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate. I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding and I would consider doing that myself a terrible use of my time considering all the other things I could be doing. The alternative wasn't to have a much better TUI, but to not have any.

dist-epoch 10mo ago

It's just a reiteration of the age-old conflict in arts: - making art as you thing it should be, but at the risk of it being non-commercial - getting paid for doing commercial/trendy art choose one

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Yeah, but I guess wider. It's like the discussion would turn into "Don't use oil colors, then you don't get to do the fun process of mixing water and color together to get it just perfect" while maybe some artists don't think that's the fun process, and all the other categories, all mixed together, and everyone think their reason of doing it is the reason most people do it.
FergusArgyll 10mo ago
It's not. It's: - Making art because you enjoy working with paint - Making art because you enjoy looking at the painting afterward
- krapp 10mo ago
  [flagged]
smokel 10mo ago
I've given this quite some thought and came to the conclusion that there is actually no choice, and all parties fall into the first category. It's just that some people intrinsically like working on commercial themes, or happen to be trendy. Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions, and for these a little nudging towards either might influence things. But for most artists, their ideas or techniques are simply not relevant to a larger audience.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > and all parties fall into the first category [...] Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions I'm not sure what your background is, but there are definitly artists out there drawing, painting and creating art they have absolutely zero care for, or even actively is against or don't like, but they do it anyways because it's easier to actually get paid doing those things, than others. Take a look in the current internet art community and ask how many artists are actively liking the situation of most of their art commissions being "furry lewd art", vs how many commissions they get for that specific niche, as just one example. History has lots of other examples, where artists typically have a day-job of "Art I do but do not care for" and then like the programmer, hack on what they actually care about outside of "work".

loubbrad 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer... Reminds me of this excerpt from Richard Hamming's book: > Finally, a more complete, and more useful, Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) was devised—after more years than you are apt to believe during which most programmers continued their heroic absolute binary programming. At the time SAP first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff”, and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly. Yes! Programmers wanted no part of it, though when pressed they had to admit their old methods used more machine time in locating and fixing up errors than the SAP program ever used. One of the main complaints was when using a symbolic system you do not know where anything was in storage—though in the early days we supplied a mapping of symbolic to actual storage, and believe it or not they later lovingly pored over such sheets rather than realize they did not need to know that information if they stuck to operating within the system—no! When correcting errors they preferred to do it in absolute binary addresses.

layer8 10mo ago
I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that. You can’t reason with precision anymore about how what you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that removes the “fun” for a substantial portion of the developer workforce.
- convolvatron 10mo ago
  its not not about fun. when I'm going through the actual process of writing a function, I think about design issues. about how things are named, about how the errors from this function flow up. about how scheduling is happening. about how memory is managed. I compare the code to my ideal, and this is the time where I realize that my ideal is flawed or incomplete. I think alot of us dont get everything specced out up front, we see how things fit, and adjust accordingly. most of the really good ideas I've had were not formulated in the abstract, but realizations had in the process of spelling things out. I have a process, and it works for me. Different people certainly have other ones, and other goals. But maybe stop telling me that instead of interacting with the compiler directly its absolutely necessary that instead I describe what I want to a well meaning idiot, and patiently correct them, even though they are going to forget everything I just said in a moment.

zahlman 10mo ago

Indeed. My response was: actually, no, if I think about it I really don't think it was "building" at all. I would have started fewer things, and seen them through more consistently, if it were about "building". I think it has far more to do with personal expression. ("Solving a problem for others" also resonates, but I think I implement that more by tutoring and mentoring.)

phicoh 10mo ago

The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Depends on what you do. When I'm using LLMs to generate code for projects I need to maintain (basically, everything non-throw-away-once-used), I treat it as any other code I'd write, tightly controlled with a focus on simplicity and well-thought out abstractions, and automated testing that verify what needs to be working. Nothing gets "merged" into the code without extensive review, and me understanding the full scope of the change. So with that, I can change the code by hand afterwards or continue with LLMs, it makes no difference, because it's essentially the same process as if I had someone follow the ideas I describe, and then later they come back with a PR. I think probably this comes naturally to senior programmers and those who had a taste of management and similar positions, but if you haven't reviewed other's code before, I'm not sure how well this process can actually work. At least for me, I manage to produce code I can maintain, and seemingly others to, and they don't devolve into hairballs/spaghetti. But again, requires reviewing absolutely every line and constantly edit/improve.
- phicoh 10mo ago
  We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI. The problem is, that code would require a massive amount of cleanup. I took a brief look and some code was in the wrong place. There were coding style issues, etc. In my experience, the easy part is getting something that works for 99%. The hard part is getting the architecture right, all of the interfaces and making sure there are no corner cases that get the wrong results. I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help with the rest?
  - simonw 10mo ago

globalnode 10mo ago

yep theres all types of people. i get hung up on the structure and shape of a source file, like its a piece of art. if it looks ugly, even if it works, i dont like it. ive seen some llm code that i like the shape of but i wouldnt like to use it verbatim since i didnt create it.

skybrian 10mo ago

I think it’s true that people get enjoyment from different things. Also, I wonder if people have fixed ideas about how coding agents can be used? For example, if you care about what the code looks like and want to work on readability, test coverage, and other “code health” tasks with a coding agent, you can do that. It’s up to you whether you ask it to do cleanup tasks or implement new features. Maybe there are people who are about literally typing the code, but I get satisfaction from making the codebase nice and neat, and now I have power tools. I am just working on small personal projects, but so far, Claude Opus 4.5 can do any refactoring I can describe.

omnicognate 10mo ago

> do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer and from the first line of the article: > I love writing software, line by line. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck. Last time I commented this on HN, I said something like "if an AI could pluck these abstract ideas from my head and turn them into code, eliminating the typing part, I'd be an enthusiastic adopter", to which someone predictably said something like "but that's exactly what it does!". It absolutely is not, though. When I "program" away from the keyboard I form something like a mental image of the code, not of the text but of the abstract structure. I struggle to conjure actual visual imagery in my head (I "have aphantasia" as it's fashionable to say lately), which I suspect is because much of my visual cortex processes these abstract "images" of linguistic and logical structures instead. The mental "image" I form isn't some vague, underspecified thing. It corresponds directly to the exact code I will write, and the abstractions I use to compartmentalise and navigate it in my mind are the same ones that are used in the code. I typically evaluate and compare many alternative possible "images" of different approaches in my head, thinking through how they will behave at runtime, in what ways they might fail, how they will look to a person new to the codebase, how the code will evolve as people make likely future changes, how I could explain them to a colleague, etc. I "look" at this mental model of the code from many different angles and I've learned only to actually start writing it down when I get the particular feeling you get when it "looks" right from all of those angles, which is a deeply satisfying feeling that I actively seek out in my life independently of being paid for it. Then I type it out, which doesn't usually take very long. When I get to the point of "typing" my code "line by line", I don't want something that I can give a natural language description to. I have a mental image of the exact piece of logic I want, down to the details. Any departure from that is a departure from the thing that I've scrutinised from many angles and rejected many alternatives to. I want the exact piece of code that is in my head. The only way I can get that is to type it out, and that's fine. What AI provides, and it is wildly impressive, is the ability to specify what's needed in natural language and have some code generated that corresponds to it. I've used it and it really is very, very good, but it isn't what I need because it can't take that fully-specified image from my head and translate it to the exact corresponding code. Instead I have to convert that image to vague natural language, have some code generated and then carefully review it to find and fix (or have the AI fix) the many ways it inevitably departs from what I wanted. That's strictly worse than just typing out the code, and the typing doesn't even take that long anyway. I hope this helps to understand why, for me and people like me, AI coding doesn't take away the "line-by-line part" or the "typing". We can't slot it into our development process at the typing stage. To use it the way you are using it we would instead have to allow it to replace the part that happens (or can happen) away from the keyboard: the mental processing of the code. And many of us don't want to do that, for a wide variety of reasons that would take a whole other lengthy comment to get into.

jt2190 10mo ago

> … not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side. Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with fewer employees, and we’ve been seeing an outsized correction for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)

aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
> Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better; quite the opposite. But I guess managers will only realize this when it's too late: and of course they won't take any responsibility for this.
- jt2190 10mo ago
  > I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better… That is your definition of “better”. If we’re going to trade our expertise for coin, we must ask ourselves if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care?
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    > if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care? This is exactly the phenomenon of markets for "lemons": > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons (for the HN readers: a related concept is "information asymmetry in markets"). George Akerlof (the author of this paper), Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz got a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.

zjzkshz 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters Do people actually spend a significant time typing? After I moved beyond the novice stage it’s been an inconsequential amount of time. What it still serves is a thorough review of every single line in a way that is essentially equivalent to what a good PR review looks like.

zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
Yes, for the type of work LLMs are good at (greenfield projects or lots of boilerplate).
- hackable_sand 10mo ago
  Novice work
conradfr 10mo ago
Do people actually enjoy reviewing PRs? See, that also works.

AndrewKemendo 10mo ago

Dead on and well said Almost more importantly is: the people who pay you to build software, don’t care if you type or enjoy it, they pay you for an output of working software Literally nothing is stopping people from writing assembly in their free time for fun But the number of people who are getting paid to write assembly is probably less than 1000

zeroonetwothree 10mo ago

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

wpm 10mo ago
I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output. When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse.
- mirror_neuron 10mo ago
  I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- sauercrowd 10mo ago
  > and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output. I can recommend for that problem to make the "jumps" smaller, e.g. "Add a react component for the profile section, just put a placeholder for now" instead of "add a user profile". With coding LLMs there's a bit of a hidden "zoom" functionality by doing that, which can help calibrating the speed/involvment/thinking you and the LLM does.

threethirtytwo 10mo ago

This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will remain true. Because programming is a direct generator of business value, it has also become the backbone of many people’s livelihoods. Mortgages, families, social status, and long term security are tied to it. When a skill reliably converts into income, it stops being just a skill. It becomes a profession. And professions tend to become identities. People do not merely say “I write code.” They say “I am a software engineer,” in the same way someone says “I am a pilot” or “I am a police officer.” The identity is not accidental. Programming is culturally associated with intelligence, problem solving, and exclusivity. It has historically rewarded those who mastered it with both money and prestige. That combination makes identity attachment not just likely but inevitable. Once identity is involved, objectivity collapses. The core of the anti AI movement is not technical skepticism. It is not concern about correctness, safety, or limitations. Those arguments are surface rationalizations. The real driver is identity threat. LLMs are not merely automating tasks. They are encroaching on the very thing many people have used to define their worth. A machine that can write code, reason about systems, and generate solutions challenges the implicit belief that “this thing makes me special, irreplaceable, and valuable.” That is an existential threat, not a technical one. When identity is threatened, people do not reason. They defend. They minimize. They selectively focus on flaws. They move goalposts. They cling to outdated benchmarks and demand perfection where none was previously required. This is not unique to programmers. It is a universal human response to displacement. The loudest opponents of AI are not the weakest programmers. They are often the ones most deeply invested in the idea of being a programmer. The ones whose self concept, status, and narrative of personal merit are tightly coupled to the belief that what they do cannot be replicated by a machine. That is why the discourse feels so dishonest. It is not actually about whether LLMs are good at programming today. It is about resisting a trend line that points toward a future where the economic value of programming is increasingly detached from human identity. This is not a moral failing. It is a psychological one. But pretending it is something else only delays adaptation. AI is not attacking programming. It is attacking the assumption that a lucrative skill entitles its holder to permanence. The resistance is not to the technology itself, but to the loss of a story people tell themselves about who they are and why they matter. That is the real conflict. HN is littered with people facing this conflict.

BananaaRepublik 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer... This sounds like an alien trying and failing to describe why people like creating things. No, the typing of characters in a keyboard has no special meaning, neither does dragging a brush across a canvas or pulling thread through fabric. It's the primitive desire to create something by your own hands. Have people using AI magically lost all understanding of creativity or creation, everything has to be utilitarian and business?

embedding-shape 10mo ago
My entire point is that people are different. For some people (read through the other comments), it's quite literally about typing of characters, or dragging a brush across the canvas. Sure, that might not be the point for you, but my entire point of my comment is that just because it's "obviously because of X" for you, that doesn't mean it's like that for others. Sometimes I like to make music because I have an idea of the final results, and I wanna hear it like that. Other times, I make music because I like the feeling of turning a knob, and striking keys at just the right moment, and it gives me a feeling of satisfaction. For others, they want to share an emotion via music. Does this mean someone of us are "making music for the wrong reasons"? I'd claim no.
- card_zero 10mo ago
  I bet you also sometimes like to make music because the final result emerges from your intimate involvement with striking keys, no? That's the suggestion.
- Izkata 10mo ago
  No, they're right. Your description is what you get from outsiders who don't understand what they're seeing. In a creative process, when you really know your tools, you start being able to go from thought to result without really having to think about the tools. The most common example when it comes to computers would be touch-typing - when your muscle memory gets so good you don't think about the keyboard at all anymore, your hands "know" what to do to get your thoughts down. But for those of us with enough experience in the programming languages and editor/IDE we use, the same thing can happen - going from thought to code is nearly effortless, as is reading code, because we don't need to think about the layers in between anymore. But this only works when those tools are reliable, when we know they'll do exactly what we expect. AI tooling isn't reliable: It introduces two lossy translation layers (thought -> English and English -> code) and a bunch of waiting in the middle that breaks any flow. With faster computers maybe we can eliminate the waiting, but the reliability just isn't there. This applies to music, painting, all sorts of creative things. Sure there's prep time beforehand with physical creation like painting, but when someone really gets into the flow it's the same: they're not having to think about the tools so much as getting their thoughts into the end result. The tools "disappear". > Other times, I make music because I like the feeling of turning a knob, and striking keys at just the right moment, and it gives me a feeling of satisfaction. But I'll bet you're not thinking about "I like turning this knob" at the moment you're doing it, I'll bet you're thinking "Increase the foo" (and if you're like me it's probably more liking knowing that fact without forming the words) and the knob's immediate visceral feedback is where the satisfaction comes from because you're increasing the foo without having to think about how to do it - in part because of how reliable it is.

a022311 10mo ago

I think both of you are correct. LLMs do empower you (and by "you" I mean the reader or any other person from now on) to actually complete projects you need in the very limited free time and have available. Manually coding the same could take months (I'm speaking from experience developing a personal project for about 3 hours every Friday and there's still much to be done). In a professional context, you're being paid to ship and AI can help you grow an idea to an MVP and then to a full implementation in record-breaking time. At the end of the day, you're satisfied because you built something useful and helped your company. You probably also used your problem solving skills. Programming is also a hobby though. The whole process matters too. I'm one of the people who feels incredible joy when achieving a goal, knowing that I completed every step in the process with my own knowledge and skills. I know that I went from an idea to a complete design based on everything I know and probably learned a few new things too. I typed the variable names, I worked hard on the project for a long time and I'm finally seeing the fruits of my effort. I proudly share it with other people who may need the same and can attest its high quality (or low quality if it was a stupid script I hastily threw together, but anyway sharing is caring —the point is that I actually know what I've written). The experience of writing that same code with an LLM will leave you feeling a bit empty. You're happy with the result: it does everything you wanted and you can easily extend it when you feel like it. But you didn't write the code, someone else did. You just reviewed an intern's work and gave feedback. Sometimes that's indeed what you want. You may need a tool for your job or your daily life, but you aren't too interested in the internals. AI is truly great for that. I can't reach a better conclusion than the parent comment, everyone is unique and enjoys coding in a different way. You should always find a chance to code the way you want, it'll help maintain your self-esteem and make your life interesting. Don't be afraid of new technologies where they can help you though.

Wowfunhappy 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. I've "vibe coded" a ton of stuff and so I'm pretty bullish on LLMs, but I don't see a world where "coding by hand" isn't still required for at least some subset of software. I don't know what that subset will be, but I'm convinced it will exist, and so there will be ample opportunities for programmers who like that sort of thing. --- Why am I convinced hand-coding won't go away? Well, technically I lied, I have no idea what the future holds. However, it seems to me that an AI which could code literally anything under the sun would almost by definition be that mythical AGI. It would need to have an almost perfect understanding of human language and the larger world. An AI like that wouldn't just be great at coding, it would be great at everything! It would be the end of the economy, and scarcity. In which case, you could still program by hand all you wanted because you wouldn't need to work for a living, so do whatever brings you joy. So even without making predictions about what the limitations of AI will ultimately be, it seems to me you'll be able to keep programming by hand regardless.

esafak 10mo ago
I don't see how an AGI coder will end scarcity; it will simply debase knowledge work. Physical things we need, like housing, are still scarce.
- Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
  The AGI can build robots that build houses. It has a virtually unlimited amount of working time to dedicate to the robotics engineering problems. We'd still be limited to some extent by raw materials and land but it would be much less significant.
  - esafak 10mo ago
    That can trim costs but not drive it to zero. If you assume that the computer is going to do all the work, won't your salary erode, making it harder for you to afford scarce things?

jcheng 10mo ago

> For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.

senordevnyc 10mo ago
Yeah, I'd put myself in this camp. My trust is slowly going up, and coupled with improved guardrails (more tests, static analysis, refactoring to make reviewing easier), that increasing trust is giving me more and more speed at going from thought ("hmm, I should change how this feature works to be like X") to deployment into the hands of my customers.

irthomasthomas 10mo ago

In my feed 'AI hype' outnumbers 'anti-AI hype' 5-1. And anti-hype moderates like antirez and simonw are rare. To be a radical in ai is to believe that ai tools offer a modest but growing net positive utility to a modest but growing subset of hackers and professionals

kaffekaka 10mo ago
Well put. AI obviously brings big benefits into the profession. We just have not seen exactly what they are just yet. How it will unfold. But personally I feel that a future of not having to churn out yet another crud app is attractive.
- catlifeonmars 10mo ago
  In theory “not having to churn out yet another crud app” doesn’t require AI, any ol code generator will do. AI is a really expensive way (in terms of gpus/tpus) to generate boilerplate, but as long as that cost is massively subsidized by investors, you may as well use it.
  - kaffekaka 10mo ago
    I agree, we (or I) should have gotten out of this earlier. Shame on me, really. But LLM:s have lowered the threshold.
never_inline 10mo ago
The only AI bloggers who don't have something to sell seems to be simonw, the flask guy, and this redis guy. Any other blog recommendations from HN?
- erk__ 10mo ago
  tbh I think it is just a question about time before flask guy has something to sell: https://earendil.com/ https://earendil.com/

tracerbulletx 10mo ago

For me its the feeling of true understanding and discovery. Not just of how the computer works, but how whatever problem domain I'm making software for works. It's model building and simulation of the world. To the degree I can use the LLM to teach me to solve the problem better than I could before I like it, to the degree it takes over and obscures the understanding from me, I despise it. I don't love computers because of how fast I can create shareholder value, that's for sure.

colordrops 10mo ago

The split I'm seeing with those around me is: 1. Those who see their codebase as a sculpture, a work of art, a source of pride 2. Those who focus on outcomes. They are not contradictory goals, but I'm finding that if your emphasis is 1, you general dislike LLMs, and if your emphasis is 2, you love them, or at least tolerate them.

epolanski 10mo ago
Why would you dislike LLMs for 1? I have my personal projects where every single line if authored by hand. Still, I will ask LLMs for feedback or look for ideas when I have the feeling something could be rearchitected/improved but I don't see how. More often than not, they fluke, but occasionally they will still provide valid feedback which otherwise I'd missed. LLMs aren't just for the "lets dump large amounts of lower-level work" use case.
- colordrops 10mo ago
  I don't disagree with you - LLMs are not at odds with quality code if you use them correctly. But many people who take excessive pride in their code don't even bother to look and see what can be done with them. Though, in the last couple months, I have seen several of the (1) types around me finally try them.

jacquesm 10mo ago

> For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. Talk about a good thing coming from bad intentions! Congratulations on shaking that demon.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
nuky 10mo ago
[dead]
DonHopkins 10mo ago
It's pointless these days because most web sites are pre-ruined. ;)

singingbard 10mo ago

[dead]

notatoad 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer but luckily for us, we can still do that, and it's just as fun as it ever was. LLMs don't take anything away from the fun of actually writing code, unless you choose to let them. if anything the LLMs make it more fun, because the boring bits can now be farmed out while you work on the fun bits. no, i don't really want to make another CRUD UI, but if the project i'm working on needs one i can just let claude code do that for me while i go back to working on the stuff that's actually interesting.

rowanajmarshall 10mo ago
I think the downside is the developers who love the action of coding managed to accomplish several things at once - they got to code, and create things, and get paid lots for doing it. AI coding makes creating things far more efficient (as long as you use AI), and will likely mean you don't get paid much (unless you use AI). You can still code for the fun of it, but you don't get the ancillary benefits.

paulcole 10mo ago

Who’s saying you can’t enjoy the typing of letters, numbers, and symbols into a computer? The issue is that this is getting to be a less economically valuable activity. You wouldn’t say, “It’s not that they hate electricity it’s just that they love harpooning whales and dying in the icy North Atlantic.” You can love it all you want but people won’t pay you to do it like they used to in the good old days.

abustamam 10mo ago

I think all programmers are like LEGO builders. But different programmers will see each brick as a different kind of abstraction. A hacker kind of programmer may see each line of code as a brick. An architect kind of programmer may see different services as a brick. An entrepreneur kind of programmer may see entire applications as a brick. These aren't mutually exclusive, of course. But we all just like to build things, the abstractions we use to build them just differ.

MattSayar 10mo ago
This is exactly the way I see it. You can always get better performance at lower levels of abstraction, but there are trade-offs. Sometimes the trade-offs are worth it (like building bigger things), and sometimes they aren't (it's a buggy mess).

pxc 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer. I don't think this is really it for many people (maybe any); after all, you can do all of that when writing a text message rather than a piece of code. But it inches closer to what I think is the "right answer" for this type of software developer. There are aspects of software development that are very much like other forms of writing (e.g., prose or poetry). Like other writing, writing code can constitute self-expression in an inherently satisfying way, and it can also offer the satisfaction of finding "the perfect phrase". LLMs more or less eliminate both sources of pleasure, either by eliminating the act of writing itself (that is, choosing and refining the words) or through their bland, generic, tasteless style. There are other ways that LLMs can disconnect the people using them from what is joyful about writing code, not least of all because LLMs can be used in a lot of different ways. (Using them as search tools or otherwise consulting them rather than having them commit code to simply be either accepted/rejected "solves" the specific problems I just mentioned, for instance.) There is something magical about speaking motion into existence, which is part of what has made programming feel special to me, ever since I was a kid. In a way, prompting an LLM to generate working code preserves that and I can imagine how, for some, it even seems to magnify the magic. But there is also a sense of essential mastery involved in the wonderful way code brings ideas to life. That mastery involves not just "understanding" things in the cursory way involved in visually scanning someone else's code and thinking "looks good to me", but intimately knowing how the words and abstractions and effects all "line up" and relate to each other (and hopefully also with the project's requirements). That feeling of mastery is itself one of the joys of writing code. Without that mastery, you also lose one of the second-order joys of writing code that many here have already mentioned in these comments: flow. Delegation means fumbling in a way that working in your own context just doesn't. :-\

catlifeonmars 10mo ago

I’m better at code than prose, so coding via an agent is frustrating. Rather than multiple attempts to achieve the desired results, I’d rather just write in once, with the precision and nuance that I want. I’d be interested to try a “dueling pianos” style approach where I can cooperate with an agent indirectly through the code, rather than a lower fidelity option.

gspr 10mo ago

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. I know you didn't mean to, but I think that description is a mischaracterization. I'd wager most of us "I control the computer" people who enjoy crafting software don't really care for the actual imputation of symbols. That is just the mechanism by which we move code from our heads to the computer. What LLMs destroy – at least for me – is the creation of code in my head and its (more-or-less) faithful replication inside the computer. I don't particularly enjoy the physical act of moving my fingers across a piece of plastic, but I do enjoy the result executing my program on my computer. If an LLM is placed in the middle, two things happen: first, I'm expressing the _idea_ of my program not to a computer, but to an LLM; and second, the LLM expresses its "interpretation" of that idea to the computer. Both parts destroy joy for me. That's of course not important to anyone but myself and likeminded people, and I don't expect the world to care. But I do also believe that both parts come with a whole host of dangers that make the end result less trustworthy and less maintainable over time. I'm definitely warming to the role of LLMs as critics though. I also see value in having them write tests – the worst a bad or unmaintainable test will provide is a false error.

barrenko 10mo ago

Yeah, not all painters were happy with the transition to photography.

matwood 10mo ago

Good points. I'm a 'solve the problem' person, so rarely get into language wars, editor wars, etc... I just don't care as long as the problem is solved in a way that meets the needs of the user. I've worked with all the types, and no type is wrong. For example, I can certainly appreciate the PL researcher type who wants to make everything functional, etc... I won't fight against it as long as it doesn't get in the way of solving the problem. I've also found that my style works well with the other styles because I have way of always asking "so does this solve the problem??" which is sometimes forgotten by the code is beautiful people, etc...

lelanthran 10mo ago

> For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. For the latter two, that's a minimum-wage job when LLMs produce your software, if that.

notnullorvoid 10mo ago

For me it's not the typing that is satisfying, but rather building the program in my head first, and internally validating. Describing to an LLM how to output the program I built in my head just isn't possible without taking more time than it does to write the code myself.