8 ms·

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.' 'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.' Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.

n4r9 8mo ago
Pain can mean tedium rather than intellectual challenge.
- wtetzner 8mo ago
  I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.
  - dgacmu 8mo ago
    Some code is fun and some sucks? There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually. We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
    - wtetzner 8mo ago
      I mean, I agree if it's really just "machine translate this code to use the approved method of doing this thing". That seems like a perfect use case for AI. Though one would think Google would already have extensive code mod infrastructure for that kind of thing. But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.
      - dgacmu 8mo ago
        They do and I think a lot of that is LLM'd these days, though that's just what I hear third-hand. I do agree that this: > What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code. seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes. Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)
  - TuringTest 8mo ago
    I can only speak for myself but for me, it's all about the syntax. I am terrible at recalling the exact name of all the functions in a library or parameters in an API, which really slows me down when writing code. I've also explored all kinds of programming languages in different paradigms, which makes it hard to recall the exact syntax of operators (is comparison '=' or '==' in this language? Comments are // or /*? How many parameters does this function take, and in what order...) or control structures. But I'm good at high level programming concepts, so it's easy to say what I want in technical language and let the LLM find the exact syntax and command names for me. I guess if you specialise in maintaining a code base with a single language and a fixed set of libraries then it becomes easier to remember all the details, but for me it will always be less effort to just search the names for whatever tools I want to include in a program at any point.
    - gertlex 8mo ago
      I agree with a bunch of this (I'm almost exclusively doing python and bash; bash is the one I can never remember more than the basics of). I will give the caveat that I historically haven't made use of fancy IDEs with easy lookup of function names, so would semi-often be fixing "ugh I got the function name wrong" mistakes. Similar to how you outlined multi-language vs specialist, I wonder if "full stack" vs "niche" work unspokenly underlies some of the camps of "I just trust the AI" vs "it's not saving me any time".
  - kaydub 8mo ago
    How long have you been coding? How many languages and frameworks have you worked with? Where has your professional focus been? I've written professional code in production for the past 15+ years in VB, C# (MVC2/MVC3 + Razor), Php(Yii, Yii2, Symfony), Perl, Python(Flask, Cherrpy), Java(Spring MVC, Spring boot, JSF, J2EE), Golang, Rust, Ruby. I've worked on build/ci pipelines from Jenkins, CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, Teamcity, etc. I've had to deploy/manage infrastructure from bare metal to the cloud with Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, Terraform, Cloudformation. I've had to run on MySQL, Postgres, Mariadb, SQL Server and use ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, SNS, MSK, Kinesis (of all flavors). I could literally keep going and going and going. I'm tired. It's way easier to prompt than keep track of all this shit at this point. I don't need to know how to implement $feature or $tool in each and every framework, I'll let the machines worry about that.
    - wtetzner 8mo ago
      I've been writing professional code for 20 years at this point, using many languages, libraries, frameworks, etc. But I certainly don't use them all at the same time. This also just feels like we're solving the wrong problem. Using AI doesn't fix any of it, it just makes it easier to make the problem worse faster.
      - kaydub 8mo ago
        You haven't worked somewhere where you're working on multiple different microservices each written by different teams in different languages?
        n4r9 8mo ago
        That absolutely sounds like a case where AI will only plaster over the problem and eventually make it worse.
        kaydub 8mo ago
        I don't see how...
capyba 8mo ago
Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!
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- wtetzner 8mo ago
  > I would have finished the project in the same amount of time Probably less time, because you understood the details better.
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- dvfjsdhgfv 8mo ago
  > if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.
  - scrame 8mo ago
    quite a bit of software you would need to understand the assembly. not everything is web-services.
    - manofmanysmiles 8mo ago
      I've found LLMs (since Opus 4.5) exceptionally good at reading and writing and debugging assembly. Give them gdb/lldb and have your mind blown!
echelon 8mo ago
Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me. Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules? If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript? There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now. I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire. I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades. God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane. The future is exciting. Bring it.
- estimator7292 8mo ago
  Burn the planet to the ground because your life is boring. Extremely mature stance you've got there
  - echelon 8mo ago
    This is 1960's era anti-nuclear all over again. People on Reddit posting AI art are getting death threats. It's absurd.
- objclxt 8mo ago
  > Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
- wtetzner 8mo ago
  > Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. > The future is exciting. Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.
alainrk 8mo ago
I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?
- estimator7292 8mo ago
  If you're gonna take this track, at least be honest with yourself. Does your boss get more value out of you? You aren't going to get a kickback from being more productive, but your boss sure will.
- wtetzner 8mo ago
  I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.
    - FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
      Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.
      - kaydub 8mo ago
        Always have another agent around that is just reviewing code. "Look for duplicate code, code smells, bad architecture, future scalability problems..." I usually keep one agent/prompt/context ripping through new features and another 1-3 agents/prompts/contexts reviewing, testing, planning.
wtetzner 8mo ago
> It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc. In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding? Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.
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- falkensmaize 8mo ago
  What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.
- geetee 8mo ago
  Writing the code is where I discover the complexity I missed while planning. I don't truly understand my creation until I've gone through a few iterations of this. Maybe I'm just bad at planning.
- thwarted 8mo ago
  At first I thought you were referring to the debates over using vim or using emacs, but I think you mean to refer to the discussions about learning to use/switching to powerful editors like vim or emacs. If you learn and use a sharp, powerful editor and learn to type fast, the "burden" of editing and typing goes away.
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mycall 8mo ago
Isn't that what Tolkien did in his head? Write something, learn what he liked/didn't like then revise the words? Rinse/repeat. Same process here.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  If Tolkien had not lived an entire life, fought in a war, been buddies with other authors, and also been a decent writer, the story doesn’t exist. And an LLM won’t come up with it. An LLM isn’t coming up with the eye of Sauron, or the entire backstory of the ring, or gollum, etc etc The LLM can’t know Tolkien had a whole universe built in his head that he worked for decades to get on to paper. I’m so tired of this whole “an LLM just does what humans already do!” And then conflating that with “fuck all this LLM slop!”
  - mycall 8mo ago
    In the age of OpenClaw and interest agentic processes, the LLM doesn't need to dream up everything by itself. There are tons of tools it can use. Using those tools, the LLM can generate a random world and write about that, and score it too -- with enough iterations, a best seller could pop out.
franze 8mo ago
Claude Opus 4.6: “He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.
- Calavar 8mo ago
  Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are, what their respective character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.
- dmbche 8mo ago
  Do you find this interesting to make and read?
  - franze 8mo ago
    I am probably the only person who ever willingly created a complete AI generated book and willingly read it front to cover. Last summer. I called it "Claude Code: A Primer" an Claude Code Origin Story. Good book, complete made up. The technology is here, lets explore it. And when somebody states something in an HN comment. Lets just try it. Imperfect method. But better than to just talk Hypothetically about AI. If AI will write better books than ever written until now? More insights than ever created before. Would we read it? Is it even possible? If not, why not. Whats is missing? Thats the questions I find fascinating. I for one want to find out. With experimentation, not via predefined believes.
jesse_dot_id 8mo ago
People are different. Some are painters and some are sculptors. Andy Warhol was a master draftsman but he didn't get famous off of his drawings. He got famous off of screen printing other people's art that he often didn't own. He just pioneered the technique and because it was new, people got excited, and today he's widely considered to be a generational artistic genius. I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output. If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process. I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.
- thwarted 8mo ago
  I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output. If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.
  - jack_pp 8mo ago
    That's a moral debate, not suitable for this discussion. The discussion at hand is about purity and efficiency. Some people are process oriented, perfectionists, purists that take great pride in how they made something. Even if the thing they made isn't useful at all to anyone except to stroke their own ego. Others are more practical and see a tool as a tool, not every hammer you make needs to be beautiful and made from the best materials money can buy. Depending on the context either approach can be correct. For some things being a detail oriented perfectionist is good. Things like a web framework or a programming language or an OS. But for most things, just being practical and finding a cheap and clever way to get to where you want to go will outperform most over engineering.
everforward 8mo ago
I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code. I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should. I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file. It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.
Aperocky 8mo ago
Tolkien's book is an art, programs are supposed to do something. Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want. > Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.' Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.
dkersten 8mo ago
“ What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.” Yeah, this was always the easy part.
kmac_ 8mo ago
Current models won't write anything new, they are "just" great at matching, qualifying, and copying patterns. They bring a lot of value right now, but there is no creativity.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  95% of the industry wasn't creating creative value, it was repetitive. * auth + RBAC, known problem, just needs integration * 3rd party integration, they have API, known problem, just needs integration * make webpage responsive, millions of CSS lines * even video gaming, most engines are already written, just add your character and call couple of APIs to move them in the 3D space
  - kmac_ 8mo ago
    That's why they bring a lot of value. Plus, new models and methods enable solutions that weren't available a decade ago.
  - bilbo0s 8mo ago
    So true. You can only complain about creativity if you were actually being creative. 99.99999% of the industry was not. But sure, for the 0.000001% of the industry coming up with new deep learning algorithms instead of just TF/PyTorch monkey-ing, maybe the LLMs won’t help as much as a good foundation in some pretty esoteric mathematics.
  - GeoAtreides 8mo ago
    Not sure what 95% of the industry created, but it did bring liquidity in my bank account and a roof over my head. now what?
simonw 8mo ago
Have you really never found writing code painful? CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change? I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up. I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent. These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  > I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later. Same experience, I don't know why people keep saying code was easy part, sure, only when you are writing a boilerplate which is easy and expectations are clear. I agree code is easier than some other parts, but not the easiest, industry employed millions of us, to write that easy thing. When working on large codebases or building something in the flow, I just don't want to read all the OAuth2 scopes Google requires me to obtain, my experience was never: "now I will integrate Gmail, let me do gmail.FetchEmails(), cool it works, on to the next thing"
- enraged_camel 8mo ago
  Incidentally, I've been using AI to deal with the weird bugs, cryptic errors and generally horrendous complexities of a framework we've been using at work (Elixir's Ash). It's really nice to no longer have to read badly organized docs, search the Internet for similar problems and ask around in the developers' Slack/Discord.
  - simonw 8mo ago
    So many of my coding agent sessions start with "clone <github URL to relevant dependency> into /tmp for reference" - it's such a great pattern because incomplete or inaccurate decimation matters way less if the agent can dispatch a sub-agent to explore the codebase any time it needs to answer an obscure question.
bdcravens 8mo ago
I don't find writing code painful, but I do find it tedious. The amount of time wasted on boilerplate keeps me from getting to the good stuff. LLMs let me speed run through all of that. To take it back to your example, let's imagine Tolkien is spending a ton of time on setting up his typewriter, making sure he had his correction tape handy, verifying his spelling and correcting mistakes, ensuring his tab stops were setup to his writing standard, checking for punctuation marks, etc. Now imagine eliminating all that crap so he can focus on the artistic nature of the dialogue.
bilekas 8mo ago
Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out. When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to see a happy path draw a shadow of s solution, iterate over your plans and then put some real "code"/foundation in place. It's a beautiful process. Starting out I used to just jump into s project deep with the code first and hit that workaround button one too many times and it's far more expensive, we all know that.
- kaydub 8mo ago
  So waterfall sdlc...
  - bilekas 8mo ago
    If the shoe fits your work flow, call it what you want. Change it how you like for all I care. But coding shouldn't be the majority of your time.
bufordtwain 8mo ago
I didn't fully realize how much pain there was until I started delegating the coding to AI. It's very freeing. Unfortunately I think this will soon lead to mass layoffs.
karel-3d 8mo ago
Sometimes you are not writing Lord of the Rings. Sometimes you are writing a marketing copy for a new Nissan that's basically the same as last year Nissan, yet you need to sell it somehow. Nobody will REALLY read it more than 2 seconds and your words will be immediately forgotten. Maybe some AI is good then.
- g947o 8mo ago
  Copy & paste will do the job as well. Just remember to update the year number with a tool we have had for decades named "find/replace". Since nobody reads it, nobody knows it's almost the same thing, and there is no chance you get fired because LLM made things up that you didn't review/catch.
jarjoura 8mo ago
Your comment is spot on, but the nuance people who are still new to these LLMs don't yet see is the real reason "he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead." 1. That prompt is always a slot machine. It's never 100% deterministic and that's why we haven't seen an explosion of claude skills. When it works for you, and it's magical, everyone is wowed. However, there is a set of users who then bang their head, wondering why their identical attempt is garbage compared to their coworker. "It must be a skills issue." No, it's just the LLM being an LLM. 2. Coding agents are hyper localized and refuse to consider the larger project when it solves something. So you end up with these "paper cuts" of duplicated functions or classes that do one thing different. Now the LLM in future runs has to decide which of these classes or functions to use and you end up with two competing implementations. Future you will bang your head trying to figure out how to combine them. 3. The "voice" of the code it outputs is trained on public repositories so if your internal codebase is doing something unique, the LLM will consistently pick the voice it's trained on, forcing you to rewrite behind it to match your internal code. 4. It has no chill. If I set any "important" rules in the prompt then it sometimes adheres to it at the expense of doing the "right" thing in its changes. Or it completely ignores it and does its own thing, when it would have been the perfect time to follow the rule. This is to your point that, if I had just written the code myself, it would have been less words than any "perfect" prompt it would have taken to get the same code change.

n4r9 8mo ago

Pain can mean tedium rather than intellectual challenge.

wtetzner 8mo ago
I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.
- dgacmu 8mo ago
  Some code is fun and some sucks? There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually. We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
  - wtetzner 8mo ago
    I mean, I agree if it's really just "machine translate this code to use the approved method of doing this thing". That seems like a perfect use case for AI. Though one would think Google would already have extensive code mod infrastructure for that kind of thing. But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.
    - dgacmu 8mo ago
      They do and I think a lot of that is LLM'd these days, though that's just what I hear third-hand. I do agree that this: > What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code. seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes. Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)
- TuringTest 8mo ago
  I can only speak for myself but for me, it's all about the syntax. I am terrible at recalling the exact name of all the functions in a library or parameters in an API, which really slows me down when writing code. I've also explored all kinds of programming languages in different paradigms, which makes it hard to recall the exact syntax of operators (is comparison '=' or '==' in this language? Comments are // or /*? How many parameters does this function take, and in what order...) or control structures. But I'm good at high level programming concepts, so it's easy to say what I want in technical language and let the LLM find the exact syntax and command names for me. I guess if you specialise in maintaining a code base with a single language and a fixed set of libraries then it becomes easier to remember all the details, but for me it will always be less effort to just search the names for whatever tools I want to include in a program at any point.
  - gertlex 8mo ago
    I agree with a bunch of this (I'm almost exclusively doing python and bash; bash is the one I can never remember more than the basics of). I will give the caveat that I historically haven't made use of fancy IDEs with easy lookup of function names, so would semi-often be fixing "ugh I got the function name wrong" mistakes. Similar to how you outlined multi-language vs specialist, I wonder if "full stack" vs "niche" work unspokenly underlies some of the camps of "I just trust the AI" vs "it's not saving me any time".
- kaydub 8mo ago
  How long have you been coding? How many languages and frameworks have you worked with? Where has your professional focus been? I've written professional code in production for the past 15+ years in VB, C# (MVC2/MVC3 + Razor), Php(Yii, Yii2, Symfony), Perl, Python(Flask, Cherrpy), Java(Spring MVC, Spring boot, JSF, J2EE), Golang, Rust, Ruby. I've worked on build/ci pipelines from Jenkins, CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, Teamcity, etc. I've had to deploy/manage infrastructure from bare metal to the cloud with Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, Terraform, Cloudformation. I've had to run on MySQL, Postgres, Mariadb, SQL Server and use ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, SNS, MSK, Kinesis (of all flavors). I could literally keep going and going and going. I'm tired. It's way easier to prompt than keep track of all this shit at this point. I don't need to know how to implement $feature or $tool in each and every framework, I'll let the machines worry about that.
  - wtetzner 8mo ago
    I've been writing professional code for 20 years at this point, using many languages, libraries, frameworks, etc. But I certainly don't use them all at the same time. This also just feels like we're solving the wrong problem. Using AI doesn't fix any of it, it just makes it easier to make the problem worse faster.
    - kaydub 8mo ago
      You haven't worked somewhere where you're working on multiple different microservices each written by different teams in different languages?
      - n4r9 8mo ago
        That absolutely sounds like a case where AI will only plaster over the problem and eventually make it worse.
        kaydub 8mo ago
        I don't see how...

capyba 8mo ago

Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!

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wtetzner 8mo ago
> I would have finished the project in the same amount of time Probably less time, because you understood the details better.
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dvfjsdhgfv 8mo ago
> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.
- scrame 8mo ago
  quite a bit of software you would need to understand the assembly. not everything is web-services.
  - manofmanysmiles 8mo ago
    I've found LLMs (since Opus 4.5) exceptionally good at reading and writing and debugging assembly. Give them gdb/lldb and have your mind blown!

echelon 8mo ago

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me. Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules? If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript? There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now. I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire. I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades. God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane. The future is exciting. Bring it.

estimator7292 8mo ago
Burn the planet to the ground because your life is boring. Extremely mature stance you've got there
- echelon 8mo ago
  This is 1960's era anti-nuclear all over again. People on Reddit posting AI art are getting death threats. It's absurd.
objclxt 8mo ago
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
wtetzner 8mo ago
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. > The future is exciting. Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.

alainrk 8mo ago

I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?

estimator7292 8mo ago
If you're gonna take this track, at least be honest with yourself. Does your boss get more value out of you? You aren't going to get a kickback from being more productive, but your boss sure will.
wtetzner 8mo ago
I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.
  - FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
    Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.
    - kaydub 8mo ago
      Always have another agent around that is just reviewing code. "Look for duplicate code, code smells, bad architecture, future scalability problems..." I usually keep one agent/prompt/context ripping through new features and another 1-3 agents/prompts/contexts reviewing, testing, planning.

wtetzner 8mo ago

> It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc. In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding? Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.

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falkensmaize 8mo ago
What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.
geetee 8mo ago
Writing the code is where I discover the complexity I missed while planning. I don't truly understand my creation until I've gone through a few iterations of this. Maybe I'm just bad at planning.
thwarted 8mo ago
At first I thought you were referring to the debates over using vim or using emacs, but I think you mean to refer to the discussions about learning to use/switching to powerful editors like vim or emacs. If you learn and use a sharp, powerful editor and learn to type fast, the "burden" of editing and typing goes away.
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mycall 8mo ago

Isn't that what Tolkien did in his head? Write something, learn what he liked/didn't like then revise the words? Rinse/repeat. Same process here.

irishcoffee 8mo ago
If Tolkien had not lived an entire life, fought in a war, been buddies with other authors, and also been a decent writer, the story doesn’t exist. And an LLM won’t come up with it. An LLM isn’t coming up with the eye of Sauron, or the entire backstory of the ring, or gollum, etc etc The LLM can’t know Tolkien had a whole universe built in his head that he worked for decades to get on to paper. I’m so tired of this whole “an LLM just does what humans already do!” And then conflating that with “fuck all this LLM slop!”
- mycall 8mo ago
  In the age of OpenClaw and interest agentic processes, the LLM doesn't need to dream up everything by itself. There are tons of tools it can use. Using those tools, the LLM can generate a random world and write about that, and score it too -- with enough iterations, a best seller could pop out.

franze 8mo ago

Claude Opus 4.6: “He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.

Calavar 8mo ago
Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are, what their respective character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.
dmbche 8mo ago
Do you find this interesting to make and read?
- franze 8mo ago
  I am probably the only person who ever willingly created a complete AI generated book and willingly read it front to cover. Last summer. I called it "Claude Code: A Primer" an Claude Code Origin Story. Good book, complete made up. The technology is here, lets explore it. And when somebody states something in an HN comment. Lets just try it. Imperfect method. But better than to just talk Hypothetically about AI. If AI will write better books than ever written until now? More insights than ever created before. Would we read it? Is it even possible? If not, why not. Whats is missing? Thats the questions I find fascinating. I for one want to find out. With experimentation, not via predefined believes.

jesse_dot_id 8mo ago

People are different. Some are painters and some are sculptors. Andy Warhol was a master draftsman but he didn't get famous off of his drawings. He got famous off of screen printing other people's art that he often didn't own. He just pioneered the technique and because it was new, people got excited, and today he's widely considered to be a generational artistic genius. I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output. If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process. I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.

thwarted 8mo ago
I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output. If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.
- jack_pp 8mo ago
  That's a moral debate, not suitable for this discussion. The discussion at hand is about purity and efficiency. Some people are process oriented, perfectionists, purists that take great pride in how they made something. Even if the thing they made isn't useful at all to anyone except to stroke their own ego. Others are more practical and see a tool as a tool, not every hammer you make needs to be beautiful and made from the best materials money can buy. Depending on the context either approach can be correct. For some things being a detail oriented perfectionist is good. Things like a web framework or a programming language or an OS. But for most things, just being practical and finding a cheap and clever way to get to where you want to go will outperform most over engineering.

everforward 8mo ago

I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code. I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should. I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file. It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.

Aperocky 8mo ago

Tolkien's book is an art, programs are supposed to do something. Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want. > Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.' Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.

dkersten 8mo ago

“ What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.” Yeah, this was always the easy part.

kmac_ 8mo ago

Current models won't write anything new, they are "just" great at matching, qualifying, and copying patterns. They bring a lot of value right now, but there is no creativity.

throwaw12 8mo ago
95% of the industry wasn't creating creative value, it was repetitive. * auth + RBAC, known problem, just needs integration * 3rd party integration, they have API, known problem, just needs integration * make webpage responsive, millions of CSS lines * even video gaming, most engines are already written, just add your character and call couple of APIs to move them in the 3D space
- kmac_ 8mo ago
  That's why they bring a lot of value. Plus, new models and methods enable solutions that weren't available a decade ago.
- bilbo0s 8mo ago
  So true. You can only complain about creativity if you were actually being creative. 99.99999% of the industry was not. But sure, for the 0.000001% of the industry coming up with new deep learning algorithms instead of just TF/PyTorch monkey-ing, maybe the LLMs won’t help as much as a good foundation in some pretty esoteric mathematics.
- GeoAtreides 8mo ago
  Not sure what 95% of the industry created, but it did bring liquidity in my bank account and a roof over my head. now what?

simonw 8mo ago

Have you really never found writing code painful? CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change? I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up. I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent. These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

throwaw12 8mo ago
> I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later. Same experience, I don't know why people keep saying code was easy part, sure, only when you are writing a boilerplate which is easy and expectations are clear. I agree code is easier than some other parts, but not the easiest, industry employed millions of us, to write that easy thing. When working on large codebases or building something in the flow, I just don't want to read all the OAuth2 scopes Google requires me to obtain, my experience was never: "now I will integrate Gmail, let me do gmail.FetchEmails(), cool it works, on to the next thing"
enraged_camel 8mo ago
Incidentally, I've been using AI to deal with the weird bugs, cryptic errors and generally horrendous complexities of a framework we've been using at work (Elixir's Ash). It's really nice to no longer have to read badly organized docs, search the Internet for similar problems and ask around in the developers' Slack/Discord.
- simonw 8mo ago
  So many of my coding agent sessions start with "clone <github URL to relevant dependency> into /tmp for reference" - it's such a great pattern because incomplete or inaccurate decimation matters way less if the agent can dispatch a sub-agent to explore the codebase any time it needs to answer an obscure question.

bdcravens 8mo ago

I don't find writing code painful, but I do find it tedious. The amount of time wasted on boilerplate keeps me from getting to the good stuff. LLMs let me speed run through all of that. To take it back to your example, let's imagine Tolkien is spending a ton of time on setting up his typewriter, making sure he had his correction tape handy, verifying his spelling and correcting mistakes, ensuring his tab stops were setup to his writing standard, checking for punctuation marks, etc. Now imagine eliminating all that crap so he can focus on the artistic nature of the dialogue.

bilekas 8mo ago

Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out. When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to see a happy path draw a shadow of s solution, iterate over your plans and then put some real "code"/foundation in place. It's a beautiful process. Starting out I used to just jump into s project deep with the code first and hit that workaround button one too many times and it's far more expensive, we all know that.

kaydub 8mo ago
So waterfall sdlc...
- bilekas 8mo ago
  If the shoe fits your work flow, call it what you want. Change it how you like for all I care. But coding shouldn't be the majority of your time.

bufordtwain 8mo ago

I didn't fully realize how much pain there was until I started delegating the coding to AI. It's very freeing. Unfortunately I think this will soon lead to mass layoffs.

karel-3d 8mo ago

Sometimes you are not writing Lord of the Rings. Sometimes you are writing a marketing copy for a new Nissan that's basically the same as last year Nissan, yet you need to sell it somehow. Nobody will REALLY read it more than 2 seconds and your words will be immediately forgotten. Maybe some AI is good then.

g947o 8mo ago
Copy & paste will do the job as well. Just remember to update the year number with a tool we have had for decades named "find/replace". Since nobody reads it, nobody knows it's almost the same thing, and there is no chance you get fired because LLM made things up that you didn't review/catch.

jarjoura 8mo ago

Your comment is spot on, but the nuance people who are still new to these LLMs don't yet see is the real reason "he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead." 1. That prompt is always a slot machine. It's never 100% deterministic and that's why we haven't seen an explosion of claude skills. When it works for you, and it's magical, everyone is wowed. However, there is a set of users who then bang their head, wondering why their identical attempt is garbage compared to their coworker. "It must be a skills issue." No, it's just the LLM being an LLM. 2. Coding agents are hyper localized and refuse to consider the larger project when it solves something. So you end up with these "paper cuts" of duplicated functions or classes that do one thing different. Now the LLM in future runs has to decide which of these classes or functions to use and you end up with two competing implementations. Future you will bang your head trying to figure out how to combine them. 3. The "voice" of the code it outputs is trained on public repositories so if your internal codebase is doing something unique, the LLM will consistently pick the voice it's trained on, forcing you to rewrite behind it to match your internal code. 4. It has no chill. If I set any "important" rules in the prompt then it sometimes adheres to it at the expense of doing the "right" thing in its changes. Or it completely ignores it and does its own thing, when it would have been the perfect time to follow the rule. This is to your point that, if I had just written the code myself, it would have been less words than any "perfect" prompt it would have taken to get the same code change.