8 ms·

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Wr

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap. Say what you will about the Claudisms in this piece, this bit certainly rings true for me. With old school coding, there was always a reward at the end, the harder it was, the more satisfying it felt. With agentic coding, I really doesn’t feel like that, at least not in the same way. It feels more like continually riding a wave of productivity, where small features or huge features have similar levels of interaction required. And that’s exciting in the beginning but quickly becomes very tiring.

verdverm 3mo ago
Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature
- georgemcbay 3mo ago
  > but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software. "I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.
  - DanielHB 3mo ago
    It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.
  - nibbleyou 3mo ago
    I used to get overjoyed and would tell my partner how amazing programmer I am every time I built something that felt difficult at the beginning. Now for every problem I know Claude/Codex will do it, and they do. I just don't get that feeling on finishing 10 features now.
  - IanCal 3mo ago
    When my wife has a thing she says she needs to do and I can help, I now ask “do you want this done or do you want to do it?”. I think this is a similar kind of split. Sometimes I want to cook, that’s a thing I want to actively do. Sometimes I cook because I want to put dinner out, dinner being out is the thing I want and cooking is just a required step. Sometimes I want to solve a problem, sometimes I want a problem solved. Here’s the tricky part for me now and I think others are hitting it - when a machine can solve the problem does that devalue the feeling of doing it by hand? Solving a sudoku feels good even though I know I have multitudes of machines in my house that could solve it faster than I could pick up the pen. Games that place a dollar value on some item I can also achieve makes me feel like the effort is only worth $ though. This isn’t logical but I’m ok being human. So for a personal project do I get the same feeling doing it by hand? Will it feel like I’ve just made my life harder for no reward or will it be a nice satisfying thing? As the models get so much better the goalposts shift too, the less I direct the less I was needed. It’s a weird time. Fascinating, exciting and definitely useful - but so much of what I’ve learned is rapidly becoming less and less important for many tasks. Still, I’ve argued for many years that more people should code because it’s such a powerful tool even used basically, I guess I’ve got my wish (and that side I genuinely love, seeing people make things with their domain knowledge and not having to learn exactly how brackets work in order to automate something)
  - j1elo 3mo ago
    We're just getting used to the invention of the washing machine. All clothes are equally cleansed on average, with good enough results even if afterwards some particular pieces need a bit of extra care, while before we had to clean them all one by one and paying attention to minutia and details on each piece's needs. Nowadays you just control a couple buttons and hope for the best. Better to find joy in other parts of the process! Hanging clothes out is still a widespread practice in Europe, and some enjoy it. Likewise for software quality controls, testing, and full product lifecycle.
thinkindie 3mo ago
I think it all depends on your personal driver: personally I rather see a product I built in whatever way used by ever growing number of people because they find it useful. It means that the time I spent working on that helped other people solving a problem (hopefully). That’s why a was always keen on cutting some corners when and where necessary in order to think about the user first and the code beauty second. Of course I appreciate well structured and maintainable code but you can always strike a balance, even with LLMs assisted coding sessions.
- hdjrudni 3mo ago
  I don't even want to put 'my' code or apps out into the wild anymore. I've built a a few things I think are useful and I'm using myself but I'm afraid it'll just get called slop or my only users will be bots. What's the point. So I don't get the joy out of sharing it nor the joy of the achievement. But I've widdled down what I thought was an endless backlog of features to nearly zero, I guess that's something.
  - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
    Github's weekly Top Trending repos list is depressing. Slop on top of slop, many doing the exact same thing as each other with so much low-quality content it's challenging to read through and compare similar repos.
  - encyclopedism 3mo ago
    If it's code built by an LLM it's almost inherently uninteresting in that 'anyone' can also generate the same slop. Beyond the initial novelty the 'achievement' really doesn't stretch that far. Your slop, my slop, their slop it's all 'slop' and no one can really care about slop. The novelty is wearing thin fast
    - deaux 3mo ago
      Of course not, this makes no sense. It's the opposite, most of LLM generated apps are indeed uninteresting, yet it's not inherent at all. Most photos, most drawings, most human-written articles are uninteresting and have been so since forever. Nothing about that is inherent. And in the exact same manner, no, others can't generate the same thing. They physically can, but that has never been a barrier. If I make uninteresting art, it's not because I physically lack the ability to use my hands in a manner that would create interesting art. It's because I can't come up with the ideas, and lack the taste, to produce interesting art.
fragmede 3mo ago
Setting up a loop so the AI can test its output, so you can have it go off on its own, gives me a dopamine hit. The more rube Goldberg-ian the hit, the bigger the dopamine hit. I setup a network->usb-c keyboard dongle, and a fingerbot so codex could remote control a laptop, plus a webcam so it could see what the laptop was doing, so that I could get hibernate working on that specific hardware with that Linux kernel.
DanielHB 3mo ago
You put it in a good way, I have been saying this for my partner that I don't fear my job is at risk. I fear I am going to hate my job soon. I am coping a bit by still doing stuff by hand, especially stuff where prompting the LLM doesn't save that much time. And what I call "adding good taste" to LLM output where I move things around to structure them in a more human-understandable way (by hand usually).
- datsci_est_2015 3mo ago
  My cope goes one level further, I’m already seeing incidents where poorly designed code (not necessarily purely “vibecoded”) has made it extremely difficult to figure out why a system is failing. Errors like “SegFault” and “Driver unresponsive” still exist, and so far even $100 of AI credits don’t seem to be able to solve those issues. I’m already personally seeing the diminishing returns of AI generated code, especially in light of the increase in token prices (or tokens required per task, both are the same).
elmer2 3mo ago
This sounds like development/engineering will eventually go from a knowledge-based career to a factory worker, with a reduction in salary. It takes way less knowledge and experience to guide an LLM, than it does to write it yourself. Especially if LLMs are already being trained on previous knowledge. I'm already seeing people on Linkedin having almost no previous experience (or a Junior at best) getting hired as AI engineers.

verdverm 3mo ago

Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature

georgemcbay 3mo ago
> but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software. "I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.
- DanielHB 3mo ago
  It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.
- nibbleyou 3mo ago
  I used to get overjoyed and would tell my partner how amazing programmer I am every time I built something that felt difficult at the beginning. Now for every problem I know Claude/Codex will do it, and they do. I just don't get that feeling on finishing 10 features now.
- IanCal 3mo ago
  When my wife has a thing she says she needs to do and I can help, I now ask “do you want this done or do you want to do it?”. I think this is a similar kind of split. Sometimes I want to cook, that’s a thing I want to actively do. Sometimes I cook because I want to put dinner out, dinner being out is the thing I want and cooking is just a required step. Sometimes I want to solve a problem, sometimes I want a problem solved. Here’s the tricky part for me now and I think others are hitting it - when a machine can solve the problem does that devalue the feeling of doing it by hand? Solving a sudoku feels good even though I know I have multitudes of machines in my house that could solve it faster than I could pick up the pen. Games that place a dollar value on some item I can also achieve makes me feel like the effort is only worth $ though. This isn’t logical but I’m ok being human. So for a personal project do I get the same feeling doing it by hand? Will it feel like I’ve just made my life harder for no reward or will it be a nice satisfying thing? As the models get so much better the goalposts shift too, the less I direct the less I was needed. It’s a weird time. Fascinating, exciting and definitely useful - but so much of what I’ve learned is rapidly becoming less and less important for many tasks. Still, I’ve argued for many years that more people should code because it’s such a powerful tool even used basically, I guess I’ve got my wish (and that side I genuinely love, seeing people make things with their domain knowledge and not having to learn exactly how brackets work in order to automate something)
- j1elo 3mo ago
  We're just getting used to the invention of the washing machine. All clothes are equally cleansed on average, with good enough results even if afterwards some particular pieces need a bit of extra care, while before we had to clean them all one by one and paying attention to minutia and details on each piece's needs. Nowadays you just control a couple buttons and hope for the best. Better to find joy in other parts of the process! Hanging clothes out is still a widespread practice in Europe, and some enjoy it. Likewise for software quality controls, testing, and full product lifecycle.

thinkindie 3mo ago

I think it all depends on your personal driver: personally I rather see a product I built in whatever way used by ever growing number of people because they find it useful. It means that the time I spent working on that helped other people solving a problem (hopefully). That’s why a was always keen on cutting some corners when and where necessary in order to think about the user first and the code beauty second. Of course I appreciate well structured and maintainable code but you can always strike a balance, even with LLMs assisted coding sessions.

hdjrudni 3mo ago
I don't even want to put 'my' code or apps out into the wild anymore. I've built a a few things I think are useful and I'm using myself but I'm afraid it'll just get called slop or my only users will be bots. What's the point. So I don't get the joy out of sharing it nor the joy of the achievement. But I've widdled down what I thought was an endless backlog of features to nearly zero, I guess that's something.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  Github's weekly Top Trending repos list is depressing. Slop on top of slop, many doing the exact same thing as each other with so much low-quality content it's challenging to read through and compare similar repos.
- encyclopedism 3mo ago
  If it's code built by an LLM it's almost inherently uninteresting in that 'anyone' can also generate the same slop. Beyond the initial novelty the 'achievement' really doesn't stretch that far. Your slop, my slop, their slop it's all 'slop' and no one can really care about slop. The novelty is wearing thin fast
  - deaux 3mo ago
    Of course not, this makes no sense. It's the opposite, most of LLM generated apps are indeed uninteresting, yet it's not inherent at all. Most photos, most drawings, most human-written articles are uninteresting and have been so since forever. Nothing about that is inherent. And in the exact same manner, no, others can't generate the same thing. They physically can, but that has never been a barrier. If I make uninteresting art, it's not because I physically lack the ability to use my hands in a manner that would create interesting art. It's because I can't come up with the ideas, and lack the taste, to produce interesting art.

fragmede 3mo ago

Setting up a loop so the AI can test its output, so you can have it go off on its own, gives me a dopamine hit. The more rube Goldberg-ian the hit, the bigger the dopamine hit. I setup a network->usb-c keyboard dongle, and a fingerbot so codex could remote control a laptop, plus a webcam so it could see what the laptop was doing, so that I could get hibernate working on that specific hardware with that Linux kernel.

DanielHB 3mo ago

You put it in a good way, I have been saying this for my partner that I don't fear my job is at risk. I fear I am going to hate my job soon. I am coping a bit by still doing stuff by hand, especially stuff where prompting the LLM doesn't save that much time. And what I call "adding good taste" to LLM output where I move things around to structure them in a more human-understandable way (by hand usually).

datsci_est_2015 3mo ago
My cope goes one level further, I’m already seeing incidents where poorly designed code (not necessarily purely “vibecoded”) has made it extremely difficult to figure out why a system is failing. Errors like “SegFault” and “Driver unresponsive” still exist, and so far even $100 of AI credits don’t seem to be able to solve those issues. I’m already personally seeing the diminishing returns of AI generated code, especially in light of the increase in token prices (or tokens required per task, both are the same).

elmer2 3mo ago

This sounds like development/engineering will eventually go from a knowledge-based career to a factory worker, with a reduction in salary. It takes way less knowledge and experience to guide an LLM, than it does to write it yourself. Especially if LLMs are already being trained on previous knowledge. I'm already seeing people on Linkedin having almost no previous experience (or a Junior at best) getting hired as AI engineers.