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I’m the opposite. I don’t believe there is a royal road to understanding anything. For me, the process of programming involves frustration. That is usually when

I’m the opposite. I don’t believe there is a royal road to understanding anything. For me, the process of programming involves frustration. That is usually when I find my greatest insights. Syntax isn’t a big deal. Names either. You can look them up. Remember them. Language gotchas are annoying and sometimes problematic. To me, our job is understanding problems. And for me, understanding the problem involves wrestling with the code. I learn much from modelling problems in code, building theories, testing them. Once an LLM system has generated some code I haven’t learned anything. Even when I read through the solution. It doesn't require the same activation of my brain. There’s nothing quite like working through the problem yourself. LLMs definitely feel like they are draining my passion for computers. There were plenty of folks who checked out or were never truly passionate about programming. Now they’re louder than ever. “Nobody cares about code,” and, “optimizing is a waste of time.” Now we don’t even want to understand how it works, or whether it works at all. They repeat the lines their master have told them: get on board or get left behind. I’m pretty sure I am risking getting, “left behind.” But I’m okay with that. The tech is truly the least interesting thing to me. If I don’t have a career in 10 years… oh well. I’ll still be programming.

acedTrex 21d ago
ya i find all LLM output to be incredibly boring and unskillful, I can ship vibe bugs fast with the best of them but it brings me no joy. I'll never let myself be left behind but the joy professionally of writing quality software is 100% gone.
- fragmede 21d ago
  The possibility to have an agent implement every little thing that comes up in your mind as you're building doesn't spark the tiniest bit of joy? Previously, "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.
  - skydhash 20d ago
    > "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before. My answer was it to "ooh it would be cool if" has always to build a PoC of the thing or a MVP, then I can flesh it out when I need more features. Sometimes a web app can be a single PHP script, and a cli command can be as simple as a single file C program. Or using tkinter with python for GUI. The answer to "ooh it would be cool if I can travel fast" is not "yeah but it'll take too long to build a car". It's "let's build a kick scooter first".
  - acedTrex 20d ago
    Not even a little bit to be frank. The joy of things came from their implementation to me. I will write something and then peruse its code on github for hours afterwards just looking, like one would at an art gallery. If I did not toil on it I wont use it most likely. There's a very very small amount of software I ACTUALLY desperately need in a way that I would not care how it came to exist. Do not get me wrong, those things exist, i have a plethora of dog shit vibe code websites, clis and tuis and other random stuff on a self hosted forgejo. They did their job now they die. But it brought me no joy, in fact it was rather unpleasant the entire time doing it.
    - fragmede 20d ago
      That's really sad! I'm sorry for you. If you try reframing it, maybe you can find joy again.

acedTrex 21d ago

ya i find all LLM output to be incredibly boring and unskillful, I can ship vibe bugs fast with the best of them but it brings me no joy. I'll never let myself be left behind but the joy professionally of writing quality software is 100% gone.

fragmede 21d ago
The possibility to have an agent implement every little thing that comes up in your mind as you're building doesn't spark the tiniest bit of joy? Previously, "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.
- skydhash 20d ago
  > "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before. My answer was it to "ooh it would be cool if" has always to build a PoC of the thing or a MVP, then I can flesh it out when I need more features. Sometimes a web app can be a single PHP script, and a cli command can be as simple as a single file C program. Or using tkinter with python for GUI. The answer to "ooh it would be cool if I can travel fast" is not "yeah but it'll take too long to build a car". It's "let's build a kick scooter first".
- acedTrex 20d ago
  Not even a little bit to be frank. The joy of things came from their implementation to me. I will write something and then peruse its code on github for hours afterwards just looking, like one would at an art gallery. If I did not toil on it I wont use it most likely. There's a very very small amount of software I ACTUALLY desperately need in a way that I would not care how it came to exist. Do not get me wrong, those things exist, i have a plethora of dog shit vibe code websites, clis and tuis and other random stuff on a self hosted forgejo. They did their job now they die. But it brought me no joy, in fact it was rather unpleasant the entire time doing it.
  - fragmede 20d ago
    That's really sad! I'm sorry for you. If you try reframing it, maybe you can find joy again.