This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.

I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.

Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder.

That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I used to. Mastering a “simple” thing is rewarding. Trying to master much of modern software is not. Web programming rots your brain. Modern languages and software product motivations are all about gaining more money and mindshare. There is no mastering any stack, it changes to swiftly to matter. I view the necessity of using LLMs as an indictment against what working in and with information technology has become.

I wonder if the hope of mastering the agentic process, is what is rejuvenating some programmers. It’s a new challenge to get good at. I wonder what Pink would say today about the role of AI in “what motivates us”.

(Edited, author name correction)

It's the best thing to happen to systems engineering.

AI poses many challenges from security to ensuring code safety. When paired and met with the same expectations before the hype, you could consider it good enough to shave off 8 hours of work. But this is just the first 8 hours of getting some code ready.

A savvy dev could easily just grab an existing template they made prior and stitch things together in a degree better than AI.

Now it is just massage the prompt and hope it adheres.

We start to understand those old fogeys who we blew past we were young once we get to their age. It's the way of the world.

I am having long design sessions with Claude Code and let it implement the resulting features and changes in version controlled increments.

But I am the one who writes the example games and simulations in the DSL to get a feel for where its design needs to change to improve the user experience. This way I can work on the fun and creative parts and let Claude do the footwork.

I let Claude simultaneously write code, tests and documentation for each increment, and I read it and suggest changes or ask for clarification. I find it a lot easier to dismiss an earlier design for a better idea than when I would have implemented every detail of the system myself, and I think so far the resulting product has largely benefited from this.

To me, now more than ever it is important to keep the love for programming alive by having a side project as a creative outlet, with no time pressure and my own acceptance criteria (like beautiful code or clever solutions) that would not be acceptable in a commercial environment.

If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.

It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.

I’ve made the choice to not go full bore into AI as a result. I still use it to aid search or ask questions, but full on agentic coding isn’t for me, at least not for the projects I actually care about and want/need to support long-term.

I am a bit, but not much, younger than 60 and have been coding since Apple II days.

These tools are pretty close to HAL 9000 so of course GIGO as always has been the case with computer tech.

Almost everything is in Go except an image fingerprinting api server written in Swift. The most USEFUL thing I’ve written is a Go based APFS monitor that will help you not overfill your SSD and get pained into corner by Time Machine.

Your destination is only a point somewhere on what they perceive as the journey. You're saying, well, if they don't go where I did and stop when I did, it was no proper journey.

It's more like iterating on the REPL with AI in the loop, meaning the user stays in control while benefitting from AI, so real growth happens.

Interesting thing to consider, in a couple of years, will there be a differentiator between people who are good at driving company-specific AI tools and those who are generally better by having built skills the hard way ground up with benefit of AI?

The remaining friction is fundamentally the same as that which existed when writing code manually. The gap between what you envision for your design/solution and the tools for implementing that vision. With code, the friction encountered when implementing your vision is substantial; with AI, that friction is significantly reduced, and what's left is in areas different from what past experience would lead you to expect.

For people who feel that AI kills a passion, I'd recommend finding another hobby. Especially at the age of 60, when you don't have to work, you can plan retirement -- the next 20+ years as if it is your second childhood, and do whatever you want. I encourage you to search for greater meanings. After all, programming is just a man-made wonder, and the universe is full of grandeur.

Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.

It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.

It's the programming equivalent of those tiktok videos split in half, top half being random stock videos, bottom being temple run and an AI narration of a mildly wtf reddit post.

In a way I am lucky that I work at a place where everyone gets to choose what they want to use and how they use it. So my weapons of choice are a slightly tweaked, almost vanilla zsh, vim and zed with 0 ai features. I have a number of friends/former coworkers working at places where the usage of ai is not just allowed or encouraged but mandated. And is part of their performance score - the more you slop-code, the better your performance.

Then you hopefully capture that information somehow in a future prompt, documentation, test, or other agent guardrail.

So I finds fun in the knowledge engineering of it all. The meta practice of building up a knowledge base in how to solve problems like this codebase.

https://leanpub.com/we-mourn-our-craft

The tool doesn’t invalidate the craft. If anything, what we’re mourning when AI “kills the passion” might be about identity.

Many programmers spent decades defining themselves as the person who knows how to do hard things

And it’s disorienting when that thing becomes easy.

Don't take it personally, but those are the worst kind of engineers in any real world business context. I watched those type of people ruining projects, companies by overengineering them to death.

On the bright side, such traits can make a positive impact in academic or research context.

Adding a jit to perl, inlining, ssa, fixing raku,... Endless possibilities. Just fixing glibc or gcc is out, because people.

I'm more on the second group so LLMs let me get to that part faster without having to get bogged on in the "small stuff".

But I do get the people that enjoy the craftsmanship of the finer details instead.

Now I can find out the gaps, corner cases and motivates me more on craftmanship and perfecting the artifacts i delivered.

if it the puzzle solving metaphor, i'm taking solved puzzles as pieces to solve a more meta puzzle ... and i enjoying the journey at that level.

i try to practice tracing all the way down the stack and learning about new things added to the stack, but i'm not in it for the sake of the stack or its vagaries and difficulties.

I've always done networking (isp, datacenter, large enterprise), security (networking plus firewall, vpn, endpoint), unix/linux admin, even windoze stuff with active directory, but never any development or programming directly. I was just never wired for it, though I can do ip/cidr/bgp/acl stuff in my head for days. I missed out on higher ed entirely after high school, and I learned along the way what I did after 45 years of tinkering with pc's from apple II on i life.

Right now I'm taking my network and security knowledge in writing an mcp to do network and security tasks enabling agents like claude-code, claude-desktop, codex, openclaw a means of accessing resources indirectly via my mcp, and it's something I could have never done before the advent of AI as I "don't do code". Now I can tell it intimately everything I need/want it to do, and it just literally does it. It's extremely effective too, if not at times aggravating/infuriating.

My biggest gripe is it does everything half ass, but nothing I haven't seen time and again from outsourcing. It feels like the usual contractor slop you might get hiring wipro/infosys or any other offshore development effort, but at least without human idiocy.

AI in general really needs a "don't do half-ass work" option, as it typically feels like I'll get "good enough for government work" sort of results until I kick and slap it at least twice to fix its shortcomings. It invariably feels like it always only gives me half of what I ask for. You can almost tell it's built to not give you everything up front, instead make you work for it.

It's a trap, as a wise man once said.

It's why I spend the majority of my time coding every day at age 73.

Ever since the dawn of time I've wanted to make my own games but always ended up wasting time on trying to make engines and frameworks and shit, because no development environment worked the way I wanted to, out of the box.

I don't trust AI enough to let it generate code out of thin air yet, and it's often wrong or inefficient when it does, so I just ask it to review my existing code.

I've been using Codex that way for the last couple months and it's helped me catch of lot of bugs that would have taken me ages on my own. All the code and ideas are still my own, and the AI's made me more productive without being lazy.

Maybe this time I will manage to finish making an actual game for once :')

I thought I enjoyed the journey more, but it turns out the destination is wild! There are still quite a few projects I keep for myself, pieces I want done in a specific way, that I now have time to do properly, while the dull stuff can get done elsewhere.

I just use the chat interface to study and do one-off scripts.

I love having 4-5 bots open and spam the same questions then reading the answers. For everything. Feels like I am doing something, like video games.

It has elevated my wardrobe and music tastes but I still had to have a baseline ofc. They are way too agreeable still.

I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.

Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

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voxleone 9 hours ago | parent | next [–]

I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defining use cases, and understanding the business constraints. Then I design the objects and flows. When possible, I formalize the system with fairly strict axioms and constraints. Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster.

I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.

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jantb 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

I’m doing the same as you and even though I was producing coding a lot of the actual products I estimated the coding part just to be about 20% of the work. The rest is figuring out what and how to build stuff and what stakeholders really need, and solving production issues in live event driven systems. Agentic coding is just faster at the 20% part, and I can always sit down and code the really hard stuff if I want to or feel I need to if the LLM gets stuck. If it produces something not understandable I either learn from it until I understand it og makes it do a pattern I know instead. So all in all, not so worried. reply

finaard 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

> This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me. Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them, unless they eventually became viable to do in a commercial setting where I then had some junior developer to make the annoying stuff go away.

Now with LLMs I have my own junior developer to handle the annoying stuff - and as a result, a lot of my fun stuff I was thinking about in the last 3 decades finally got done.

One example from just last week - I had a large C codebase from the 90s I always wanted to reuse, but modern compilers have a different idea of how C should look like. It's pretty obvious from the compiler errors what you need to do each case, but I wasn't really in the mood for manually going through hundreds of source files. So I just stuck a locally running qwen coder in yolo mode into a container, forgot about it for a week, and came back to a compiling code base. Diff is quick to review, only had a handful of cases where it needed manual intervention.

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throw-the-towel 8 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Note that you are able to choose freely what parts of the work get done by Claude, and what parts you do yourself. At work, many of us have no such luxury because bosses drunk on FOMO are forcing agent use. reply

sktrdie 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

You still care about end result though: in your case, the end result being the puzzled you solved. AI can make that process still enjoyable. For instance I had to build a very intricate cache handler for Next.js from scratch that worked in a very specific way by serializing JSON in chunks (instead of JSON.parse it all in memory). I knew the theory, but the API details and the other annoyances always made it daunting for me.

With AI I was able to thinker more about the theory of the problem and less about the technical implementation which made the process much more fun and doable.

Perhaps we're just climbing the ladder of abstraction: in the early days people were building their own garbage collection mechanisms, their own binary search algorithms, etc. Once we started using libraries, we had to find the fun in some higher level.

Perhaps in the future the fun will be about solving puzzles within the realm of requirement definitions and all the intricacies that stem from that.

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specproc 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

One hundred percent. I came back into tech professionally over the last decade. Always been into computers, but the first decade or so of my career was in humanitarian amin. Super interesting sector, super boring day-to-day.

I am looking for a web API I could use with CURL, and limited "public/testing" API keys. Anyone?

I am very interested in Claude code to test its ability to code assembly (x86_64/RISC-V) and to assist the ports of c++ code to plain and simple C (I read something from HN about this which seems to be promising).

The avatar raised its brows in surprise. "Well, for one thing, you do it, it's you who gets the feeling of achievement."

"Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?"

"They'd know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it."

"Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren't told it was by an AI, or didn't care."

"If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered."

"But if you can—"

"Ziller, are concerned that Minds—AIs, if you like—can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?"

"Frankly, when they're the sort of original works of art that I create, yes."

"Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber."

"Oh, do I?"

"Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and—in some cases—permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic."

"If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed."

"Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.

"The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”

― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

> It is the struggle that they crave

And yet, it's hard to shake the despondent feeling you get looking at the helicopters hoovering around the peak

I've made and continue to make things that I've been thinking about for a while, but the juice was never worth the squeeze. Bluetooth troubleshooting for example -- 5 or 6 different programs will log different parts of the stack independently. I've made an app calling all of these apps, and grouping all of their calls based on mac address' and system time of the calls to correlate and pinpoint the exact issue.

Now I heard the neckbeards crack their knuckles, getting ready to bear down on their split keyboards and start telling me how the program doesn't work because AI made it, it isn't artistic enough for their liking, or whatever the current lie they comfort themselves with is. But it does work, and I've used it already to determine some of my bad devices are really bad.

But there are bugs, you exclaim! Sure, but have you seen human written code?? I've made my career in understanding these systems, programming languages, and people using the systems -- troubleshooting is the fun part and I guess lucky for me is that my favorite part is the thing that will continue to exist.

But what about QA? Humans are better? No. Please guys, stop lying to yourselves. Even if there was a benefit that Humans bring over AI in this arena, that lead is evaporating fast or is already gone. I think a lot of people in our industry take their knowledge and ability to gatekeep by having that knowledge as some sort of a good thing. If that was the only thing you were good at, then maybe it is good that the AI is going to do the thing they excel at and leave those folks to theirs.

It can leave humans to figure out how to maybe be more human? It is funny to type that since I have been on a computer 12h a day since like 1997...but there is a reason why we let calculators crunch large sums, and manufacturing robots have multiple articulating points in their arms making incredible items at insane speeds. I guess there were probably people who like using slide rules and were really good at it, pissed because their job was taken by a device that can do it better and faster. Diddnt the slide rule users take the job from people who did not have a tool like that at first but still had to do the job?

Did THEY complain about that change as well? Regardless, all of these people were left behind if all they are going to do is complain. If you only built one skill in your career, and that is writing code and nothing else, that is not the programs fault.

The journey exists for those who desire to build the knowledge that they lack and use these new incredible tools.

For everyone else, there is Hacker News and an overwhelmingly significant crowd that are ready to talk about the good ole days instead of seeing the opportunities in expanding your talents with software that helps you do your thing better than you have ever dreamed of.