alt Hacker NewsI really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.
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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.
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.
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.