alt Hacker NewsThis feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.
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I’d argue most businesses have had their start through yak shaving.
I’ve found that the overuse of AI papers over a lot of problems. Then if things start failing people have no idea where or what to start fixing. I’m very much a destination person, but I’ve been on enough rides which crashed and burned to be cautious about it.
In my experience it's not as simple and depends on a whole lot of circumstances: generally I am interested to learn and to build. Give me pressure through dysfunctional processes, understaffed teams, unrealistic standards, too strong peer opinions- etc - and I'll happily reach for the shortest path.
Riding horseback saves time over walking but it's harder to smell the roses along the way. Nevertheless, millions now ride horses recreationally.
It makes me of the difference between the indie developer who labored over Stardew Valley vs. (for example) Square Enix putting out a farming sim because their committee of suits decided they wanted revenue from that genre.
Speaking of things that I don’t buy. Metaphorically yesterday this site would gatekeep over enjoying the process of coding itself. People who merely programmed for a 200KUSD paycheck, pphew, disgusting.
Made a post about how you learned to touch type? Or improved something keyboard-related? “I don’t think that typing code was ever the bottlenck”.[1] Now we’re supposed to be grateful for non-deterministic code completion, ah it saves us millions of keystrokes a year.
Some will cry Goomba Fallacy. Yeah of course. Could be that many lurker accounts started posting more, displacing the gatekeeper typist hackers. Now it’s all of a sudden an even split. Huh.
The OP was not about AI. But thankfully there was a top-level meta comment to drag us down into that pit.
[1] The non sequitur of it all is a separate topic
i think what's really splitting it might actually be differing levels of slop tolerance.
They are different things. There are projects where I deeply care about the code, and projects where I deeply care about the end result. And a whole lot in between, or that are entirely throwaway.
But I use AI also for some of the ones where I deeply care about the code, now. E.g. my terminal is in Ruby, and it worked well enough, but over the last couple of days I had Claude put together a test harness and burn down a number of sharp corners and refactor the code. It's not perfect still, but it's cleaner than it was because I didn't have time to do enough yak shaving myself. I do care about that codebase, because I have other things I want to use it for, and not having to do it all manually gave me enough time to get it to a far better state.
I feel like a lot of the split comes from people who are a whole lot less overcommitted. If you have way too many projects, you pick and choose which projects you want to lovingly care for and which ones you just want to advance the functionality of as fast as possible. Sometimes those are one and the same at different times.