It's still ok to enjoy programming

Even if work is not life, hobby programming also has been affected.

I worked hard a couple of years ago to reverse engineer a game to produce a very specific tool. Recently, the game was updated, so I worked on my free time to do a free contribution to the community, and then, a few hours later a tool that does the same thing appeared entirely vibecoded.

Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.

Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

As someone whose whole identity was built around programming I mourn it daily. But I do think it's wonderful that people can realize their ideas now. E.g. I've seen a lot of vibe coded retro games lately, and while they're clearly lacking craftsmanship in some areas (e.g. not crunching your binary, bad looking AI load screens, & just a general lack of polish) I have to remind myself that these games probably wouldn't exist without AI, and TBH some of them are not half bad.

I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.

Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.

> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.

> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints

The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.

I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.

My prediction is that it will take a while for the processes and habits to changes, but programming manually or at least reviewing code will become a niche activity, pretty much like building or maintaining mechanical clocks or old-school woodworking with hand tools.

Building software is hard for humans, managing the complexity of large projects has been at the frontier of our intellectual capabilities for a while, leading to well known issues in cyber security and exploding costs. At some point machines are simply better suited to the task.

Programming is still fun, at least if you are solving real problems and building real products.

The part of programming that sucks the most is untangling ambiguity. In my current app I had an ultra simple proxy convention, but it sucks. I have since settled on a different single convention to cover 6 different scenarios of traffic redirection, but it was a challenge to distill simplicity from chaos of the wilds and write all the various tests. It’s moving forward faster now but it was like starting over to get this rolling.

What I find is fun is building things that solve real problems I have. Then my problem is solved, I am paying nothing for it, and I can extend it however I want for any reason without downstream restrictions.

There is so much AI still cannot do in software. If you ask AI to build a faster WebSocket solution, for example, you will get more of what’s already there. I have a WebSocket library I wrote myself 4 or 5 years ago. I thought it was fast, turns out it wasn’t. I wrote my own perf tool for it and had a defect in the perf tool that spit out wrong results, but that defect showed me where the performance bottleneck was. Now my library is 40x-100x faster than other WebSocket libraries. I did use Claude to analyze my earlier perf bug, and it made the same mistakes I was making. If you want to go faster than popular battle tested solutions you have to be original and AI just isn’t quite there.

I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.

And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.

> Work is not life.

Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.

Anyhone who tells you things like, "what, you are still looking at code and care what it looks like?" just exposes themselves as a supreme twit.

> It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it, because that's not the point.

What do you say to someone that is bothered though? I don't know why it effects my enjoyment so, but it does.

I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.

For whatever a single anecdote is worth, there do still seem to be at least some jobs that require a decent amount hand-coding still. I just landed a new role and when I asked about AI usage policies, etc. they told me you can use whatever you want but don't count on it working well as the AIs are not that good at writing the code we work on. They suggested using it more as a explainer and for targeted tasks vs. agentic development.

I wish there was I way I could forget this site existed so I would never go back here.

I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.

Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.

Last year I started at a new job and was at first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.

Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.

Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.

I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.

I love creating fun things and solving challenging problems no-one has solved. I do not really "enjoy" actual programming. Andnever did, since starting it 30 years ago when I was 9.

"Enjoying programming" for me as an engineer/computer scientist is akin to mathematician studying topology, enjoying idk, arithmetic or solving quadratic equations". Whether someone actua, lly gets dopamine from it strictly personal but in the grand scheme of things those are trivial things below me.

Sadly lots of "programmers" are really just "technicians" that happened to pick up skills in some niche and didn't approach computational problems from first principles.

> Work is not life.

When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.

+1 to this, the end gratification is what it matters. More rewarding experience

I have a long term goal of establishing a workflow or framework wherein AI operates at my pace. I suspect much of the angst I experience when working with AI is driven by its independent working that I will be held accountable for.

One simple change that has really helped me is to take the git tool access away from the AI. This has made me quite critical of AI excesses in the design of the code and I feel free to rollback its changes and to request redos. I grok the changesets better as a result.

(as a hobby. God forbid you enjoy it for money.)

This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.

The future sucks.

Those types of articles make me wonder - is it specific to current US-based software companies culture to be so much involved in AI? I work for in central-eastern Europe and AI has changed the way I code, but not to an extent that I don't ever manually write code anymore. I don't want to sound patronizing, just a genuine question, cause I have a disconnect with what I'm reading on HN and what I see on a daily basis.

It's just so sad to see the loudest people (who usually have a vested interest in AI taking jobs) always have un-nuanced takes that ai tools are always the best tools for the job.

Anyone who can speak with any nuance on where humans (the only actual intelligence on earth) can vastly outperform the best models has their voices buried.

Algo feeds are a plague brainwashing people with news/info about only on the extreme views thanks to it optimizing for engagement to serve the most ads. Your favorite really really smart but boring professor's thoughts from University would never get shared online in todays world for example.

I'm curious if there are specific examples of the kind of thing that motivated this post. What comments or articles are suggesting that it's not ok to enjoy programming?

I'm not sure I need you to tell me...

I feel obligated to quote a comment I saw under 3b1b video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc&lc=Ugyrq4aZqNPa6Ol28...:

I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....

Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.

I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.

I just hate this existence.

I've been practicing leet code recently because.. reasons. But I actually have been enjoying it a lot more than in the past because I get that now scarce hands on experience

Most of the times someone writes something like that I find they are mostly talking to themselves.

Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.

yes, but it's a hobby now. If you enjoy historical re-enactment of old software development practices, feel free!

And here I was trying so hard to hate the thing I've loved doing.

Thanks blog!

> I still program on the weekends because it is fun

Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?

Some of us enjoy mentally modelling everything to see opportunities to iterate as each cog turns in their head. Often without being in front of a device, letting sub conscious figuring out difficult problems. AI has its place but so does that process.

If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.

It's like meat was invented.

Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".

I like getting stuff done, and AI lets me get more done, more quickly.

For a second I didnt see where it says "made by my own two hands", but it's down the bottom.

Phew!

It's becoming a hobby I guess

Yeah but I want to get paid for it.

The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...

I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.

Gosh, programming was never that enjoyable.

I finally freed from typewriting mundane stuff like yet another API endpoint or subscribing to rabbitmq, and can focus of creative work and really building useful things.

It’s ok to enjoy knitting too.

> It's still ok to enjoy programming

It is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.

Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.

Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.

NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...)

1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798

Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.

So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.

I can now freely admin that I never enjoyed programming. It was just a means to an end for creating.

HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.

These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.

AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.

The dumbest people always win temporarily.

You don’t realize the difference between joy at work and joy on the weekend vs. only joy on the weekend?

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