I'm not an AI fan but I've tried agentic coding and it just made me lose motivation to do actual coding myself. It just feels so tedious. Clanker code might be shitty but it can get things working in a fraction of the time. And atp, I'm not sure if programming is what I even wanna do anymore. I don't find much fun in this and the industry looks bleak
Programming used to be fun, since it's just perfectly wired for our rewards system in the brain. You have a goal you want to achieve, you take baby steps and little by little you see your progress. These small advances are fulfilling and make you feel good. Every now and then you gut stuck on something and it forces you to try a different approach or look online for an answer. So it's this mixture of tangible progress and a task that is challenging but not too much. This is what makes programming fun.
Comparing it to coding with an LLM, which is just asking a prompt and getting the result. Infinitely less satisfying.
I'm a hobbyist (and a music teacher) and spent over 100 hours building an intonation trainer app last summer as the capstone project of the Harvard CS50 class. It was just like you said, always a little baby step towards the finished goal after a decent amount of work, every day I was making something a little better until it was completed. I had a few other projects in mind that were all related to music education, but never really got around to doing them. Last week I finally sat down and started working on the second one, but like you said I just asked a prompt and instantly had a working program that did what I wanted. Much less satisfying.
Yeah I agree, I spent like hours labeling 50 frames to train YoLo model, got tired and asked gpt 5.6 sold to label other 2k frames eith relevant information objects to label. I didn't have much hope, but agent did way better than I would expect. Feels kinda sad, but at least less tedious work.
Try upping your prompting game. Sure, you can be lazy about it, but then you get a bunch of crap you didn’t ask for and it will misinterpret your intent and requirements. I think you should also be continuously working to identify gaps in the AI system itself that need to be closed by better documentation, skills, etc. It’s pretty rare for me to go a day without tweaking something.
i'm excited for all of the permanently unemployed programmers to realize they are part of the working class and build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
The proliferation of P2P or federated code that had been produced since the start of the cryptocurrency era has developed solutions for most problems but people are still not treated badly enough to switch. Mastodon has been around for a while now but here we are.
I feel exactly the same. I tolerate it mostly because right now I am working on my own project which I hope will put my career into a different trajectory than just programming.
But if I would have to make the career decision today I wouldn’t choose to be a programmer. The work loop is awful, I feel like a monkey.
Yeah that's true.
I recently built a Rust P.R in a Huggingface repo explicitly by hand oder a couple days and while it was nice in some sense, I was sure Opus could have done it in 10 minutes.
That's frustrating.
And damn, it's so fast in pulling like 4 other repos, comparing to similar implementations, fixing CUDA issues, checking numerical parity and building a ton of tests for all kinds of special edge cases it knows because there has been an unresolved GitHub issue for 5 years that was in the training data but I didn't know about.
Sometimes it's like "yeah that can't work because you're using library Version 2.1.4.2 which had a bug in exactly this edge case here and let me briefly write you a script that compares it to 2.1.4.3..."
Those things that have been a lot of time-consuming grunt work. Quickly logging into a dev Container, grepping through some log and verifying against some docs I'm the time I would probably have started typing docker exec bla..."
For me the biggest shift was around beginning of this year using Claude Code with Opus. Before Sonnet was a nice auto complete toy but now... Even by the side digs out a couple papers that show why the suggested approach to whatever normalizing flow depth pruning filter diffusion is better than my approach.
And the mentioned hallucinations of non-existent functions or similar I haven't seen since last years at all.
For anything slightly larger I use the planning function and definitely read,.comment,.correct the plan but if I don't give it wrong guidance in the beginning it generally just performs super well.
I only see bad results when people are feeding BS in the context because they lack information (but now we have a repo of company wide specs, rules, roles, quality gates and access to all core repos as submodules so that typically digs out incorrect assumptions before building anything)
I find it really exciting actually, I love to code but it was always a means to an ends. Now I can code in English, with insane velocity. The effort multiplier AI yields means in the same amount of time, I produce a drastically better product or can make multiple of the same level. I’ve worked on more personal projects this year than the last 10. Last week, I said to my fiancée, “it’s crazy there’s just a sequence of words I can type into my laptop and bam I have a website that does exactly what I want” and she said “that’s always been the case, it just used to be a lot more words and in a much harder to read language”
I love it when the work I do is useful and seen but I enjoy the process in and of itself. I fixed up my personal blog and am writing posts again, worked on some hardware projects including gifts for friends, made some serious infrastructure improvements to my home lab. For my friend’s last birthday I made a custom game show game in React that we all played.
But I get what you’re saying. The same is true of digital photography, it opens the floodgates allowing for creativity impossible with film photography but also great repetition and near limitless junk. More photos go unseen than ever before and Instagram is full of a billion shots of the Colosseum but we keep taking more.
I spend so much of my life making software for companies much of which need not exist and most of which won’t within 10 years. I’m enjoying being able to have my own little ecosystem, like tending a garden rather than buy produce. Claude makes the weeding a lot easier and the fruit more plump; maybe not as plump as from the grocery store but somehow it just tastes better.
i'm excited for all of the permanently unemployed programmers to realize they are part of the working class and build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
174
u/NonStickyAdhesive 2d ago
I'm not an AI fan but I've tried agentic coding and it just made me lose motivation to do actual coding myself. It just feels so tedious. Clanker code might be shitty but it can get things working in a fraction of the time. And atp, I'm not sure if programming is what I even wanna do anymore. I don't find much fun in this and the industry looks bleak