For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end.

Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions.

Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up.

With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software.

The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.

I see AI-accelerated codegen as doing all of the boring shit I hated:

do while error == true;

Write code

Run code

Read error

Attempt to fix error

Run code

Read error

Search Google for error

Attempt to fix error

Run code

Read error

done

---

Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane parts of it for me.

I like it and I recommend it to those who are willing to admit that their jobs aren't all sunshine and roses until the product is shipped and we can sit back and get to work on the next nightmare.

And by handing over all the small decisions and things like writing unit tests, you are opting in to mediocre code quality (or worse) and you no longer get the full experience of using your code, for example when writing unit tests yourself. Or when in other cases where you call your own procedures from your own code. When writing a test becomes difficult it is often (not always) an indication of bad code quality. It will also lead to you being less familiar with the code in general.

It may be, that all of those are OK in your scenario or use case.

It's like the Blank Page Problem for writers. It's really hard to start.

But if you have a shitty page of text, you can edit it to make it better.

With LLM tools I can get from idea to (shitty) proof-of-concept solution really fast. Then I can start dogfooding it and improve and rewrite.

But sometimes the shitty solution is enough for my purposes. It works and doesn't actively break shit. My problem was solved and I don't need to optimise the silly TUI yt-dlp wrapper it just made me.

For me the problem with the vision is that stuff I’d like to exist is so far above the capabilities of AI (rather complex games) that I don’t even want to try it. And for stuff that I build and use they are pointless because they don’t accelerate me much.

I found it great to write bash scripts, automation, ffmpeg command lines, OCR, refactoring… it’s a great autocomplete.

Working in a large team I realized that even relying too much of other people’s work is making me understand the technology less and I need to catch up.

> the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end.

Perhaps you mean "the fun part of building computer systems", because it sounds like you don't enjoy writing code.

It’s still cans of snakes all the way down though when it comes debugging time.

> and it never gives up.

Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."