I like this framing; I think it captures some of the key differences between engineers who are instinctively enthusiastic about AI and those who are not.

Many engineers walk a path where they start out very focussed on programming details, language choice, and elegant or clever solutions. But if you're in the game long enough, and especially if you're working in medium-to-large engineering orgs on big customer-facing projects, you usually kind of move on from it. Early in my career I learned half a dozen programming languages and prided myself on various arcane arts like metaprogramming tricks. But after a while you learn that one person's clever solution is another person's maintainability nightmare, and maybe being as boring and predictable and direct as possible in the code (if slightly more verbose) would have been better. I've maintained some systems written by very brilliant programmers who were just being too clever by half.

You also come to realize that coding skills and language choice don't matter as much as you thought, and the big issues in engineering are 1) are you solving the right problem to begin with 2) people/communication/team dynamics 3) systems architecture, in that order of importance.

And also, programming just gets a little repetitive after a while. Like you say, after a decade or so, it feels a bit like "more of the same." That goes especially for most of the programming most of us are doing most of the time in our day jobs. We don't write a lot of fancy algorithms, maybe once in a blue moon and even then you're usually better off with a library. We do CRUD apps and cookie-cutter React pages and so on and so on.

If AI coding agents fall into your lap once you've reached that particular variation of a mature stage in your engineering career, you probably welcome them as a huge time saver and a means to solve problems you care about faster. After a decade, I still love engineering, but there aren't may coding tasks I particularly relish diving into. I can usually vaguely picture the shape of the solution in my head out the gate, and actually sitting down and doing it feels rather a bore and just a lot of typing and details. Which is why it's so nice when I can kick off a Claude session to do it instead, and review the results to see if they match what I had in mind.

Don't get me wrong. I still love programming if there's just the right kind of compelling puzzle to solve (rarer and rarer these days), and I still pride myself on being able to do it well. Come the holidays I will be working through Advent of Code with no AI assistance whatsoever, just me and vim. But when January rolls around and the day job returns I'll be having Claude do all the heavy lifting once again.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure you're dealing with big balls of mud which has dampened your love of coding. Where implementing something is more about solving accidental complexity and dealing with technical debts than actually doing the job.

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libraryofbabel 4 days ago | parent [-]

I've seen some balls of mud, sure, but I don't think that's the essence of it. It's more like:

1) When I already have a rough picture of the solution to some programming task in my head up front, I do not particularly look forward to actually going and doing it. I've done enough programming that many things feel like a variation on something I've done before. Sometimes the task is its own reward because there is a sufficiently hard and novel puzzle to solve. Mostly it is not and it's just a matter of putting in the time. Having Claude do most of the work is perfect in those cases. I don't think this is particularly anything to do with working on a ball of mud: it applies to most kinds of work on clean well-architected projects as well.

2) I have a restless mind and I just don't find doing something that interesting anymore once I have more or less mastered it. I'd prefer to be learning some new field (currently, LLMs) rather than spending a lot of time doing something I already know how to do. This is a matter of temperament: there is nothing wrong with being content in doing a job you've mastered. It's just not me.

	▲	skydhash 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> 1) When I already have a rough picture of the solution to some programming task in my head up front, I do not particularly look forward to actually going and doing it. Every time I think I have a rough picture of some solution, there's always something in the implementation that proves me wrong. Then it's reading docs and figuring whatever gotchas I've stepped into. Or where I erred in understanding the specifications. If something is that repetitive, I refactor and try to make it simple. > I have a restless mind and I just don't find doing something that interesting anymore once I have more or less mastered it. If I've mastered something (And I don't believe I've done so for pretty much anything), the next step is always about eliminating the tedium of interacting with that thing. Like a code generator for some framework or adding special commands to your editor for faster interaction with a project.