It's not the typing, obviously, you're right. I think the parent is talking about it being an "intellectual exercise" to organize their thoughts about what they wanted to see as a result, whereas we who enjoy programming enjoy the exercise of breaking down thoughts into logical and algorithmic segments, such that no edge cases are left behind, and such that we think through the client's requirements much more thoroughly than they thought through them themselves. A physician might take joy in finding and fixing a human or animal malady. A roofer might take joy in replacing a roof tile, or a whole roof. But what job besides coding offers you the chance to read through the entire business structure of.. a lawyer, a doctor, a roofing company, a bakery.. and then decide how to turn their business into (a) a forward-facing, customer-friendly website, and (b) a lean data-gathering machine and (c) a software suite and hosting infrastructure and custom databases tailored to their exact needs, after you've gleaned those needs from reading all their financials and everything they've ever put out into the world?

The joy of writing code is turning abstract ideas into solid, useful things. Whether you do most of it in your head or not, when you sit down to write you will find you know how you want to treat bills - is it an object under payroll or clients or employees or is it a separate system?

LLMs suck at conceptualizing schema (and so do pseudocoders and vibe coders). Our job is turning business models into schemata and then coding the fuck out of them into something original, beautiful, and useful.

Let them have their fun. They will tire of their plastic toy lawnmowers, and the tools they use won't replace actual thought. The sad thing is: They'll never learn how to think.

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svara 4 days ago | parent [-]

> The sad thing is: They'll never learn how to think.

Drawing a sense of superiority out of personal choices or preferences is a really unfortunate human trait; particularly so in this case since it prevents you from seeing developments around you with clarity.

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globnomulous 3 days ago | parent [-]

I agree with the person you're answering. LLM-assisted coding is like reading a foreign language with a facing translation: most students who do this will make the mistake of thinking they've translated and understood the original text. They haven't. People are abysmal at maintaining an accurate mental accounting of attribution, authorship, and ownership.

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grim_io 3 days ago | parent [-]

Why is it so hard for people to understand or appreciate the higher layers of abstraction, that lie above their preferred layers of comfort?

Think back on assembly programmers scoffing at c programmers.

Same arguments, probably same outcomes.

	▲	globnomulous 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree. When you add an abstraction layer, the user of that layer continues to write code. That's not the case when people rely heavily on LLMs. They're at best reading and tweaking the model's output. That's not the only way to use an LLM. One can instead write a piece of code and then ask the tool for analysis, but that's not the scenario that people like me are criticizing or concerned about -- and it's not how most people imagine LLMs will be used in the future, if models and tools continue to improve. People are predicting that the models will write the software. That's what people like me and the person I agreed with are criticizing and concerned about. I'm uncomfortable with the idea not because it's outside of my area of comfort but because people don't understand code they read the way they understand code they write. Writing the code familiarizes the writer with the problem space (the pitfalls, for instance). When you haven't written it, and you've instead just read it, then you haven't worked through the problems. You don't know the problem space or the reasons for the choices that the author made. To put this another way: you can learn to read a language or understand it by ear without learning to speak it. The skills are related, but they're separate. In turn, people acquire and develop the skills they practice: you don't learn to speak by reading. Junior engineers and young people who learn to code with AI, and don't write code themselves, will learn, in essence, how to read but not how to write or 'speak;' they'll learn how to talk to the AI models, and maybe how to read code, but not how to write software.