honestly, with LLMs, everything is fun again.

embedded dev with a billion toolchains, GPU development with each vendors bespoke API, ffmpeg with its billion parameters - if anything, you could say LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization. without LLMs, we might be facing a world where 30% of the workforce is in software dev.

i am keeping my eyes peeled on vibe-coding PCB layouts and schematics. a lot of eyes in that direction already but its still early.

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ori_b 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't get it. What part of the process do you enjoy?

Do you also enjoy hiring a taskrabbit to go hiking for you, taking photos along the way?

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mentos 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I’m just looking to make pizza not smelt the ore for the oven I’m going to cook it in.

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ori_b 4 days ago | parent [-]

Why make pizza when you can order it? As far as I can tell, there's not much enjoyment of making being had.

Enjoying having is fine too, but let's at least be honest about it.

I enjoy looking at photos people took on hikes, but I don't call it hiking.

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mentos 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is it hiking if I bought my boots on amazon?

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ori_b 4 days ago | parent [-]

Not if you sit at home wearing boots and looking at photos of mountains.

If you want to have boots, that's cool. But is replacing walking with ordering boots and photos making hiking fun again? Or were you only interested in the photos anyway?

What part of the process of hiking do you enjoy? And why is it so hard to hear what part of the process of programming people enjoy?

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mentos 4 days ago | parent [-]

But you’d agree it’s still hiking even if I didn’t tan the leather for the boots myself.

	▲	ori_b 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, if you go out and walk. The same way I would agree it was programming if you designed the algorithms yourself.

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lmorchard 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just obtuse. Some folks have fun building their own pizza oven, curing & slicing their own meat, and mixing their own dough. Some folks like to buy mostly pre-made stuff and just play with a few special ingredients. Some folks want to make 5 different pizzas with different flavors. Some folks just order a pizza.

Some folks walk out of their house and start hiking. Some folks drive somewhere and then start walking. Some folks take photos from the car. Some folks take a roadtrip.

All of these things ask for different effort & commitment with different experiences & results as the payoff. At least be honest about that.

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ori_b 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's interesting that nobody has actually answered what part of the process they enjoy.

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lmorchard 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Like, fine, here's a personal example: I wanted to build a system that posts web links I share to a bot account on the fediverse. That seemed like a fun result to me.

I wanted to self-host the links, so I installed Linkding. (I didn't write Linkding.) For the fediverse bot, I installed gotosocial as the service host (I didn't write gotosocial.)

From there, a cronjob running a small program using Linkding and gotosocial APIs could do the trick. Decided to do it in golang, because the standalone binaries are easy to deploy.

Writing that small program didn't seem like fun - I've already played with those APIs and golang. What I wanted, for my enjoyment, was the completed system.

So, I took 10 minutes to write out a quick spec for the program and what I wanted it to do. I loaded that up as context for Claude Code along with some pointers for building CLI apps in golang. I let it rip and, in about 20 minutes, Claude produced a functional tool. It also wrote a decent README based on my original prose.

I reviewed the code, did some testing, made some tweaks, called it done. My bookmarks are now regularly posted to a bot account on the fediverse. This is an enjoyable outcome for me - and I didn't have to type every line of code myself.

For bonus points, I also had Claude Code gin up some GitHub Actions workflows to lint, test, build, and release multi-platform binaries for this tool. I've done these things before, but they're tedious. More enjoyable to have the resulting automations than to build them. And now I have them: I can make tweaks to this tool and get builds just through the GitHub web UI.

I've since repeated this pattern with a handful of other small personal tools. In each case, I wanted the tool and the utility it offered. I didn't care about the process of writing the code. It's working pretty well for me.

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lmorchard 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's different for everyone, so no one answer would likely satisfy you

	▲	ori_b 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's why I used the word "you" and not "I".

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HDThoreaun 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Having a product that works is what these people enjoy

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satvikpendem 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Seeing the output I want when I describe it, and making changes to get to the vision in my mind. I don't have aphantasia so maybe it's different for those who do, but I can literally see the UI of the app I want to build and of course I can build it by writing code manually too, but I can make it exist much faster with an LLM than without.

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acedTrex 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization.

This is fundamentally what makes them so DAMAGING to humanity. They didn't bail us out, they robbed us of it.

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HPsquared 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Specialization is for insects, as Heinlein said. We are going back to the Renaissance Man ideal and I'm all for it.

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Palomides 4 days ago | parent [-]

isn't it exactly the opposite? LLMs have killed the generalist, only specialists with very targeted skills have anything marketable

	▲	CuriouslyC 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		100% the opposite. LLMs lack high level creativity, wisdom and taste. Being a generalist is how you build these. For example, there's a common core to music, art, food, writing, etc that you don't see until you've gotten good at 3+ aesthetic fields. There are common patterns in different academic disciplines and activities that can supercharge your priors and help you make better decisions. LLMs can "see" these these connections if explicitly prompted with domains and details, but they don't seem to reason with them in mind or lean on them by default. On the other hand, LLMs are being aggressively RL'd by the top 10% of various fields, so single field expertise by some of the best in the world is 100% baked in and the default.
	▲	4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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decremental 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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groestl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On a meta level, seems this trajectory follows Alan Kay: first we made the complex things possible, now we make simple things simple.

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necrotic_comp 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with this. I've been able to tackle projects I've been wanting to for ages with LLMs because they let me focus on abstractions first and get over the friction of starting the project.

Once I get my footing, I can use them to generate more and more specialized code and ultimately get to a place where the code is good.

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mhog_hn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization” - well said!

	▲	CrossVR 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Finally we can get rid of those insufferable nerds. /s

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llmslave2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What is fun? Prompting?