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ori_b 3 days ago

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 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is it hiking if I bought my boots on amazon?

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ori_b 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 days ago | parent [-]

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

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lmorchard 3 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 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	ori_b 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's why I used the word "you" and not "I".

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HDThoreaun 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Having a product that works is what these people enjoy