I enjoy getting into the zone while listening to synthwave and banging out code. But I'm not going to ignore that I can code most programs 100x as fast using claude code. I don't enjoy coding so much that I will spend 8 hours getting a side project together when I could get more done in 30 minutes with AI.

I personally love coding! unfortunately for me the agents are much faster at it and often more correct, especially after iteration. Guiding AI is more efficient currently.

Speaking only for myself, I _love_ coding. But I haven't done refactoring by applying a needle (with a steady hand) to a roll of magnetic tape in _YEARS_ /snark.

I love monkey-patching some python or js. But never have I ever suggested that anyone would should do it. Writing everything in Haskell sounds lovely but I wouldn't advise that either.

I honestly don't care what language I'm writing in. LLMs bring us back to the smalltalk days: your code is data and your data is code. LLMs bring a translation layer so that even if you're writing some high-level language, some DSL that exists only on some 1-off platform that no one else is aware of, _everybody_ has access to a self-bootstrapping codebase.

I feel more empowered to _code_ than ever: now, every single input carries semantic weight that gets carried through the "compiler." Every claim of determinism can much more easily be fuzz-tested and made more robust. "'sup, this broke, fix yo" and "Would you be so kind as to fix this error?" contain semantic context that actually affects the output of the generated code. That restores empowerment around code _authorship_ while still preserving the guarantees we want from the published artifact.

"Deep understanding" doesn't disappear when you gain the ability to be more expressive. "Deep understanding" disappears when people become incurious.

ok but a lot of coding used to be fighting package managers, discovering bugs in dependencies, dealing with deploy baloney, etc, not just "solving puzzles" or "architecting the backend"

There are certain things I enjoy coding by hand, in exactly the same way I like using a manual coffee grinder. Coding can be enjoyable.

But most of the time coding is a means to an end. I bet your friend in HVAC was not told to use a manual drill to have a deeper understanding of how to make holes for installation. AI is simply a power tool.

I enjoy building things. I do not enjoy the act typing out code by hand.

> Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question

To follow this debate through, to maximize coding enjoyment, shouldn't we be avoiding compilers? They take away a lot of the code we need to write. Frameworks as well?

I have a wrist pain from typing a lot. I prefer to generate and then audit. Just make changes one file at a time and then review and commit.

So I go from typing to prompting and reviewing diffs.

There is no way I install an agent on my laptop so I stick to web UI

I love coding and I always have - arguably moreso now, if you can still call it coding.

For me, it is not about the syntax nor the mechanics of typing though. My enjoyment comes from thinking about problems and breaking them down, or thinking about what architecture would best serve them. I guess I'm meant to be a systems design guy, so I'm lucky that AI-coding fits this well (AI models have limited context windows, relative to the size of codebases, so doing the big picture thinking is still important, and fun for me).

> The only context I have is my friend in HVAC from many years ago that went to a school that taught everything manually because they wanted people to have a deep understanding of it. What happens to code in the future when people don't have a deep understanding?

What happen is that their boss gets a 3 page email screed with pictures of how they fucked up the thermostat wiring in trying to gerry-rig a new heat pump/air handler that supports only electric resistance backup heat into my house which has an oil boiler for backup. And I get shit from my wife about why our $10k new heat pump is blowing cold air on her during defrost cycles.

I don’t know but to me it seems a bunch of people should learn proper typing. There is no way in world that AI is faster in solving/writing problems than you are when you can maneuver your idea/vim properly and have proper domain knowledge and mental model of your codebase. I think it’s genuinely 10x as fast. Just on execution and then if you write it you keep mental model, decide details and you don’t lose context.

Like honestly I’m losing my mind, when people claim I haven’t written code in a year. You had the wrong job your whole life and whilst you think you are so frontier now by using agenst your market value is actually decreasing.

Imagine a painter saying, I’m so happy I don’t have to paint anymore. Or a tennis player. I’m so happay that I don’t have to play tennis anymore.

wtf is going on?

Really if you think about it AI will know everything and you can quickly get the answer for whatever right from inside your smart glasses.

We all become knowledge experts especially when the data we see inside our glasses is always 100% correct. This could take Years but that's where we are heading and Im sure no one now likes the sound of it.

There's parts I enjoy, parts I dislike and parts I hate with a passion.

However, I love putting something in front of users, seeing them use it and get value out of it. And AI lets me get there 10x faster.

I guess I'm of two minds on it.

Sometimes, I will review every line, test the front-end in a staging environment, verify the backend contract, et cetera. Over time, though, I realized that many of these reviews just didn't result in any necessary changes. The current model (with guidance/claude.md/etc) was able to one-shot the task.

Not to overly personify, but imagine how you might treat a junior colleague. You start by reviewing everything they do with a microscope, later you review the broad-strokes, and eventually, for low-stakes or well-scoped tasks, you just play with the demo and the ticket and approve it.

Otherwise it's not materially different than a pre-AI world - you've got sample I/O, test cases, hand-review, look at the application on different screen sizes, contrive some edge cases, test against a spec if there is one - et cetera.

I think this is the real problem. I am sympathetic towards automated code synthesis.

But without formal verification and a human reviewing specifications to ensure alignment, I think code will end up being broken in unexpected ways or drift away from the original intent.

The same way that I verified all of the code that was written before AI. Just because you hand type the code doesn't mean that you don't have to test and verify. I can test much more thoroughly with AI that without.

Have you ever worked in a company? Have you ever worked in a F100?

Companies are paying for software, not for owning the code.

Both. And internal tools. And infrastructure scaffolding a la terraform. And visual design.

And frontier models routinely crush all the above in a way I couldn't, at speeds unattainable to mere flesh and blood like me.

Not the guy you asked, but honestly, I'm not sure which one of those I'd consider better use cases, not worse.

Generally end-user applications, depending on how you classify internal tools. I'm generally very happy with the output of Opus 4.X with a moderately structured CLAUDE.md and some investment in detection/avoidance of anti-patterns (Next.js+ts). I imagine that the bitter lesson is true here, and these heuristic guidelines will become increasingly unnecessary w/ smarter models.

Library-type work has mostly been side/toy projects, although fwiw, with a standard/spec on hand (CommonMark for example), I'm also happy w/ the output. It's often possible to "close the loop" and have the coding agent autonomously iterate until the standard is adhered to.

Judging by parent's CV, it kind of looks like they are relatively new to the industry and working in areas where they are heavy on the greenfield side of the equation. I get the sense that they've probably had some good success on smallish projects where they are in charge of keeping it all in their head. That's not to say that isn't earned or otherwise valuable experience, but it surely is not the way a lot of software projects are situated. Parent: I hope you won't take my comment here as a slight. I mean no offense, just pointing out what I think is probably valuable context.