Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it"

I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight.

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?

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.