I only find it to be painful when done for the corporate world... when I go home, even after 7 hours at the office, I find it therapeutic to push to main, not have a CI, not write tests, test in production, commit with one-liners like I'm asking someone if they want a beer, and overall just code any random idea that crosses my mind... even more so now with AI, because now I can get my ideas out there faster, and believe me, this is serious crapware, but who cares? I don't...

I think what is agonizing is either the process imposed by the company or the architecture you are working with. Both can lead to immense frustration. When you have good architecture and a good development process, things become much less frustrating. I wanted to add one more thing: if you work on any idea you don't like, it doesn't matter the language, the platform, the architecture or the process. In the end you will feel the pain and frustration.

Programming doesn't cause me pain or feel like work. I build projects in my free time because I enjoy solving problems.

One thing I love about programming is that it forces me to understand ideas at a much deeper level than simply reading about them. Writing code requires both step by step reasoning and high-level abstraction. That combination often leads to better solutions and a clearer understanding of the problem.

I often ask myself, "Would I still do this if I weren't getting paid?" The answer is usually yes. That's why many of my projects are completely free, with no ads or subscriptions.

Aside from the human side of it which is often nothing to do with programming itself, I'd say anything that is captivating is only so because its agonizing. If you have a problem to solve and instantly know the solution, there was no problem, just manual labour left not done (using that in the most technical sense). Solving problems is captivating, but it has to be hard or there'd be no problem at all.

The only things I find agonizing about programming:

1. unrealistic time frames and expectations from non-technical managers, and

2. leetcode

Everything else is awesome.

> Your goals are set by others; information and resources are provided by others. The programmer rarely controls his working conditions, sometimes not even his objectives. In management terms, "one's authority is not commensurate with his responsibility."

This is the real reason hackers start start ups.

Through words and patterns you can change the operation of the machine, and thus alter the physical world. Your programs are wizardry! The part that sucks is trying to make magic happen within an organization run by boring accounting people. The only room for magic is begrudging.

For me the agonizing part are all the arbitrary things you have to memorize or lookup, that do not follow from the flow of the code or the principles on which the system is built. Struggling to find the right keywords to find which particular frob needs to be foozled for the program to start working, which may or may not be documented anywhere or written up by someone who already somehow stumbled across the answer.

Because you get to solve real problems people have. But you have to work with real people.

I never found programming agonizing.

It’s not agonizing or difficult at all, you just need like 20 years of obsession lmao

But seriously it’s easy after that. The hard part becomes:

- what do people want

- how should it look and feel

- how does it generate revenue

There’s a concept and execution phase to each of these that are difficult in their own way.

But yeah I have not stressed out about which for loop to use or if it should be monolithic or services etc in a long time. We have so many language options and you can even have a bot write it for you to the latest style and standard

It's agonizing because it's hard. It's captivating because it's possible.