I have been programming for 25+ years and the last year has been the most fun because every single useless-for-everyone-but-me idea ... I could spend a few hours on and get it working. Did 30-40 different small projects this year.[1] Mostly used by me (and some by a couple of friends).

I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.

Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.

I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.

---

[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.

That's been my experience too. 7+ years in industry and lot more before, and I now finally feel like I have more time to do fun side projects. Some may say it is all about the journey, but i rather build for whoever is going to use it, even though it might only be for myself.

Me too.

I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.

Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.

All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.

I can just have the bot do that crap now.

If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.

[flagged]