> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.

I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.

That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.

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apt-apt-apt-apt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How can you say there are no challenges and things to master when working with AI? Unless you are just doing "Make this. LGTM. Now make this".

	▲	zbentley an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> "Make this. LGTM. Now make this". I think well north of 90% of people in software engineering have job expectations that, when assisted/automated with AI, boil down to exactly that. It's a pain in the ass to work at such a job and find challenges or things to master--your superiors don't want you to do that, there's not enough time in the day, and you're tired from LGTM-now-make-this work. That's most software jobs, because that's what most software companies want.

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ipsod 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you not seek mastery with the new tools, though?

It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.

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VGHN7XDuOXPAzol an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.

Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)

Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.

It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.

	▲	sellmesoap 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.

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sashank_1509 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Did a tailor gain mastery of the sweatshop machine? Did mastery of the automated sewing machines give the same joy to the tailor or was it mind numbing meaningless activity that he would be happier to be free of.