This seems to romanticize the past. I've been doing this for 40 years and I don't see that much has changed. I would code even if I didn't get paid for it. That said I've always seen writing code as a means to an end. I use GenAI every day to write code, and it brings pure joy when there's boiler plate that I don't need to write so I can focus on the fun stuff. There is zero value in me writing yet another Python argparse routine. I've done it and I've learn everything I'm ever going to learn about it. Let me get on to the stuff that I don't know how to do.

"I’m not sure if anyone else feels this way, but with the introduction of generative AI, I don’t find coding fun anymore. It’s hard to motivate myself to code knowing that a model can do it much quicker. The joy of coding for me was literally the process of coding."

I experimented with GPT-5 recently and found its capabilities to be significantly inferior to that of a human, at least when it came to coding.

I was trying to give it an optimal environment, so I set it to work on a small JavaScript/HTML web application, and I divided the task into small steps, as I'd heard it did best under those circumstances.

I was impressed overall by how far the technology has come, but it produced a number of elementary errors, such as putting JavaScript outside the script tags. As the code grew, there was also no sense that it had a good idea of how to structure the codebase, even when I suggested it analyze and refactor.

So unless there are far more capable models out there, we're not at the stage where generative AI can match a human.

In general I find current model to have broad but shallow thinking. They can draw on many sources, which is extremely useful, but seem to have problems reasoning things through in depth.

All this is to say that I don't find the joy of coding to have gone at all. In fact, there's been a number of really thorny problems I've had to deal with recently that I'd love to have side-stepped, but due to the currently limitations of LLMs I had to solve them the old-fashioned way.

Having gone through a bit of a crisis of meaning personally lately, this article resonates deeply. I would encourage the author to look inward and question the beliefs that got them here.

I'd argue you didn't lose the joy of coding, you lost the illusion that coding made you real, that it made you you.

The fun is still there. I'm relearning Rust and generative AI is really useful to help with understanding concepts and improving code. But I'm still the one understanding and improving.

Still an infinite amount to learn and do. It's still not hard to have more skill than an AI. Of course AI can solve all the dumbbell problems you get in school. They're just there to build muscle. Robots can lift weights better than you, too, but that doesn't mean there's no value in you doing it.

It may not be that hard to see where this is all going. At least with some precision. Think of global arms race, or industrialization. Humans and this planet did not need any of that. Planet did not need it, because when you look at these cities from a flight, they look exactly like wounds that disrupt the continuity of greenery and terrain. Cities and industries don't belong to this planet. And no need to say much about the silly arms race and business-driven tech that humans have.

AI is just one of those arms races that we imposed on ourselves, with desire to dominate others, or to protect ourselves from such domination. It is irreversible, just like the other things. It survives by using the same tactic of a cheap salesman - tell the first buyer that they can dominate the world, and then tell next buyers that they need to protect themselves from the first one.

We transformed our lifestyles to live with those unnecessary, business/politics driven "advancements". The saga continues.

BTW, electronic calculators, when they came up, did a similar thing, erasing the fun out of calculations by hand.

I share with the author this youth where a child learns coding before everything else. I really loved coding and made it my carrier. Yet I don't think I would have been on the side of recognized genius if born earlier. I don't think any of them spent most of their time smashing keys. They were rather conceptualizing and planning stuff, and had human skills I could only dream of.

That being said, we untalented programmers are experiencing what most jobs suffered in the last 2 centuries: massive automation of their everyday activities. I especially identify with these traditional farmers who took their life as their way of life was wiped out by artificial fertilizers, mechanic, chemicals and hyperscaling.

Simply being interested in the tools and technologies is no longer sufficient for success or happiness.

There was a time when you could walk in the door with a handful of proper nouns printed on a piece of paper. The low hanging fruit has all been collected by now. But, there is always fruit available higher up in the tree. It's just harder to get to. Most people don't know how to climb the tree. They say they can, or that they do it all the time, but they're usually full of shit. It takes a lot of practice and discipline to do this safely.

To be clear, the tree is the customer in this analogy. Your tech and tools are only useful in so far as they complete a valuable job for some party. Reselling value-added tools to other craftsmen is also a viable path, but you have to recognize that the most wizened operators tend to use the older and more boring options. Something that looks incredibly clever to a developer with 3 years of experience is often instantly disregarded by someone with 4 years of experience. The rate at which you stop being a noob is ideally exponential.

I often look back on the things I thought were absolutely mandatory from a technology standpoint and feel really silly about much of it. I wish there was a better way to ramp developers without them causing total destruction. Right now it's like we're training electrician apprentices by having them work on HV switch gear at a nuclear power plant.

There is still a huge gap in ideas like apprenticeship in technology. Being able to code is such a tiny piece of the pie. Being able to engage in dialog with the non technical business owners such that your code has effect on target is ~ the rest of the pizza. A laser guided munition delivered from 60k feet will not be very useful if you don't know where it needs to go or how many targets there are. A lot of what I see on the HN front page is tantamount to carpet bombing the jungle non-stop in hopes of jostling an apple out of a tree somewhere.

>>> The joy of coding for me was literally the process of coding.

Maybe I was lucky. For me, the joy was the power of coding. Granted, I'm not employed as a coder. I'm a scientist, and I use coding as a problem solving tool. Nothing I write goes directly into production.

What's gone is the feeling that coding is a special elite skill.

With that said, I still admire and respect the real software developers, because good software is more than code.

Just putting aside the bold assumption that LLMs do make coders obsolete or coding unnecessary, it is possible to find similar joy in the end result as one does (or did, given the article) for programming itself. Focusing on what kind of tools or products are being created, and what problems are being solved, and together with LLMs achieving that goal better and faster than without them and finding joy in solving problems this world has. That’s typically why anyone would have paid you to code anyway even before LLMs.

Of course in reality there’s weird economical mechanics where making the most money and building something that benefits the world don’t necessarily collide, but theres always demand for and joy in solving complex problems, even if its on a higher abstraction level than coding with your favorite language.

Software is still eating the world. It was always about efficiency. It was about getting rid of manual data entry by building CSV based export-import flows. It was about getting rid of hundreds of chatbot operators answering mundane questions with an AI bot that could do a decent job with the easy-but-voluminous conversations. Now it’s about getting rid of the tedious coding jobs and replacing them with code gen tools.

In each of these cases, lots of relatively low-value jobs were no longer needed and a few very-high-value jobs sprang into existence.

The author of the article loves coding. But software is about solving problems efficiently, not punching the keyboard. The other parts of the job might not be as fun for everyone, but they are even more valuable than typing code. Great programmers could always do both. Now they can focus on the higher value work more by leveraging tools that can do the lower-value work.

Work is not supposed to be fun. That’s why they pay you to do it. If it was fun, you would have to pay your employer. (Tongue in cheek advice).

Its definitely much harder to get into the industry than it was a few years ago and if its coding you were after, you may indeed be disappointed. But give Software Engineering a try! We need to rewrite many of our critical systems and we are afraid to do so primarily to the lack of truly skilled software engineers. IMHO, the AI agents are creating time for us to study what really matters. I would start with Modern Software Engineering by Dave Farley. DM me directly if you want to chat on this topic. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvydra/

Choose your own adventure:

1) you are using coding assistant too much - you aren't yet ready for the Senior role that requires. Advice: chill out with that and get back to coding solo

or

2) you haven't used coding assistant enough to realize it's an idiot savant grade Junior to Mid programmer. Advice: use coding assistant more and then see #1

Real talk: all moments suck and all moments are wonderful. Source: have lived through few computer moments.

What a time to be alive!

I genuinely feel like I got bait-and-switched by computer science. If I could go back and study something different I would do it in a heartbeat.

Sadly, there's very little I can do now. I don't have the financial means to meaningfully change careers now. Pretty much the only thing I could do now that pays somewhat well and doesn't require me to go to university again is teaching. I think I will ride this one out and end it when it ends.

I still enjoy coding. AI mostly doesn’t produce adequate quality or correctness for the type of code I enjoy writing. There are several domains where AI is worse than useless because training data doesn’t exist. Obviously my experience doesn’t generalize but writing software is a vast, unbounded domain.

If you find coding boring, explore the frontiers. You will find a lot of coding wilderness where no AI has trod.

I relate to this on a level that I have felt before. I went from wanting to program for literally any company just as long as I could write code to just wanting to finish my degree and make enough money to live in the middle of nowhere with no internet access for the rest of my life.

I have 2000s web nostalgia, but I think the modern dot com and onward software SV was, frankly, mostly up to stupid shit. Not something to romanticize

Good things to look forward to are:

- Lean and mathlib revolutionizing math

- Typst replacing latex and maybe some adobe prosuc

- Fuschia/Redox/wasi replacing Unix

- non-professional-programmers finally learning programming en mass

I think the latter is maybe the most profound. Tech may not grow at a break-neck pace, but erasing the programmer vs computer illiterate dichotomy will mean software can way the world in much less Kafkaesque ways.

I identify with this, though I'm further along the path.

Coding was incredibly fun until working in capitalist companies got involved. It was then still fairy fun, but tinged by some amount of "the company is just trying to make money, it doesn't care that the pricing sucks and it's inefficient, it's more profitable to make mediocre software with more features than really nail and polish any one part"

Adding on AI impacts how fun coding is for me exactly how they say, and that compounds with company's misaligned incentives.

... I do sometimes think maybe I'm just burned out though, and I'm looking for ways to rationalize it, rather than doing the healthy thing and quitting my job to join a cult-like anti-technology commune.

LLMs are a useful tool but they are basically idiot savants.

They still need someone with higher reasoning skills (eg humans) to verify what they cough up. This need is likely to continue for quite some time (since LLMs simply aren't capable of higher reasoning).

Learning to code effectively using LLMs is probably the best path forward, from a career standpoint.

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