Comment by pdntspa
2 months ago
That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.
I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)
I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!
You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done.
Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am quite sure that I would hate AI coding for me. I think for me it comes down to – when I was learning about coding and stretching my personal knowledge in the area, the coding part was the fun part because I was learning. Now that I am past that part I really just want to solve problems, and coding is the means to that end. AI is now freeing because where I would have been reluctant to start a project, I am more likely to give it a go.
I think it is similar to when I used to play games a lot. When I would play a game where you would discover new items regularly, I would go at it hard and heavy up until the point where I determined there was either no new items to be found or it was just "more of the same". When I got to that point it was like a switch would flip and I would lose interest in the game almost immediately.
I think it ultimately comes down to whether you care more about the what, or more about the how. A lot of coders love the craft: making code that is elegant, terse, extensible, maintainable, efficient and/or provably correct, and so on. These are the kind of people who write programming languages, database engines, web frameworks, operating systems, or small but nifty utilities. They don't want to simply solve a problem, they want to solve a problem in the "best" possible way (sometimes at the expense of the problem itself).
It's typically been productive to care about the how, because it leads to better maintainability and a better ability to adapt or pivot to new problems. I suppose that's getting less true by the minute, though.
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A few counterpoints:
1. If you don't care about code and only care about the "thing that it does when it's done", how do you solve problems in a way that is satisfying? Because you are not really solving any problem but just using the AI to do it. Is prompting more satisfying than actually solving?
2. You claim you're done "learning about coding and stretching my personal knowledge in the area" but don't you think that's super dangerous? Like how can you just be done with learning when tech is constantly changing and new things come up everyday. In that sense, don't you think AI use is actually making you learn less and you're just justifying it with the whole "I love solving problems, not code" thing?
3. If you don't care about the code, do the people who hire you for it do? And if they do, then how can you claim you don't care about the code when you'll have to go through a review process and at least check the code meaning you have to care about the code itself, right?
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> > I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!
> You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding.
Part of it perhaps, but there's also a huge variation in model output. I've been getting some surprisingly bad generations from ChatGPT recently, though I'm not sure if that's ChatGPT getting worse or me getting used to a much higher quality of code from Claude Code which seems to test itself before saying "done". I have no idea if my opinion will flip again now 5.2 is out.
And some people are bad communicators, an important skill for LLMs, though few will recognise it because everyone knows what they themselves meant by whatever words they use.
And some people are bad planners, likewise an important skill for breaking apart big tasks that LLMs can't do into small ones they can do.
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> I don't much care about the code itself anymore.
I use writing the code as a way to investigate the options and find new ones. By the time I'm sure of the correct way to implement something, half the code is written [1]. At that point, now that I know what and how I'm going to do, it starts to get boring. I think what would work best for me would be able to say "ok, now finish this" to the AI and have it do that boring part.
[1] This also makes my LOEs horrible, because I don't know what I'm going to build until I've completed half of it. And figuring out how long it will take to do something that isn't defined is... inaccurate.
I like this framing; I think it captures some of the key differences between engineers who are instinctively enthusiastic about AI and those who are not.
Many engineers walk a path where they start out very focussed on programming details, language choice, and elegant or clever solutions. But if you're in the game long enough, and especially if you're working in medium-to-large engineering orgs on big customer-facing projects, you usually kind of move on from it. Early in my career I learned half a dozen programming languages and prided myself on various arcane arts like metaprogramming tricks. But after a while you learn that one person's clever solution is another person's maintainability nightmare, and maybe being as boring and predictable and direct as possible in the code (if slightly more verbose) would have been better. I've maintained some systems written by very brilliant programmers who were just being too clever by half.
You also come to realize that coding skills and language choice don't matter as much as you thought, and the big issues in engineering are 1) are you solving the right problem to begin with 2) people/communication/team dynamics 3) systems architecture, in that order of importance.
And also, programming just gets a little repetitive after a while. Like you say, after a decade or so, it feels a bit like "more of the same." That goes especially for most of the programming most of us are doing most of the time in our day jobs. We don't write a lot of fancy algorithms, maybe once in a blue moon and even then you're usually better off with a library. We do CRUD apps and cookie-cutter React pages and so on and so on.
If AI coding agents fall into your lap once you've reached that particular variation of a mature stage in your engineering career, you probably welcome them as a huge time saver and a means to solve problems you care about faster. After a decade, I still love engineering, but there aren't may coding tasks I particularly relish diving into. I can usually vaguely picture the shape of the solution in my head out the gate, and actually sitting down and doing it feels rather a bore and just a lot of typing and details. Which is why it's so nice when I can kick off a Claude session to do it instead, and review the results to see if they match what I had in mind.
Don't get me wrong. I still love programming if there's just the right kind of compelling puzzle to solve (rarer and rarer these days), and I still pride myself on being able to do it well. Come the holidays I will be working through Advent of Code with no AI assistance whatsoever, just me and vim. But when January rolls around and the day job returns I'll be having Claude do all the heavy lifting once again.
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it's true that 'code' doesn't mean much, but the ability to manage different layers, states to produce logic modules was the challenge
getting things solved entirely feels very very numbing to me
even when gemini or chatgpt solves it well, and even beyond what i'd imagine.. i feel a sense of loss
I feel the same way when writing code for work. It's pretty neat to have an AI bot working on the grunt work for me while I review and write high level algorithms. It's quicker and I get less burnt out.
But I still love getting my hands dirty and writing code as a mental puzzle. And the best puzzles tend to happen outside of a work environment anyways. So I continue to work through advent of code problems (for example) as a way of exercising that muscle.
You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
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Some people are into designing software, others like to put the design into implementation, others like cleaning up implementations yet others like making functional software faster.
There is enough work for all of us to be handsomely paid while having fun doing it :) Just find what you like, and work with others who like other stuff, and you'll get through even the worst of problems.
For me the fun comes not from the action of typing stuff with my sausage fingers and seeing characters end up on the screen, but basically everything before that and after that. So if I can make "translate what's in my head into source on disk something can run" faster, that's a win in my book, but not if the quality degrades too much, so tight control over it still not having to use my fingers to actually type.
I've found that good tab AI-based tab completion is the sweet spot for me. I am still writing code, but I don't have to type all of it if it's obvious.
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He's a real straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
but what would you say... you do here?
Ummm, yeah... I’m gonna have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there.
I really enjoy writing some of the code. But some is a pain. Never have fun when the HQ team asks for API changes for the 5th time this month. Or for that matter writing the 2000 lines of input and output data validation in the first place. Or refactoring that ugly dictionary passed all over the place to be a proper class/dataclass. Handling config changes. Lots of that piping job.
Some tasks I do enjoy coding. Once in the flow it can be quite relaxing.
But mostly I enjoy the problem solving part: coming up with the right algorithm, a nice architecture , the proper set of metrics to analyze etc
Yeah at this point I basically have to dictate all implementation details: do this, but do it this specific way, handle xyz edge cases by doing that, plug the thing in here using that API. Basically that expands 10 lines into 100-200 lines of code.
However if I just say “I have this goal, implement a solution”, chances are that unless it is a very common task, it will come up with a subpar/incomplete implementation.
What’s funny to me is that complexity has inverted for some tasks: it can ace a 1000 lines ML model for a general task I give it, yet will completely fail to come up with a proper solution for a 2D geometric problem that mostly has high school level maths that can be solved in 100 lines
Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."
I sometimes think of it as a sculptor analogy.
Some famous sculptors had an atelier full of students that helped them with mundane tasks, like carving out a basic shape from a block of stone.
When the basic shape was done, the master came and did the rest. You may want to have the physical exercise of doing the work yourself, but maybe someone sometimes likes to do the fine work and leave the crude one to the AI.
In my case, it really depends what. I enjoy designing systems and domain-specific languages or writing libraries that work the way I think they should work.
On the other hand, if e.g. I need a web interface to do something, the only way I can enjoy myself is by designing my own web framework, which is pretty time-consuming, and then I still need to figure out how to make collapsible sections in CSS and blerghhh. Claude can do that in a few seconds. It's a delightful moment of "oh, thank god, I don't have to do this crap anymore."
There are many coding tasks that are just tedium, including 99% of frontend development and over half of backend development. I think it's fine to throw that stuff to AI. It still leaves a lot of fun on the table.
In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires attention to detail
Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers.
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You really get enjoyment writing a full CRUD HTTP API five times, one for each endpoint?
I don't :) Before I had IDE templates and Intellisense. Now I can just get any agentic AI to do it for me in 60 seconds and I can get to the actual work.
Why do you need a full crud http api for? Just loading the data straight from the database? Usually I've already implemented that before and I just copy paste the implementation and doing some VIM magic. And in Frameworks like Rails or Laravel, it may be less than 10 lines of code. More involved business logic? Then I'm spending more time getting a good spec for those than implementing the spec.
“I want my AI to do laundry and dishes so I can code, not for my AI to code so I can do laundry and dishes”
This sums up my feelings almost exactly.
I don't want LLMs, AI, and eventually Robots to take over the fun stuff. I want them to do the mundane, physical tasks like laundry and dishes, leave me to the fun creative stuff.
But as we progress right now, the hype machine is pushing AI to take over art, photography, video, coding, etc. All the stuff I would rather be doing. Where's my house cleaning robot?
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Claude is very good at unfun-but-necessary coding tasks such as writing docstrings and type hints, which is a prominent instance of "laundry and dishes" for a dev.
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Well it would be funnier if dishwashers, washing machines and dryers didn't automate that ages ago. It's literally one of the first things robots started doing for us.
Soon you'll realize you're the "AI". We've lost control.
Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!"
Claude writing code gets the same output if not better in about 1/10 of the time.
That's where you realize that the writing code bits are just one small part of the overall picture. One that I realize I could do without.
May be a domain issue? If you're largely coding within a JS framework (which most software devs are tbf) then that makes total sense. If you're working in something like fintech or games, perhaps less so.
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I would say notetaking would be a much bigger help than Claude at this point. There's a lot of methods to organize information that I believe would help you, better than an hallucination machine.
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How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
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> its quality of work is extremely high ...
It may seem decent until you look closer. Just like with a junior dev, you should always review the code very carefully, you can absolutely not trust it. It's not bad at trivial stuff, but fails almost always if things get more complex and unlike a junior dev, it does not tell you, when things get too complex for it.
Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?
What would you like individual contributors to do about it, exactly? Refuse to use it, even though this person said they're happier and more fulfilled at work?
I'm asking because I legitimately have not figured out an answer to this problem.
Why is that a developer's problem? If anything, they are incentivized to avoid creating future competition in the job market.
It's not a problem for the senior dev directly, but maybe down the road. And it definitely is a problem for the company once said senior dev leaves or retires.
Seriously, long term thinking went out the window long time ago, didn't it?
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My last job there was effectively a gun held to the back of my head, ordering me to use this stuff. And this started about a year ago, when the tooling for agentic dev was absolutely atrocious, because we had a CTO who had the biggest most raging boner for anything that offered even a whiff of "AI".
Unfortunately the bar is being raised on us. If you can't hang with the new order you are out of a job. I promise I was one of the holdouts who resisted this the most. It's probably why I got laid off last spring.
Thankfully, as of this last summer, agentic dev started to really get good, and my opinion made a complete 180. I used the off time to knock out a personal project in a month or two's worth of time, that would have taken me a year+ the old way. I leveraged that experience to get me where I am now.
Ok, now assume you start relying on it and let's assume cloud flare has another outage. You just go and clock out for the day saying "can't work, agent is down"?
I don't think we'll be out of jobs. Maybe temporarily. But those jobs come back. The energy and money drain that LLMs are, are just not sustainable.
I mean, it's cool that you got the project knocked out in a month or two, but if you'd sit down now without an LLM and try to measure the quality of that codebase, would you be 100% content? Speed is not always a good metric. Sure, 1 -2 months for a project is nice, but isn't especially a personal project more about the fun of doing the project and learning something from it and sharpening your skills?
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How do you get junior devs if your concept of the LLM is that it's "a principal engineer" that "do[es] not ask [you] any questions"?
Also, I'm pretty sure junior devs can use directing a LLM to learn from mistakes faster. Let them play. Soon enough they're going to be better than all of us anyway. The same way widespread access to strong chess computers raised the bar at chess clubs.
I don't think the chess analogy grabs here. In chess, you play _against_ the chess computer. Take the same approach and let the chess computer play FOR the player and see how far he gets.
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There's that long term thinking that the tech industry, and really every other publicly traded company is known for.
> That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.
I am so tired of this analogy. Have the people who say this never worked with a junior dev before? If you treat your junior devs as brainless code monkeys who only exist to type out your brilliant senior developer designs and architectures instead of, you know, human beings capable of solving problems, 1) you're wasting your time, because a less experienced dev is still capable of solving problems independently, 2) the juniors working under you will hate it because they get no autonomy, and 3) the juniors working under you will stay junior because they have no opportunity to learn--which means you've failed at one of your most important tasks as a senior developer, which is mentorship.
I have mentored and worked with a junior dev. And the only way to get her to do anything useful and productive was to spell things out. Otherwise she got wrapped around the axle trying to figure out the complex things and was constantly asking for my help with basic design-level tasks. Doing the grunt work is how you learn the higher-level stuff.
When I was a junior, that's how it was for me. The senior gave me something that was structured and architected and asked me to handle smaller tasks that were beneath them.
Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with without substancial refactoring. I know this because I have made a career out of fixing exactly this mistake.
I have never worked with junior devs as incompetent as you describe, having worked at AWS, Splunk/Cisco, among others. At AWS even interns essentially got assigned a full project for their term and were just told to go build it. Does your company just have an absurdly low hiring bar for juniors?
> Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with without substancial refactoring.
Nobody is suggesting they get full autonomy to cowboy code and push unreviewed changes to prod. Everything they build should be getting reviewed by their peers and seniors. But they need opportunities to explore and make mistakes and get feedback.
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In my experience, juniors were more capable at solving engineering problems than some staff engineers, but that’s just an artifact of a broken ladder system.
I don't follow.
In the same breath (same paragraph) you state two polar opposites about working with AI:
I don't see how you can claim to be "phenomenally productive" when working with a tool you have to babysit because it forgets your instructions the whole time.
If it was the "junior dev" you also mention, I suspect you would very quickly invite the "junior dev" to find a job elsewhere.
You don't have to follow. I'm still punching way above my weight. Not sure why both things can't be true at once.
Few weeks ago I'd disagree with you, but recently I've been struggling with concentration and motivation and now I kind of try to embrace coding with AI. I guide it pretty strictly, try to stick with pure functions, and always read the output thoroughly. In a couple of places requiring some carefulness I coded them in executable pseudocode (Python) and made AI translate it to the more boilerplate-y target language.
I don't know if I'm any faster than I would be if I was motivated, but I'm A LOT more productive in my current state. I still hope for the next AI winter though.
I really hope you don't actually treat junior devs this way...
I enjoy finding the problem and then telling Claude to fix it. Specifying the function and the problem. Then going to get a coffee from the breakroom to see it finished when I return. The junior dev has questions when I did that. Claude just fixes it.
I wonder if DRY is still a principle worth holding onto in the AI coding era. I mean it probably is, but this feels like enough of a shift in coding design that re-evaluating principles designed for human-only coding might be worth the effort
> rules like DRY
Principles like DRY