Comment by yason

What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you.

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally.

Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems.

The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.

I think this is showing the difference between people who like to /make/ things and those that like to make /things/. People that write software because they see a solution for a problem that can be fixed with software seem to benefit the most of LLM technology. It's almost the inverse for the people that write software because they like the process of writing software.

As I've gotten more experience I've tended to find more fun in tinkering with architectures than tinkering with code. I'm currently working on making a secure zero-trust bare metal kubernetes deployment that relies on an immutable UKI and TPM remote attestation. I'm making heavy use of LLMs for the different implementation details as I experiment with the architecture. As far as I know, to the extent I'm doing anything novel, it's because it's not a reasonable approach for engineering reasons even if it technically works, but I'm learning a lot about how TPMs work and the boot process and the kernel.

I still enjoy writing code as well, but I see them as separate hobbies. LLMs can take my hand-optimized assembly drag racing or the joy of writing a well-crafted library from my cold dead hands, but that's not always what I'm trying to do and I'll gladly have an LLM write my OCI layout directory to CPIO helper or my Bazel rule for putting together a configuration file and building the kernel so that I can spend my time thinking about how the big pieces fit together and how I want to handle trust roots and cold starts.

Something happened to me a few years ago. I used to write code professionally and contribute to open source a lot. I was freelancing on other people's projects and contributing to mature projects so I was doing hard work, mostly at a low level (I mean algorithms, performance fixes, small new features, rather than high level project architecture).

I was working on an open source contribution for a few days. Something that I struggled with, but I enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot from it.

As it happened someone else submitted a PR fixing the same issue around the same time. I wasn't bothered if mine got picked or not, it happens. But I remember looking at how similar both of our contributions were and feeling like we were using our brains as computers, just crunching algorithms and pumping in knowledge to create some technical code that was (at the time) impossible for a computer to create. This stayed with me for a while and I decided that doing this technical algorithm crunching wasn't the best use of my human brain. I was making myself interchangeable with all the other human (and now AI) code crunchers. I should move on to a higher level, either architectural or management.

This was a big deal for me because I did love (and still do) deeply understanding algorithms and mathematics.

I was extremely fortunate with timing as it was just around one year before AI coding became mainstream but early enough that it wasn't a factor in this shift. Now an AI could probably churn out a decent version of that algorithm in a few minutes.

I did move on to open my own business with my partner and haven't written much code in a few years. And when I do now I appreciate that I can focus on the high level stuff and create something that my business needs in a few hours without exhausting myself on low level algorithm crunching.

This isn't meant to put down the enjoyment of writing code for code's sake. I still do appreciate well written code and the craft that goes into it. I'm just documenting my personal shift and noting that enjoyment can be found on both sides.

I’ve got kids and so seldom find myself with the time or energy to work on something. Cursor has really helped in that regard.

I have an extensive media collection of very large VR video files with very unhelpful names. I needed to figure out a good way to review which ones I wanted to keep and discard (over 30TB, almost 2000 files). It was fun sitting using Cursor with Claude to work on setting up a quick web UI, with calls out to ffmpeg to generate snapshots. It handled the “boring parts” with aplomb, getting me a html page with a little JavaScript to serve as my front end, and making a super simple API. All this was still like 1000 lines and would have taken me days, or I would have copied some boilerplate then modified it a little.

The problems Claude couldn’t figure out were also similarly interesting, like its syntax to the ffmpeg calls were wrong and not skipping all the frames we didn’t want to generate, so it was taking 100x longer to generate than was necessary seeking through every file, then I made some optimizations in how I had it configured, then realizing I’d generated thumbnails for 3 hours only for them to not display well on the page as it was an 8x1 tile.

At that point Claude wanted to regenerate all the thumbnails and I said “just display the image twice, with the first half displayed the first time and the second half displayed the second time, saving myself a few hours. Hacky, but for a personal project, the right solution.

I still felt like I was tinkering in a way I haven’t in awhile, and a project that I’d never have gotten around to and instead have just probably bought another new hard drive, took me a couple hours, most of which was actually marking the files as keep or delete. I ended up deleting 12TB of stuff I didn’t want, which it felt cool to write myself a bespoke tool rather than search around on the off chance that such a thing already exists.

It also gave me a mental framework of how to approach little products like this in the future, that often a web ui and a simple API backend like Node making external process calls is going to be easier than making a full fat windows UI.

I have a similarly sized STL library from 3D printing and think I could apply mostly the same idea to that, in fact it’s 99% the same except for swapping out the ffmpeg call to something to generate a snapshot of the stl at a few different angles.

There are many people who enjoy spending an afternoon working on a classic car. There are also many people who enjoy spending an afternoon driving a classic car.

Sometimes there are people who enjoy both. Sometimes there are people that really like driving but not the tinkering and some who are the opposite.

I yearn for the mindset where I actively choose to accomplish comparatively little in the brief spells I have to myself, and remain motivated. Part of what makes programming fun for me is actually achieving something. Which is not to say you have to use AI to be productive, or that you aren't achieving anything, but this is not the antithesis of what makes programming fun, only what makes it fun for you.

Ultimately it's up to the user to decide what to do with his time ; it's still a good bargain that leaves a lot of sovereignty to the user. I like to code a little too much ; got into deep tech to capacities I couldn't imagine before - but at some point you hit rock bottom and you gotta ship something that makes sense. I'm like a really technical "predator" - in a sense where to be honest with myself - it has almost become some way of consumption rather than pure problem solving. For very passionate people it can be difficult to be draw the line between pleasure and work - especially given that we just do what we like in the first place - so all that time feel robbed from us - and from the standpoint of "shipper" who didn't care about it in the first place it feels like freedom.

But I'd argue that if anyone wants to jump into technical stuff ; it has never been so openly accessible - you could join some niche slack where some competent programmers were doing great stuff. Today a solo junior can ship you a key-val that is going to be fighting redis in benchmarks.

It really is not a time to slack down in my opinion - everything feels already existing and mostly already dealt with. But again - for those who are frustrated with the status-quo ; they will always find something to do.

I get you however that this has created a very different space where past acquired skill-sets don't necessarily translate as well today - maybe it's just going to be different to find it's space than it was 10 years ago.

I like that the cards have be re-dealt though - it's arguably way more open than the stack-overflow era and pre-ai where knowledge was much more difficult to create.

I do have productivity goals! I want to spend the half hour I have on the part I think is fun. Not on machine configuration, boilerplate, dependency resolution, 100 random errors with new frameworks that are maybe resolved with web searches.

If you only get one or two half-hours a week it's probably more fun to use those to build working software than it is to inch forward on a project that won't do anything interesting for several more months.

For me it automates a lot of the boilerplate that usually bogs me down on side projects. I cal spin up all of the stuff I hate doing quickly and then fiddle with the interesting parts inside of a working scaffold of code. I recently did this with an elixir wrapper around some Erlang OTP code o wanted to use. Figuring out how to clue together all of the parts that touched the Erlang and tracing all of the arguments through old OTP code would have absolutely stopped me from bothering with this in the past. Instead I’m having fun playing with the interface of my tool in ways that matter for my use case.

I enjoy coding for the ability to turn ideas into software. Seeing more rapid feature development, and also more rapid code cleanup and project architecture cleanup is what makes AI assisted coding enjoyable to me

Look, yeah one shotting stuff makes generic UIs, impressive feat but generic

its getting years of sideprojects off the ground for me

now in languages I never learned or got professional validation for: rust, lua for roblox … in 2 parallel terminal windows and Claude Code instances

all while I get to push frontend development further and more meticulously in a 3rd. UX heavy design with SVG animations? I can do that now, thats fun for me

I can make experiences that I would never spend a business Quarter on, I can rapidly iterate in designs in a way I would never pay a Fiverr contractor or three for

for me the main skill is knowing what I want, and its entirely questionable about whether that’s a moat at all but for now it is because all those “no code” seeking product managers and ideas guys are just enamored that they can make a generic something compile

I know when to point out the AI contradicted itself in a code concept, when to interrupt when its about to go off the rails

So far so great and my backend deployment proficiency has gone from CRUD-app only to replicating, understanding and superpassing what the veteran backend devs on my teams could do

I would previously call myself full stack, but knowing where my limits in understanding are

I enjoy noodling around with pointers and unsafe code in Rust. Claude wrote all the documentation, to Rust standards, with nice examples for every method.

I decided to write an app in Rust with a React UI, and Claude wrote almost all the typescript for me.

So I’ve used Claude at both ends of the spectrum. I had way more fun in every situation.

AI is, fortunately, very bad at the things I find fun, at least for now, and very good at the things I find booooring (read in Scot Pilgrim voice).

I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying "you" instead of "I". This is how I read your post:

> I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. I don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where I'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If I have a half an hour, I tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then I continue when I have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because I can't make myself stop.)

Reading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy.

> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself.

Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917

I have nearly two decades of programming experience which is mostly server side. The other day I wanted a quick desktop (Linux) program to chat with an LLM. Found out about Viciane launcher, then chalked out an extension in react (which I have never used) to chat with an LLM using OpenAI compatible API. Antigravity wrote a bare minimum working extension in a single prompt. I didn't even need to research how to write an extension for an app released only three to five months ago. I then used AI assistance to add more features and polish the UI.

This was a fun weekend but I would have procrastinated forever without a coding agent.

LLMs are really showing how different programmers are from one another

i am in your camp, i get 0 satisfaction out of seeing something appear on the screen which i don't deeply understand

i want to feel the computer as i type, i've recently been toying with turning off syntax highlighting and LSPs (not for everyone), and i am surprised at the lack of distractions and feeling of craft and joy it brings me

I think it just depends on the person or the type of project. If I'm learning something or building a hobby project, I'll usually just use an autocomplete agent and leave Claude Code at work. On the other hand, if I want to build something that I actually need, I may lean on AI assistants more because I'm more interested in the end product. There are certain tasks as well that I just don't need to do by hand, like typing an existing SQL schema into an ORM's DSL.

I too have found this. However, I absolutely love being able to mock up a larger idea in 30 minutes to assess feasibility as a proof of concept before I sink a few hours into it.

Some people build because they enjoy the mechanics. Others build because they want to use the end product. That camp will get from A to B much more easily with AI, because for them it was never about the craft. And that's more than OK.

Historically, tinkerers had to stay within an extremely limited scope of what they know well enough to enjoy working on.

AI changes that. If someone wants to code in a new area, it's 10000000x easier to get started.

What if the # of handwritten lines of code is actually increasing with AI usage?

The problem with modern web development is that if you're not already doing it everyday, climbing the tree of dependencies just to get to the point where you have something show up on screen can be exhausting, and can take several of those half hour sessions.

Is the manual coding part of programming still fun or not? We have a lot of opinions on either side here.

I think the classic division of problems being solved might, for most people, solve this seeming contradiction.

For every problem, X% is solving the necessary complexity of the problem. Taming the original problem, in relation to what computers are capable of doing. With the potential of some relevant well implemented libraries or API’s helping to close that gap.

Work in that scenario rarely feels like wasted time.

But in reality, there is almost always another problem we have to solve, the Y%=(1-X) of the work required for an actual solution that involves wrangling with mismatches in available tools from the problem being solved.

This can be relatively benign, just introducing some extra cute little puzzles, that make our brains feel smart as we successfully win wack-a-mole. A side game that can even be refreshing.

Or, the stack of tools, and their quirks, that we need to use can be an unbounded (even compounding) generative system of pervasive mismatches and pernicious non-obvious, not immediately recognizable, trenches we must a 1000 little bridges, and maybe a few historic bridges, just to create a path back to the original problem. And it is often evident that all this work is an artifact of 1000 less than perfect choices by others. (No judgement, just a fact of tool creation having its own difficulties.)

That stuff can become energy draining to say the list.

I think high X problems are fun to solve. Most of our work goes into solving the original problem. Even finding out it was more complex than we thought feels like meaningful drama and increase the joy of resolving.

High Y problems involve vast amounts of glue code, library wrappers with exception handling, the list in any code base can be significant. Even overwhelm the actual problem solving code. And all those mismatches often hold us back, to where our final solution inevitable has problems in situations we hope never happen, until we can come back for round N+1, for unbounded N.

Any help from AI for the latter is a huge win. Those are not “real” problems. As tool stack change, nobody will port Y-type solutions forward. (I tell myself so I can sleep at night).

So that’s it. We are all different. But what type of acceleration AI gives us on type-Y problems is most likely to feel great. Enabling. Letting us harder on things that are more important and lasting. And where AI is less of a boost, but still a potentially welcome one, as an assistant.

I derive the majority of my hobby satisfaction from getting stuff done, not enjoying the process of crafting software. We probably enjoy quite different aspects of tinkering! LLMs make me have so much more fun.

I think there can be other equally valid perspectives than your own.

Some people have goals of actually finishing a project instead of just "tinkering"... and that's ok. Some say it might even be necessary.

On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology.

LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy.

The upwards transfer of wealth will continue.

Which is fine, because those things are what makes programming fun for you. Not for others.

What about the boring parts of fun hobby projects?

You could make the same argument about the printing press. Some people like forming the letters by hand, others enjoy actually writing.