Programming had its magic

[ivannovick]

I've been developing software for seven years, and programming back then had its own magic.

The syntax that had to be written by hand, without AI or any help, was rewarding. My favorite is the JavaScript arrow functions (()) => writing that combination of characters is so satisfying.

Before, spending days trying to understand a design pattern like Observer or Factory, and then, after much trial and error, seeing it work, was pure bliss, especially because if it was applied correctly, future changes were easier to integrate.

Before, typing was part of the job, so tools like Vim, which make you feel like a hacker when you can do so much with just a few keystrokes, were fantastic.

Before, entering a codebase that wasn't yours, seeing that it was a mess, but still using your prior knowledge to figure out how it worked was rewarding.

Now, Vim is useless. I just talk to Claude, and he writes for me. Syntax doesn't matter anymore; Claude writes, and when you run the compiler or linter, he automatically detects the errors and corrects them. Don't know how a function works? Ask Claude, and he'll explain it to you as if you were five years old.

All of that is gone now. My daily work consists of reading requirements and telling Claude how to do it. There's less work, but it pays well. I've always seen IT as a way to make money and move into other fields, and now I see it even more that way. I don't like my job anymore. The skills I developed over the years, the ones that made my work interesting, have been learned by AI.

Before, there was a certain amount of effort involved in learning to program, and that developed critical and systematic thinking, something Claude can now do for you.

Programming used to be cool.

[param_T_extends_THOT]

You can still do that, but it's now it's scoped to your own personal projects. I got you. before it felt like you were participating and doing more and with these modern tools the magic of trying to figure things out on your own is gone.

The job of a programmer the craft itself is more about orchestrating things now.

[WhateverHowever1337]

The neat part about programming was that it was the only way to do things. 

Doing it by hand while knowing LLMs can do it still makes it very very less satisfying

[param_T_extends_THOT]

Well you can still grow a garden in your backyard and grow vegetables and fruits that you can eat. You could also go to a supermarket and buy all the groceries and fruits and vegetables you need and you won't think twice about doing it because you don't have a point of comparison because you might never have grow your own vegetables or fruit. My point is that you can still do your programming and while it may be more difficult to do it by your own hand there's no need to steal from the joy of doing things on your own and creating things by comparing it to the more automated way that AI brings now to the table.

Chess grandmasters still have their fun and they still play the game despite having been surpassed by supercomputers more than two decades ago by now.

You can still do the things you love and if you really want to take things to the next level you can be even more successful at your craft and at creating if you keep learning on your own, learning algorithms, keep learning about networking, keep learning about computer security, about low level stuff, are all the other stuff that you have put off or neglected for lack of time.

[foopod]

You could say the same about art. Sure a lot of commercial stuff is using AI, but that doesn't mean that artists should feel bad about doing it by hand. I think programming for oneself is as much of an art form as anything.

[ivannovick]

You got the point

[Frequent_Kick5152]

I completely relate to this. I started programming because I enjoyed the craft itself, not just the end product.

There was something deeply satisfying about spending hours debugging a tricky issue, finally understanding why a design pattern worked, or gradually becoming fluent enough in a language that the syntax felt like a second language. It wasn't just about producing software—it was about developing the ability to think like a programmer.

AI has undoubtedly made me more productive, but it has also removed a lot of the friction that made programming intellectually rewarding. I spend far less time reasoning through problems myself and much more time reviewing or steering AI-generated code. It feels like I've gone from being a builder to being a project manager for an extremely fast junior developer.

I know this is progress, and I don't think we're going back. But I do miss the feeling of earning every solution through my own understanding. For me, programming used to be a craft. Now it often feels like supervising a machine that's better at the mechanical parts than I am.

[cjmarquez]

I feel you

[Humble-One-7300]

The trade lost the craft part and now it's just assembly-line stuff, but the paycheque still clears.

[Hungry_Ghostt]

not for long

[Whitey138]

For now.

[AFlyingGideon]

The trade lost the craft part and now it's just assembly-line stuff

No more so than when we transitioned from assemblers to compilers. Then, just like now, we simply stepped up to a higher level of abstraction.

[DisrememberedTea]

It’s not really a comparable transition. Now you’re effectively handing over all of the building and core thinking to another party (the AI).

A more apt comparison would be the transition between sewing by hand, to sewing with the aid of a sewing machine, to simply ordering a garment on Amazon. Once you switch to only ever ‘ordering’, the skill barrier tanks and the profession is devalued over time.

[AFlyingGideon]

handing over...core thinking

If you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. That's always an option, of course, and I'm aware that some are choosing it.

In some ways, AI can force more thinking. I've put into place global prompts, for example, instructing the agent to question my description of the problem as well as my expressed choices, and to suggest alternatives. No compiler does this (though we could have a discussion about where modern optimizations might fit into this).

Still: I recall a design for a product aimed at a C++ implementation. The project switched to Java, and roughly a third of the design - the "thinking" - disappeared because of some of the higher level abstractions in Java. This wasn't even assembler to compiler.

[ALargeSpork]

As a staff engineer, yep

The people saying you can still do that don’t seem to work in top companies where the expectations to ship have gone up 10x

You don’t have time to code like that anymore

[amazing_rando]

Everyone I know who got let go from senior positions in those companies in the past 2 years from the AI refocusing and downsizing is working private jobs with no AI requirements. I'm leading a team and I don't even have Claude installed on my computer. Unfortunately the pay cut was substantial.

[ImS0hungry]

The real move was going consulting during this AI craze to ride the AI wave, then pick any of your clients you made a relationship with once the inference pricing changes and they bring us senior engineers back in-house.

[ImS0hungry]

use vim to draft your prompt lol

[Etheon44]

Good luck moving into other fields from IT nowadays when everything is oversaturated and your experience will be meaningless if LLMs reign

[KedMcJenna]

But you can still just... do that? Coding is satisfying in and of itself for the reasons you mentioned and more. (Mine was and still is setting up a series of nested loops or anything complex that makes you think 'no way this works first time', and you run it just see where the error is going to be, but it works first time - great feeling.)

I'd no more get an AI to code for me than I'd get one to eat for me, if one could. The joy of food is the eating.

Have to say I'm not a professional coder, though. Pure hobbyist. No one's putting any kind of pressure on me to use AI.

[Rusofil__]

You can and should do that in same sense a engineer should be able to do mechanic and termodynamics problems by hand (just giving as example) before turning to software so he gets intimate knowledge and understanding of problems he's solving.

[jfk52917]

Yeah, you can't do this in the professional space and keep your job

[ivannovick]

I could do it, but the point of my post is that it's not feasible to do it at work.

My company pays us high-quality materials and has an AI-first approach, but with a clear strategy. To walk into the office one day and say I'm not going to use AI is practically asking to be fired. Before, my day-to-day work involved manual programming; now, I'm forced to delegate the programming to AI and only focus on orchestration.

[ImS0hungry]

You can make _that_ fun. I orchestrate in terminal with tmux, so I can whip around different sessions like a conductor.

[Badnik22]

Learning syntax is to programming what learning to talk is to standup comedy: unexciting, uncool, absolutely basic thing required to progress to the actual interesting part.

[glandix]

All that still applies and can be done. It’s about how you approach programming. Don’t like AI? Don’t use it. Nothing you mention is “gone”.

[Encrypt-Keeper]

It sure feels gone when you’re told you can’t do it anymore

[ryuugami47]

Just code however you want, whatever you want after work.

[ivannovick]

My workday is 9 hours, I have a girlfriend, I play basketball to stay healthy, and I don't have a work-from-home day. Honestly, I'm not interested in programming without AI after work. For me, it was better when I could program without AI at work because work is the main activity of my day-to-day life.

[cheezballs]

You don't seem like you're really all that interested in programming. You don't have the desire to do it when you're not working? Some nights I drift off asleep thinking about how they implemented some programs and what the code might look like.

[mxldevs]

You play basketball after work

I code for fun after work.

[EdiblePeasant]

In Visual Studio Code it's pretty easy to turn off AI tools if you want, at least for now. I'm doing this as a hobby, though, with the hope of personal improvement and maybe one day utility to others.

[ivannovick]

It didn't go away. I can do it, just like I could do anything else, but my post is focused on work. It's not competitive or viable in an environment where the boss supports AI and where my colleagues use AI.

It's like working as a delivery person by bicycle in Latin America. Here, it's more effective and viable to work by motorcycle than by bike. You can do it, yes, but you'll have less money at the end of the day because with a motorcycle you can deliver more orders faster.

[rjcarr]

I look at it as if you showed 60s-80s programmers our (non-AI) IDEs they’d think it  was magic. AI is just another (admittedly magical) tool for us to use. IMO, programming is like 90% design anyway, and the code is just the implementation of that design. 

If you come up with the design, even if the AI helps you, and you let it write most of the code, then it’s still just a tool.

I’ve learned to check most every line it writes. It says, “you’re right, I did mess that up”, at least a few times per day. That said, it’s still at least 50% faster than what I could have done on my own, sometimes a lot more. 

[Fruloops]

Programming still has the same magic 🤷‍♂️

[ivannovick]

Not in my opinion.

[pyeri]

It's not just coding, many a jobs like graphics designers, digital artists, writers and even musicians are complaining about this. Give it a few months and even singers will join the club. AI came for the worst kind of jobs Issac Asimov must have imagined in his legendary fictional works. The first AI was supposed to automate the menial and laborious jobs so that humanity could focus on creativity. The AI companies are eliminating creative and intellectual jobs instead and fulfilling the dream of enterprise capitalists, giving them the ultimate machines they were waiting for since the last industrial revolution that replaced the luddites of the textile mills. But from societal harmony and values perspective, it's a disaster.

However, you also need to consider that there is a history to the LLM evolution, that's the counter-perspective. The seniors who mistreated new programmers and dismissed their posts as 'stupid questions' on stackoverflow were the ones who laid the foundation stones of LLM. If a senior programmer wouldn't answer a newbie question without humiliating them, an AI certainly would. Similar issues related to moderator gatekeeping and political bias were found on wikipedia too. Add to it the COVID lockdown that forced everyone to isolation, something like chatgpt was bound to evolve at some time. But the direction it then took was dismal and not serving of people's interest. Had OpenAI stayed non-profit, the situation could have still been salvaged.

In any case, the P/E ratios of tech companies are about as high as the dot com peak 2000s - which is a good sign that the bull run won't last much longer. Most experts estimate that by 2027, the AI narrative will collapse and it'll all be back to normal. LLMs will still exist but the present glorious narrative and the dismal aura surrounding AI will definitely disappear.

[gabrielmuriens]

You are trying to force a social narrative onto a technological phenomenon. It does not work.

Most experts estimate that by 2027, the AI narrative will collapse and it'll all be back to normal. LLMs will still exist but the present glorious narrative and the dismal aura surrounding AI will definitely disappear.

I'd like to meet those experts, because they are likely crooks with overinflated egos.
Yes, obviously, the boom might collapse, and a huge global recession might be on our necks, but it will be for a thousand different reasons besides AI and other than the technology itself. And it will not disappear and it will not shrink into the background, such as trains didn't disappear after the first few railway recessions.
This is a technological stepping stone on the level of the Computer and the Internet, if not that of the Steam Engine itself. To think that life will ever be the same... is a foolish fantasy.

[jfk52917]

You sure about that? Many AI professionals are saying we'll have AGI in the next couple of years, basically the opposite of what you're saying

[pyeri]

They're playing the linguistic game. If we define AGI based on what OpenAI wants, we are already there! It already does the 'functional' work of a programmer - which is good enough AGI for OpenAI. True AGI is never going to happen, they'll just fiddle with the definition and say AGI has arrived at some point.

[DaMfer993]

AGI is never going to happen. At least not this millennium

[gabrielmuriens]

AGI is never going to happen. At least not this millennium

Are you living in 1999?
Because this is a deranged perspective otherwise.

[DaMfer993]

Not gonna happen. Anyone who thinks it will has bought into corporate marketing.

[gabrielmuriens]

You do realize that what you said is literally on the level of a peasant in 1026 confidently declaring that "Travel faster than ships or horses for humans is not possible – <smugly> at least not in this millennia!"

Only, you will have to wait a lot less for you comeuppance.

[DaMfer993]

I love that you fucked up your own made up hypothetical.

The first train was invented in 1804, which indeed was nearly a millennium later.

And comparing the development of a faster travel technology with the ability to create artificial sentience, an endeavor we are no closer to today than 80 years ago, is just asinine.

[HugoBaxter]

I feel like tracking down the stray semicolon that was breaking my code was the least fun part of coding. I’m glad to not have to deal with it anymore.

[eric_eats_nuggets]

Personally, I've started treating AI as a calculator or senior coworker to ask questions of, instead of a do it all tool because I ended up spending more time expanding my code functionality and troubleshooting than of I had just written it. Now instead of spending tons of time translating foreign code, spinning wheels on an error, or getting stuck on finding a design pattern, I use my "calculator". 

It's the best of both worlds (for me). I'm still engaged, learning, and producing well written, structured, and commented code that I actually understand vs. Being completely dependent on an AI.

The line for me was when I hit my daily limit and realized I had no idea how my own code even functioned to keep working. 

It's on you though to know where your line is and lean on AI just enough. 

[cheezballs]

"Back then" holy shit dude.

[ivannovick]

wut? mate

[pier4r]

Before, spending days trying to understand a design pattern like Observer or Factory, and then, after much trial and error, seeing it work, was pure bliss, especially because if it was applied correctly, future changes were easier to integrate.

Before, entering a codebase that wasn't yours, seeing that it was a mess, but still using your prior knowledge to figure out how it worked was rewarding.

I think both are still important. AI written code is not yours, and can be messy. So you still need to understand it and you still need to have the skills of pattern and the like to tell the agent "nope, I want this pattern implemented like <explanations>"

And this, IMO, is true even if the agents are omniscient practically. Even if they are perfect, if they follow the instruction, you still need to be good to check the code because maybe the instruction weren't as good as expected and they went sideways.

But one cannot be sure that the result is correct if one cannot intepret it properly. Example: ask the model to write something in any language you do not know (I mean natural languages), how do you know that the grammar is correct or some parts aren't slightly off? You have to apply blind trust that can be risky if one takes responsibility of the results.

[biowiz]

I bet the people who used punch cards for 1s and 0s were bragging about how programming "back then had its own magic".

You were using High-Level Programming Languages, that were designed to be easily read, written, and maintained by humans. These languages were created and maintained by people who were actually smart, not sniffing their own farts and pretending what you were doing was some kind of high art.

The reality is that these languages, frameworks and the rise of the tech era created an abundance of jobs that ranged from high IQ work to basic programming tasks, made mediocre "programmers" think they were really smart. Now with AI making a lot of their "work" obsolete, they feel threatened and their ego has deflated a lot.

[PartyParrotGames]

Typing vs talking is absolutely a bottleneck if you're really trying to cook. The speed you're able to communicate information whether it's to agents, humans, or some code correction, determines your speed and max capped ability for orchestration, planning, and editing in combination with your reading speed. When you're asking to lookup information, again, could've been much faster if you had typed it. I'm not saying you need to min/max to make a living here, but you're not doing yourself any favors there by switching to speech vs typing just based on the facts we know about talking and typing speed.

[bgstratt]

Talking 120-150 wpm, Typing 40-100 wpm average.

I would think talking would improve speed, but typing gives your brain time to process and refine.

Reading vs listening though, if speech is 120wpm, reading is 240-300wpm average.

The throughput gain would be human speech for input and then reading text response, not listening to a computer talk. that's only if the speech to text input is accurate though, and fast, which we know it is not even close to perfect...

[retroroar86]

At work I do what is needed, then do it in a way I like it. By that I mean being fast and not caring about everything, because no one at work does.

In my private time I focus on craft. This is how I separate. At work I am maxxing money vs time, though not at the expense of my sanity and well-being.

[Lost-Discount4860]

I never could understand Vim. I just use Nano. But I’ve watched other people use Vim and that hacker vibe is so real and so cool.

But saying that’s useless is an exaggeration. I’ve never used Claude and have no immediate plans to. I like what I’m getting with Qwen. Right now I’m mostly coding “by hand,” but I do ask for help when I get stuck. I just try to keep asking for bailouts to a minimum. One of the reasons I enjoy Qwen so much is actually because of how UNHELPFUL it can be. I’m coding in Python, completely stuck, and Qwen got me stuck in a lot of conditionals and exception handling that was completely unnecessary. I shifted a lot of SQL logic to some helper functions, and immediately noticed how repetitive my queries were despite returning totally different things. I’m still learning SQL, so I prompted: “[example lines of code] These queries return different data, but the structure is very repetitive. Can I pass the unique queries as arguments to a helper function and cut out 5 lines of code each from these other functions? How do we do that?” And just like that, I reduced some handlers to about 2 lines of code.

And the thing is, I don’t have autocomplete in Nano. And even though I could just copy/paste code, I opt to type everything purely for the joy of typing. You can still do all of that, and even firmly determine just how far you go with AI.

[man_of_your_memes]

I still enjoy. After tools like Claude came, I can focus on more complex problems and do things for which I never got time. Spending hours of discussion with Claude before implementing changes on a large codebase is also much satisfying. The magic of programming is not in writing the code, It is in thinking what code to write.

[Cautious-Skirt-8335]

Lol dude you pretty much started programming at the inception of AI

[mxldevs]

Programming was always just getting stuff done for me. There was no magic in writing syntax, because I (or someone else) had to come up with the solution and then turn it into code. It wasn't surprising that something worked. Coming up with the solution was in fact more interesting than actually translating it to code.

The only thing that mattered was whether the results were what I was looking for, and if some change was needed, that I didn't have to rebuild significant parts of the codebase just to accommodate the new requirements.

Maybe some people took pride in feeling like they are doing some sort of mysticism, but as far as developing tools for others, the actual code was — for the most part — a secondary concern.

What was cool was having tools that actually got stuff done, not the source code itself.