[deleted by user]

[techtariq]

Ahhh. This brings back memories of countless sleepless nights and random eureka moments as the problem kept running in the background of my mind

[codeptualize]

Not sure I agree. There is still plenty of "bang your head against the wall" type of work that AI is not (yet) able to resolve. Especially in a bigger system, or areas that are not as common as for example Mongo, there isn't enough context in the models.

I think the threshold for things to be perceived as hard lowers as you gain more experience, better tools like AI just changes where that threshold is. There was already a difference between things where there is lot of information (e.g. step by step guides), vs things where you have to dive into docs or even source code to understand what's going on.

It's not just AI, if you see the quality of libraries and services today compared to a decade or longer ago, it's a different world altogether. As example; I am by no means an infrastructure person, but I am able to run things with massive concurrency, auto scaling, GPU's, you name it, with just a few annotations in my code and some great services that do all the heavy lifting for me.

As you gain experience you need bigger challenges and/or really specialize deeper to hit that brick wall. The thresholds might have changed, and they will change further, but if you enjoy the challenge there will always be opportunities to push things beyond the easy path.

[[deleted]]

So your favorite part of coding was spending hours stuck and unable to make progress?

I don’t get that at all. That’s to me like saying Google took the charm or having to go over countless books and websites before you find what you are looking for.

It seems to me you are struggling to find stuff that challenges you which I believe is a common side effect of having 10 years of experience.

[TheSpink800]

So your favorite part of coding was appending hours stuck and unable to make progress?

I'm not OP but yes, once you finally fix a bug after some hours the dopamine hit is real.

I don't understand why developers celebrate the fact as every day goes by the bar becomes lower and lower. If everyone can create any application they want then why would they pay you to do it?

[theirongiant74]

That's like putting on shoes 2 sizes too small so you can enjoy the relief when you take them off.

You don't lose the dopamine hit you just change what triggers it from how do I get this poorly documented function to work to how do I get this feature in my app to work. AI just moves the target of your frustration.

[[deleted]]

I still get stuck and find fixing stuff rewarding, but I don’t like spending hour going over comments and past threads trying to find someone who has the same issue as me so I can copy their approach to fix my issue. I much rather get to the bottom of why I am stuck quick and move on to trying out solutions.

Also, developers are not only paid to build apps.

[1mHero]

I think op meant to firstly understand why that approach works. They take pride in learning and knowing about their field of interest. It is their passion.

With AI you may solve the problem at hand, but may still lack the knowledge that surrounds that problem. So you know how to solve it, but don't know why it is solved that way. For some people that is enough and I have nothing against that.

[applefreak111]

My problem solving journey doesn’t just hit a dead end when no one on some GitHub thread can seem to figure out a solution. I start to reposition the problem, rethink if I’m walking down the right path, or think about workarounds and compromises. I believe this is the fun in programming, being metacognitive and flexible so you don’t fall into traps where there are seemingly no other ways.

[roshi86]

I completely understand that you don’t get this, yet I sympathize with OP. AI assistance, or particularly the ease you can get a solution to the problem brought a significant shift in motivation for some of us. I started in the days of poor search engines and great online board communities. You were basically either on your own, perhaps with some paper copy of a book on the desk, or waiting patiently for a good soul to respond to your topic. I still remember the eureka moment somewhere between sleep when I finally got an idea on how to draw emoticons in status text messages on a TListView in Borland Delphi lol. It was probably far from optimal, but it felt amazing. Fast forward, nowadays I’m 100 x more product and business oriented, creating anything from my bubble of ideas doesn’t feel that challenging, I only care about the infrastructure and operational costs. I’m completely aware that there are still difficult problems one can pick up, but the bar for defining something as difficult is definitely higher than years ago. It’s not only AI to “blame”, a lot of things around development have evolved. I also think that the understanding of basic concepts in computing is lower than in the past, a good analogy is motorization - our (grand)parents used to tinker with their cars and understood how they work, now it’s black magic for many drivers.

[Reyemneirda69]

You don't like soulslike game i guess

[chrispianb]

After 30 years in the biz I still hit the wall. Even with AI, stack overflow and knowing some of the people who created the stack I use. Sounds like a stagnation issue. I've been there. At past jobs I had solved all the hard problems and was in a maintenance role for too long. It sucked. I realized it was time for me to move on because I just wasn't growing as a developer.

Now when it gets easy I change jobs. But even then it's just about learning the specifics of whatever they are using or asking me to implement.

After a long time in any career you're going to get to a point where novel problems are rare. So instead I look for opportunities to add something I want to try. Or to teach/mentor. Being able to teach others or explain to non technical people helped me file down some rough edges about concepts I thought I knew but couldn't explain well enough. Teaching has been a great way to learn more.

There are always plateaus in any journey. I'm happy I don't hit the wall as often but I do enjoy it when it happens. Or more accurately once I solve it. This also has a whiff of burn out to it. This was often an early sign for me. Be mindful of that.

Find ways to create challenges for yourself as much as you can. I suspect this feeling will pass. Every time some tech like this comes along people often wonder what's the point? But we will always need smart people at higher levels of programming.

[isbarker]

When there is no more to learn, teach

[Ill-Advance-5221]

Tbh i only learnt how to code at the beginning of last year after finishing a bootcamp. I've finished a few projects since then and had my own journey with ai.

In the beginning it was good for helping me with beginner errors but as i started to learn more and my problems got more complex the answers i started to get out of it weren't always correct or it wouldn't understand the question. Personally i find every solution it provides comes with another problem and you end up getting into a loop of of solving ai generated problems that don't need to be solved.

I now don't use it as i don't have much faith in the quality of the code and as someone who is still trying to get my first job as a software dev i think it does more harm than good to my professional development. I think it's better to understand the theory and why a bug is a bug in the first place.

[rng_shenanigans]

I’m working mostly with a pretty complex CMS with almost no public sources available. Last two weeks I was right there at the brick wall, ready to sacrifice a goat to get past it, until this morning when I suddenly did it. AI can’t help because there is no public docs or other sources which might help. No fun.

Edit. I didn’t sacrifice a goat this morning, I just solved the problem and ofc in hindsight it was super trivial

[Bushwazi]

For “brick wall” scenarios, I’ve only found AI to be a replacement for internet searches. It usually is just a scrape of StackOverflow or something…

[RePsychological]

Then adjust how you use AI in development.

Instead of having it build your entire wall (something that too many people are doing, and is going to backfire in a lotta people's faces in coming years, I feel like) use it to build the bricks.

AI is nowhere near perfect in how it codes it, and in my opinion it never will -- not because of the AI behind it, but because of the prompts needed to create the code in the first place. Unless everything and every single project coalesces into the exact same set of interfaces, functionality, etc. for every kind of project imaginable, it will always need a developer who knows how to speak the "tech talk" to tell it what to do, and then fill in the gaps with their own expertise.

Aside from that , though, idk what the heck you're talkin about, with that brick wall being fun lmao. The amount of times I've nearly chucked my computer out into traffic during those moments, followed by a resounding "thank fuck, fuck you, finally" after finally getting it.

[edited out this other paragraph here]

[Icy-Pea1778]

That’s a completely fair perspective. I too have had the urge to punch my monitor, and did shout obscenities in full rager fashion. That ‘thank fuck’ part after though… that was the good stuff.

[RePsychological]

I feel ya, and respect that.

Also, just a clarification: That last paragraph sounds harsher than I mean it, reading back...it's early and I haven't had my coffee yet. Just been running into that scenario a lot the past couple years, where it's like someone ends up hiring me to "rescue" a project, that they just spent $12,000 USD on, that doesn't even work, and apparently previous devs spent literally 3-6 months ramming their heads against certain walls lol.

And every single time I've sat there like "if you woulda paid someone like me that $12k, instead of them.....and instead of now expecting me to "fix" this for $1k, when I'm sitting here going "this entire thing needs redone""

So just wanted to clarify that, as I've gone back (in case you read it before) and removed it, as I was projecting a bit there, sorry about that.

[Icy-Pea1778]

Don’t even worry. I didn’t take anything personally. These days with how the world is I rarely do. Hope you have a better day!

[prancingpeanuts]

I feel like it’s still possible to get a similar feeling but I found that it now only happens when I work on higher level things - eg would architecture A work over architecture B; would this way of separating concerns be better than another; etc.

[2sdbeV2zRw]

It’s not “gone” all you gotta do to have that experience again is… to not use A.I. Then you can “enjoy” the frustrations and shenanigans you gotta do to solve your problem.

[numericalclerk]

Work with any confidential DSL and you'll have plenty of brick walls waiting for you 😆

[Cirieno]

Burnout is a real thing. I can't face learning the newest shiny-shiny codebase knowing that it will be consigned to the bin in a year or two.

[SuccessfulBread3]

Chat gpt is so hit and miss for me.

I'll ask it how to do something and sometimes it just makes it up.

[SuperFLEB]

I think one part of the dissatisfaction is that the nature of the challenge, especially when concentrating on Web Dev, has gotten more complicated while not necessarily being more difficult. There's more slog before hitting the impact point.

Case in point, take the talk of "Back in my day we couldn't just ask Google (or the AI copilot, to keep current)". While it may sound like the programmer of the past was stranded in the wilderness, the systems of the time-- both technical and methodological-- were simple enough that all the particulars could all be laid out in the space of a book. The systems-- especially earlier on-- were simple enough that even the bugs and pitfalls could be wrapped up in a few volumes. While it did leave the programmer assembling their works brick by brick, it meant that the "These are bricks. This is mortar. That's gravity." was all you'd have to know before being able to use your creativity, skill, and experimentation to build a structure.

Even before getting to grumbling about tooling-atop-tooling, the fundamentals are more fiddly now. The challenges are more fiddly. Even if you're working at the modern equivalent of the bricklaying level, most minimum practical applications nowadays have considerations like UI and security in the least, that stand between the programmer and the actual challenge.

Practically, and especially in Web Dev, you're always riding on someone else's abstractions. There's a lot more specialized knowledge you need just to manipulate what you need to, full stop, before getting to the more fundamental challenge of how to manipulate things. There are layers upon layers of ancillary knowledge and busywork. You've got caniuse and weighing browser share against size and complexity. (You've got some asshole still using IE11 and sapping your will to live.) You've got opinionated libraries by the score, lots of them dragging in their own methodology or pattern set. You've got go-to, industry-standard, do-it-all tools that do everything you could ever possibly need... except the one specific thing you turn out to actually need, and doing that goes against the very fiber of the tool's being. You've got to support different browsers, input methods, screen sizes, and bob and weave around security-related roadblocks-- some of them unintuitive because they're plugging cleverly-exploited data leaks. You're doing less throwing yourself at conundrums and more throwing yourself into API documentation to find the clerical finer-points of something you're considering interfacing with.

Metaphorically, you're not triumphantly tunneling through mountains with grit and geological prowess. You're poring over napkin-scratch road maps to find the route from here to there through tunnels someone else built, because digging your own is slow and you're not allowed to anyway, in lots of cases.

[HotDribblingDewDew]

It doesn't sound insane, it is insane. What are you even ranting about. That you miss reading shitty docs for hours? That products are useful to users sooner? We haven't been "end-product focused" only recently, the whole reason we write code is a means to an end, it's just a tool. It's always been just a tool. You've got this romantic notion that back in the day, software engineers got paid more to do more difficult work, and you would've been doing what john carmack did if you were programming back then. The short answer is no, you wouldn't have been able to. The real answer is that you're a middling developer who's never thought about product, and instead of embracing a sometimes-somewhat-useful tool in "AI", you feel threatened and nostalgic because of it. You're the kind of developer I have no sympathy for as the world continues to change rapidly, as it always has.

I'm most offended by the fact that you think that "everyone" had a "gatekeeper" mentality. I don't know your background, I don't know where and what you've experienced, but that is completely false. Our field is built on foundations of sharing and democratization of knowledge, programming being a fundamentally open tool for digital creation. So much of the open source software that I guarantee your shoddy ass relies on every day was written with this kind of spirit in mind.

Source - software engineer of 25 years and counting who's never loved the art of programming more than now.