[travisgriggs]

14 years ago hearing Dan Pink talk on motivation (https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc) catalyzed the decision to change jobs.

One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder.

That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I used to. Mastering a “simple” thing is rewarding. Trying to master much of modern software is not. Web programming rots your brain. Modern languages and software product motivations are all about gaining more money and mindshare. There is no mastering any stack, it changes to swiftly to matter. I view the necessity of using LLMs as an indictment against what working in and with information technology has become.

I wonder if the hope of mastering the agentic process, is what is rejuvenating some programmers. It’s a new challenge to get good at. I wonder what Pink would say today about the role of AI in “what motivates us”.

(Edited, author name correction)

[seinvak]

> mastering the agentic process

It would have been worth it if the frontier models were open weight. Right now, if you invest time in mastering tools like Claude Code or Google’s Antigravity, there is no guarantee that you won’t be removed from their ecosystems for any reason, which would make your efforts and skills useless.

[jaredklewis]

If there is a skill to using LLM coding agents, I think it is mostly just developing an intuitive sense for how to prompt and the “jagged frontier” of LLMs.

IME, the tools are largely interchangeable. They are all slightly different, but the basics of prompting and the jaggedness of the frontier is more or less the same across all of them.

Switching from codex to claude code is orders of magnitude simpler than switching from c# to java or emacs to vim.

[davidgl]

Great insightful comment !