[itsgrimetime]

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falling in love w/ and getting good at picking problems & systems apart, breaking them down, and understanding them fully. I respect the discipline, curiosity, and intellect they have. but I also am elated w/ where things are at/going. this feels absurd to say, but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months, but having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me is intoxicating

[maplethorpe]

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code?

On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it.

If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.

[satyrnein]

For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.

[em-bee]

the library of babel contain all possible books, but people are unable o find the good ones among the sea of random rubbish.

the LLM equivalent would be to prompt "give me an app", without specifying what that app does and then repeating that until you get the app you are looking for, each time, checking by hand if the app does what you want.

[gpt5]

In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

[the_af]

> In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

They may be innate, but that doesn't mean they are related or that one is a good substitute for the other.

[gpt5]

I agree. Thinking about it a little more, I've realized that people create things today even if unnecessary (e.g. grow their own food), a lot of it for the satisfaction of it.

So we would still build stuff, but it would not be out of necessity.

[leptons]

Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction.

When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying.

We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing.

People aren't going to line up for slop.

[sixtyj]

In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care.

Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you.

Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people cannot digest everything created by it.

There are more than 45,000 models avail at HF (if I remember it right). Choose wisely :)

[maplethorpe]

One potential solution to this is AI summarization. Imagine coming home, and while preparing dinner your AI assistant recounts what happened in all your favourite tv shows that day. Then while you're doing the laundry, it tells you about all the new games it found and tested for you.

These are just thought starters, but something like this could significantly raise the ceiling on what one person is able to consume in a 24 hour period.

[intended]

Nah. These would be pseudo calories.

Adults tend to forget that they gained their powers of reasoning by exercising them.

Getting a summary, the way you described it, will be minus the effort required to think about it. This is great for information that you are already informed.

This is related to the illusion of explanatory depth. Most of us “know” how something works, until we have to actually explain it. Like drawing a bi-cycle, or explaining how a flush works.

People in general are not aware of how their brain works, and how much mental exercise they used get with the way the world is set up.

I suppose we can set up brain gyms, where people can practice using mental skills so that they don’t atrophy?

[devanil]

Do you think that creation only comes with hard work?

[leptons]

Who said it was hard work?

The satisfaction comes from actually doing a thing that improves your own skill, instead of having a thing done for you.

[jondwillis]

If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.

[IAmGraydon]

>But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store

You really believe that? What has lead you to the conclusion that LLMs will ever be capable of that?

[maplethorpe]

No, I don't. But I hoped that asking the question "what would an AI tool look like once it was functioning perfectly?" might reveal something important about its underlying nature.

For example, if a carpenter was given a perfect hammer, or a painter a perfect paintbrush, would they find their craft any less enjoyable? AI, on the other hand, falls into a different category of tools (if we can call them tools at all) since they would no longer be enjoyable as tools of creation once they reached their "perfect" state.

[Robotbeat]

I dunno, browsing McMaster-Carr feels like both shopping and creating at the same time.

Typing is just choosing from the latent space something special, too. Could just be random words, or, even fewer, random grammatically correct sentences.

[Apocryphon]

To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.

[jarjoura]

I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered.

It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in near real-time the idea you had baked in your head come alive in front of you. Most of us get to this point and become the biggest evangelists of the tech. I see no reason you should feel guilty for the excitement you're feeling right now, and you should enjoy the journey. You're definitely paying for it in tokens, that's for sure.

However, there will come a point at which you will have successfully willed into existence a novel thing that you always wanted, and there it is, exactly as you dreamed, but by then, you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for. Maybe it's a feeling of not earning the thing you built, or maybe it's just, your idea is finished and now you have to think of another idea. Certainly, this was your idea though, and it proves you were right, or at least on to something, and it is valuable, to you.

Yet, you didn't go on the journey to get there. You didn't bump up against limitations of the programming language or system and think about workarounds while you were showering or commuting to the office. You basically bought the finished product from the dynamic template marketplace of Anthropic (or whereever), and that's cool that it does what you need. It just isn't really programming, or being a software engineer in the traditional sense.

What used to be something you could potentially leave your day job for to go create a startup with a cofounder over, or maybe sell off to a buyer, or just open source and share with the world, isn't going to have the same meaning. It's a black box of code that you'll need a coding agent to continue working on, keeping that money flowing to Anthropic or whereever.

Anyway, I think the Slot Machine question is where a lot of early adopters are now at in this journey, and once more of us are there, then we can start asking the hard questions. Right now too many of us are where you're at, and it's impossible to know where things will end up in a year or so.

[ThrowawayTestr]

>you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for

I want computers to do work for me. Any barrier between me and the result I want is an annoyance.

[devanil]

Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."

[the_af]

There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding.

It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.

[rcxdude]

It is hard to read the comment in question as anything other than 'the struggle is important to your satisfaction', which to me feels at the very least not unversally true (different people will find satisfaction from different things: for me personally I have far more ideas than I could ever make real, so 'having to come up with one' is not really something I expect to be a problem), at worst a kind of religious 'virtue through suffering' moral judgement.

(If the goal was to learn, then that's a different question. Learning generally requires putting the effort in. But I don't think that learning the lower-level details is actually the goal in a lot of cases, merely a means to an end)

[the_af]

I didn't read it like that.

I read it like... say, asking a genie to produce stuff for you out of thin air. "Make the most beautiful gem for me!". Then, "a marvelous painting that will impress my beloved!", "a meal worthy of a king!", etc.

After the novelty wears off, those are empty achievements. They are not yours, you haven't chipped a single facet of the gem, nor found it yourself, nor lifted a paintbrush or understood how paint flows. It's not about struggling (or not just that), it's about doing [1].

You haven't earned the things you didn't do. You don't think you're cooking when you order a ready meal. Same here.

And yet there's not a single bit of condemnation in the comment we're discussing. Just understanding, "this is a phase we all go through, but look...".

---

[1] I hate that we must add disclaimers now, but I promise this is me, a human, and not an LLM'ism, "it's not X. It's Y."

[rcxdude]

Phrases like 'you haven't earned it' imply some kind of judgement, IMO. You have the thing now, if all you wanted was the thing, not the lessons you learned along the way, then job done. The prediction that this will ring hollow, IMO, strongly depends on your personality. And LLMs are not like the genie, anyhow. You need to put in some effort yourself for anything past trivial examples.

(To project the argument to absurdity, it would be like saying you didn't bake a cake because you didn't grind the flour. And this isn't a new phenomenon: every time something is made easier and more accessible there are people claiming 'well you didn't _really_ do it unless you did it the old fashioned way', which lasts maybe a generation until the new way is just how you do it.)

[bakugo]

> Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking.

You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.

[itsgrimetime]

a lot of the replies on here (not just yours, I just picked yours to respond to) make it clear I didn't articulate what I was meaning to very well - I'm still doing the "engineering". I used "programming" in a more general sense: building stuff with computers. I still go through the same motions. I try something, hit some failure mode, have to think of and (with the help of claude) execute on that, evaluate it, decide if its better or not, identify when the agent is off track or deviating from the vision I have, etc.

it seems you and others took my words a bit more literally than I intended for them to come across. it's not like I'm just one-shotting all my ideas directly into existence, I still need to understand how to use the tool to do it. it's just a different tool. one that's allowing me to build way more than I ever have, while having a ton of fun doing it.

and sure, your analogy seems reasonable if I was simply buying the code w/ my tokens. that wouldn't be fun or fulfilling at all - it's more like there is some new "cooking" tool that immediately spawns 90% of the ingredients pre-cut & prepped (maybe the other 10% isn't exactly what I asked for but I can improvise with it) and gives me a decent recipe based on the idea of what I wanted to cook in the first place that fills in (and gives me a starting point to learn about) the gaps that I didn't even realize I was missing. I see it more as: "All this time I thought I loved chopping onions and setting up the grill, but actually I just loved cooking".

you weren't wrong about the mcdonalds though. I do love mcdonalds

[em-bee]

i love chopping onions and the whole cooking process. it is very meditative, and creative, whereas working at mcdonalds isn't.

[Finbel]

That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.

They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.

They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.

[strangattractor]

One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing.

I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high and requires the use of many technologies that most of us cannot remotely claim to be expert in. Getting an idea and getting a prototype will definitely be easier. Production Code is another beast. Dealing with legacy systems etc will still require experts at least for the near future IMHO.

[hungryhobbit]

I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ.

Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".

[tovej]

I will try anything reasonable. And have tried LLM tools for programming. But there's no way I would use it daily. It's too inefficient, too error prone, and will actively make me a worse programmer (as I will be writing less code and making fewer decisions. I will also understand less of the systems I'm building).

All the excellent developers around me are _not_ using AI except for very small, contained tasks.

[_se]

Are you implying that someone who prefers Eclipse is more likely to be a good software engineer than someone who prefers Emacs? If so, that is so hilariously backwards that I can't even begin to understand the types of experiences that you must've had.

I am sure that you're objectively wrong if that is what you're saying.

[altruios]

I'm reading it as: those unwilling to try both and make an honest evaluation and instead have preconceived notions and bigotry tend to make bad programmers. That preferences are fine, but dogmatism should be avoided.

[pxc]

Nowadays most people try VSCode or JetBrains "by default" in school or at a first job. It's Emacs that's for explorers who actually try alternatives

[phlakaton]

I went to a James Gosling talk where he excoriated the Emacs users in his audience for clinging to outdated technology and not using a state-of-the-art IDE.

But the IDE he was hawking wasn't Eclipse. I think it was Sun Studio.

[rsoto2]

Flat out wrong. The most impressive engineers I've met in my career did not care for fancy tools with bells and whistles.

[hext]

Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.

[skydhash]

Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.

[hext]

I think it’s fair to call those things out 100% of the time regardless of the LLM usage. Not sure what gave you the impression otherwise.

[em-bee]

a sculptor or a painter are doing something inherently different from someone who describes the outcome and have it created by someone else.

in my world they are called product managers or product owners (scrum) but they are not programmers. prompting an LLM is producing a product but it is not programming.

i refuse to use AI because i want to remain a programmer, and not become a manager.

[mskogly]

I agree. I remember working as a front end web developer years ago and needing to parse and transform xml/xslt from an api, and spending days and days trying to get it to work. The problem was the version of the IIs web server, version of xslt parser, and version format of the xslt etc. spent days on stack overflow trying to get a working solution. With ai I would have solved that idiotic problem in 1 minute.

Ai is tool, that lets us do what we want to do.

I also remember trying to create my first iOS app in Xcode and thinking «this is simply beyond me». Wouldn’t say app coding is trivial with ai, but its at least feasible now.

The bad part that none of us have a competitive edge anymore, and are close to unemployable. We can’t all be self taught founders who starts our own businesses. It’s going to get weird.

[sublinear]

That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming.

You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.

[ctoth]

I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0].

Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthesizer with a citation-backed parameter space" is approximately me.

I could not have built this without AI coding tools, and I've been a professional developer for 15+ years. I wrote the specs, I chose the architecture, I read the papers, I know what the output needs to sound like. The sheer surface area of translating hundreds of papers worth of acoustic phonetics into a working runtime would have taken me years solo. With Claude Code it's taken months, and I'm still the one catching when it misinterprets a Klatt coefficient or botches a formant transition rule, because you have to actually know the domain to do that.

Reducing what you do not understand to "Ikea or microwave meals?" Because you don't like it? or aren't familiar with it? Is saying a thing about you. Not about people who know how to use the tools.

[0]: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/

[sublinear]

I think you're missing my point. It has nothing to do with what I like.

I'm saying there's a ton of nuance and human feedback necessary to build the software most developers work on for a living. It's built to requirements that evolve with the business. Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences. Businesses need to pass audits. Specs can change quarterly. Clients and their contracts come and go. It's exactly like building/maintaining custom furniture for a bespoke house, or consistently cooking a signature recipe at any scale and considering any necessary accommodations. If it wasn't true, the business wouldn't be viable regardless if AI is used or not. I'm talking about systems and services, not products.

You are building a product for a narrow use case requiring DSP. Modeling was always the point. I don't doubt AI helped, but we're not talking about the same thing.

If you were building something for an enterprise client, nobody would give a shit how you got it done as long as you have a demo by monday and it ships next month. No excuses and no gotchas. Any incident risks breaking the SLA and losing the contract. If the client calls a meeting at the last minute to make changes, you're probably working on the weekend. People don't like using AI for stuff like that. Efficiency is not the priority. People don't want cutting edge or novel. They want reliability and competence. Their livelihood depends on knowing exactly how it works and how it can be extended and maintained. They want to stay at least one step ahead of what the client asks for next. People want to test the hell out of it and nobody wants to get fired for not noticing what is obvious to other stakeholders who don't share their tunnel vision. Clients don't have much tolerance for delays or bugs. This is why AI has mixed or negative results for all but personal projects or startups.

[pixl97]

> Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences

For now, at least.

[possiblydrunk]

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

[bluefirebrand]

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months

This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology

You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it

Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?

[pdntspa]

Because the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees.

I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years, are actually getting done. And quickly!

The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding? Who cares, let the AI handle it

[mkehrt]

None of my side projects are things where I want the output. They're all things where I want to write the code myself so I understand it better. AI is antithetical to this.

[dolebirchwood]

I have three side projects that revolve around taking public access data from shitty, barely usable local government websites, and then using that data to build more intuitive and useful UIs around them. They're portfolio pieces, but also a public service. I already know how to build all of these systems manually, but I have better things to do. So, hell yeah I'm just going to prompt my way to output. If the code works, I don't care how it was written, and neither do the members of my community who use my free sites.

[duskdozer]

>If the code works, I don't care how it was written

This doesn't concern you for something you're presenting as a portfolio piece?

[dolebirchwood]

The code is still clean and organized. When I say I don't care "how" the code is written, I mean I don't care how it was generated (i.e., by prompting or by hand -- and I don't do any of it manually anymore). I still care about how it's structured, as a well-structured codebase helps the agents do their job better.

[kowbell]

Perhaps part of their portfolio is the code they've hand written, and part of it is demonstrating they are able to use this new tool to make something that works (despite how imperfect the tool is, as we see so many people point out)

[pdntspa]

All of my side projects scratch an itch, so I do want the output. There are not enough hours in the day for me to make all the things I want to make. Code is just the vessel, and one I am happy to outsource if I can maintain a high standard of work. It's a blessing to finally find a workflow that makes me feel like I have a shot at building most of the things I want to.

[cess11]

Are these things that no one previously built and published, so you can go and take a look at their implementation?

[pdntspa]

Possibly. Mostly?

I wanted a stackable desk tray shelf thing for my desk in literally any size for my clutter. Too lazy to go shopping for one, and couldn't find one on any of the maker sites, so I had claude write me an openSCAD file over lunch break then we iterated on it after-hours. By end of work next day I had three of them sitting on my desk after about 3 hours of back-and-forth the night before (along with about half a dozen tiny prototypes), and thats including the 2hr print time for each shelf.

I want a music metadata tool that is essentially TheGodfather but brought into the modern day and incorporates workflows I wish I had for my DJing and music production. And not some stupid web app, a proper desktop app with a proper windowing toolkit. I'd estimate it would take me 12-18 months to get to a beta the old way, to the exclusion of most of my other hobbies and projects, instead first Gemini then Claude and I managed to get a pretty nice alpha out in a few months over the summer while I was unemployed. There's still a lot left I want to add but it already replaced several apps in my music intake workflow. I've had a number of successful DJ gigs making use of the music that I run through this app. Funny enough the skills I learned on that project landed me a pretty great gig that lets me do essentially the same thing, at the same pace, for more pay than I've ever made in my SWE career to-date.

A bunch of features for my website, a hand-coded Rails app I wrote a few years ago, went from my TODO pile to deployment in just a couple of hours. Not to mention it handled upgrading Ruby and Rails and ported the whole deployment to docker in an afternoon, which made it easy to migrate to a $3 VPS fronted by cloudflare.

I have a ton of ideas for games and multimedia type apps that I would never be able to work on at an acceptable pace and also earn the living that lets me afford these tools in the first place. Most of those ideas are unlike any game I've ever seen or played. I'm not yet ready to start on these yet but when/if I do I expect development to proceed at a comfortably brisk pace. The possibilities for Claude + Unreal + the years and years of free assets I've collected from Epic's Unreal store are exciting! And I haven't even gotten into having AI generate game assets.

So idunno, does that count?

[hk__2]

All my side projects exist to solve a problem.

[hk__2]

> The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding?

These are the downsides, but there are also upsides like in human languages: “wow I can express this complex idea with just these three words? I never though about that!”. Try a new programming paradigm and that opens your mind and changes your way of programming in _any_ language forever.

[beepbooptheory]

"I really really love cooking. In fact, I have optimized my cooking completely, I go out to restaurants every night!"

I believe gp and others just like food instead of cooking. Which is fine, but if that's the case, why go around telling everyone you're a cook?

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

But are you doing real food preparation unless you are hunting and dressing the animals and foraging for your own food?

[r-w]

Yes. You are doing any of the work yourself rather than instructing someone else on how to do it.

[sebzim4500]

You are doing something, but 99% of the work has been done for you. I guess it's like vibe coding and telling the model to fix issues when you see them.

[dorkrawk]

I like making pizza ( https://dinosaurseateverybody.com/blog/making-pizza )...

[beepbooptheory]

Ah geeze. I am utterly destroyed by this comment. Will need to sit and think now.

[pdntspa]

"I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I thought that was cheating, so I learned to play. I thought using purchased drums was cheating, so I made my own. I thought using pre-made skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I thought that was cheating too, so I raised my own goats from birth. I haven't made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."

[beepbooptheory]

Yeah, yeah we get it. Does anyone have a different response? Or, equally acceptable, can anyone unpack this one and its siblings?

As far as I can tell, my implicit argument doesn't really rest on some kind fallacious threshold on really doing the thing, or not, right? I never said anything about "cheating." I'm just asking why we got a lot chefs who don't wanna cook.

Like would yall be happy if we maybe just come up with a different word? Why do you need to be an AI user and also "programmer"? What about: "no I don't like coding, but I do love generating apps.."?

Like following the (presumed) logic here we should say that all visual artists are just wannabe photographers. Or we'd might discover an abandoned house in the woods and then feel legitimized to say we built it, because really, the end product is the same right?

AI guys, I implore you, the world is literally yours. Mountains will be moved for your cause. You are the winner, the hegemonic force for the forseeable future. Why can't yall just be happy being what you are? Why cling to titles from an obsolete world? Where you really want to be "programmer" and "artist"? These things have nothing for you, if you believe in this radically different future so much, why even be concerned as being the same kinds of things as us dumb luddites?

I think you should just use your agential blahblah to start a one-person B2B SaaS, make a lot of money, and move on. At no point will it matter what you called yourself!

[bigstrat2003]

> Because the programming is and was always a means to an end.

No. Programming is a specific act (writing code), and that act is also a means to an end. But getting to the goal does not mean you did programming. Saying "I'm good at programming" when you are just using LLMs to generate code for you is like saying "I'm good at driving" when you only ever take an Uber and don't ever drive yourself. It's complete nonsense. If you aren't programming (as the OP clearly said he isn't), then you can't be good at programming because you aren't doing it.

[NewsaHackO]

I guess I agree with you, but I think the GP may have mispoke and meant he loves building software. It's sort of like the difference between knitting and making clothes. The GP likely loves making clothes on an abstract basis and realized that he won't have to knit anymore to do so. And he really never liked knitting in the first place, as it was just a means to an end.

[datavalue]

It’s similar to the arrival of mechanized looms in the 19th century. My ancestors were weavers, and automation eventually replaced those jobs. I’ve spent 40 years working in IT as a programmer and am now nearing retirement, so I’ve been fortunate. To me it feels like programming as a skill may not have much time left. Probably how my ancestors felt.

[NewsaHackO]

Yeah, I was reading a little bit about knitting before my post and saw that in 1589, a person who invented a sort of prototype to the automated knitting machine in the UK had his patent application denied by the queen due to taking jobs away from hand knitters. I guess back then they had to be a little more protective because it would be a lot easier for civil unrest to lead to revolution and civil war in postfeudal UK than now.

[munk-a]

Most people who are knitting do it purely for the experience of knitting. If you need clothes it's far more affordable to buy the cheap manufactured stuff. Some people certainly enjoy the creativity of expression and wish they could get to that easier - but most of those people have moved away from manual tasks like knitting and instead just draw or render their imagination. There's genuine value in making things by hand as the process allows us time to study our goal and shape our technique mid-approach. GP may legitimately like knitting more than making clothes.

[NewsaHackO]

I think you misunderstood my post. Now many people do knitting for the joy of knitting, but people used to knit to create clothing to wear or to sell. Of course, automated knitting machines have largely replaced hand knitting, and people now still do it. If you are very good at hand knitting, you might see if you can sell some work. However, if you want to make knitted clothing at scale, you would be better served taking a high-level approach to the actual design of the clothing and learning how to prompt the automated knitting machine to do so instead of optimizing for how you yourself would hand knit it.

[pdntspa]

I'm still reading the code, I'm still correcting the LLM's laughably awful architecture and abstractions, and I'm still spending large chunks of time in the design and planning phase with the LLM. The only thing it does is write the code.

But that's not programming because its a natural-language conversation?

[bakugo]

> But that's not programming because its a natural-language conversation?

Correct. Programming is writing code. You are not writing code, therefore you are not programming. I don't understand what's so complicated about this.

[pdntspa]

I'm literally making a program. Present-progressive of the verb to program. I feel like you're pearl-clutching on semantics. By my read, programming != writing code, but writing code is most definitely programming. Oxford defines 'to program' as both.

[000ooo000]

No sane person would argue Person A is a concreter if Person A is telling Person B to do concreting and Person B does the concreting. Doesn't matter if Person A had elaborate plans for the concrete, or if Person A owns the concrete afterwards. These are long-established ideas. You can twist it and argue "semantics!" all you want but it will never take with anyone but the Person A's.

[californical]

I mean, yes - you’re reviewing and architecting, but not creating.

Same as if you use an image diffusion model. You can describe very clearly what you want, and iterate carefully until you get a picture that looks good. But nobody would say that they “drew a nice picture”, since they haven’t done any drawing.

(except maybe the mega-power-users who use the tool and have a warped view of their accomplishment)

[pdntspa]

I'll never say that I wrote the code, because I didn't.

[bakugo]

Sounds like you just don't like programming. And that's okay! It's okay to not like things.

But "I love programming now that I don't do any programming" is an utterly nonsensical statement. Please stop and reflect over what you said for a moment.

[pdntspa]

Substitute it with "the mechanical act of writing code" and maybe it will make more sense. I have been clumsy with my vocabulary here, forgive me.

[wmeredith]

I think this is a semantics thing. I feel the same way, but I wouldn't say that I feel like I'm good at programming. I'm most certainly not. What I am good at is product design and development, and LLM tech has made it so that I can concentrate on features, business models, and users.

[throwawaytea]

I know how to build a house for the most part. But I don't have time to build a house.

If I get a robot someday and manage it daily before I leave for work to slowly build a house, when it's done, I gotta be honest and admit I'll consider myself a home builder.

Otherwise, who is a home builder? Very few people do every single part themselves, even if they technically could.

[reverius42]

This is like saying you can accomplish a lot "in assembly" if you write C++ instead of hand-writing assembly. I think I agree that similarly to "this is not hand written assembly", for the use of LLMs to generate high level code, "this is not programming" is also true.

It didn't mean we shouldn't use C++ and stop hand-writing (almost all) assembly. I don't think it means we should't use LLMs and stop hand-writing C++ either.

[MattGaiser]

Different definitions of programming.

OP defines it as getting the machine to do as he wants.

You define it as the actual act of writing the detailed instructions.

[bluefirebrand]

It is very difficult to get the machine to do what you want without the detailed instructions

If you have an LLM generate the instructions, then the LLM is programming, you're just a "prompter" or something. Not a programmer

[r-w]

Exactly. There's a probabilistic machine in between you and every instruction that gets executed, without exception. It's straight up different.

[cgg23]

Im concerned that people are debating over this lol.

[thendrill]

I see alot of people get really confused between the act of writing code VS. programming...

Programming is willing the machine to do something... Writing code is just that writing code, yes sometimes you write code to make the machine do something and other times you write code just to write code ( for example refactoring, or splitting logic from presentation etc.)

Think about it like this... Everyone can write words. But writing words does not make you a book writer.

What always gets me is that the act of writing code by itself has no real value. Programming is what solves problems and brings value. Everyone can write code, not everyone can "program"....

[bigstrat2003]

Programming is writing code. There's nothing to confuse because that's what the word means.

[simplyluke]

Is it? I wouldn't consider punch cards writing code but they were certainly programming. Programming is a broader concept than code in a text file.

[ModernMech]

They're saying writing code is programming but not all programming is writing code. What is Scratch?

[r-w]

A graphical means of writing and manipulating a program.

[boc]

Aka Claude Code.

[poszlem]

Why do you feel good about programming despite not writing in machine code?

[bakugo]

False equivalence. x86 assembly is a programming language, C is a programming language, Javascript is a programming language. English is NOT a programming language.

If it was, you wouldn't need "AI" to convert English into a real programming language before that, in turn, can be converted to machine code.

[throwawaytea]

My boss can make people do countless things in the proper order, with just a few words. Sounds like a programming language to me.

[jlarcombe]

I enjoyed that too when I was a youngster but there are good reasons why it is impractical for day to day work.

[orsorna]

Well for one, programming actually sucks. Punching cards sucks. Copywriting sucks. Why? Well, implementation for the sake of implementation is nothing more than self-gratifying, and sole focus on it is an academic pursuit. The classic debate of which programming language is better is an argument of the best way to translate human ideas of logic into something that works. Sure programming is fun but I don't want to do it. What I do want to do is transform data or information into other kinds of information, and computing is a very, very convenient platform to do so, and programming allows manipulation of a substrate to perform such transformations.

I agree with OP because the journey itself rarely helps you focus on system architecture, deliverable products and how your downstream consumers use your product. And not just product in the commercial sense, but FOSS stuff or shareware I slap together because I want to share a solution to a problem with other people.

The gambling fallacy is tiresome as someone who, at least I believe, can question the bullshit models try to do sometimes. It is very much gambling for CEOs, idea men who do not have a technical floor to question model outputs.

If LLMs were /slow/ at getting a working product together combined with my human judgement, I wouldn't use them.

So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains. Not to disparage hobby trains, because model trains are awesome, but they are hubris.

[munk-a]

> Well for one, programming actually sucks. Punching cards sucks. Copywriting sucks.

There's a significant difference between past software advancements and this one. When we previously reduced the manual work when developing software it was empowering the language we were defining our logic within so that each statement from a developer covered more conceptual ground and fewer statements were required to solve our problems. This meant that software was composed of fewer and more significant statements that individually carried more weight.

The LLM revolution has actually increased code bloat at the level humans are (probably, get to that in a moment) meant to interact with it. It is harder to comprehend code written today than code written in 2019 and that's an extremely dangerous direction to move in. To that earlier marker - it may be that we're thinking about code wrong now and that software, as we're meant to read it, exists at the prompt level. Maybe we shouldn't read or test the actual output but instead read and test the prompts used to generate that output - that'd be more in line with previous software advancements and it would present an astounding leap forward in clarity. My concern with that line of thinking is that LLMs (at least the ones we're using right now for software dev) are intentionally non-deterministic so a prompt evaluated multiple times won't resolve to the same output. If we pushed in this direction for deterministic prompt evaluation then I think we could really achieve a new safe level of programming - but that doesn't seem to be anyone's goal - and if we don't push in that direction then prompts are a way to efficiently generate large amounts of unmaintained, mysterious and untested software that won't cause problems immediately... but absolutely does cause problems in a year or two when we need to revise the logic.

[pton_xd]

> Well for one, programming actually sucks.

I'll never understand those in a field who hate the day-to-day details of their job. You're intelligent, why not do something you actually enjoy engaging with?

Maybe now with the advancement of the field you're finally enjoying yourself, but why were you subjecting yourself to daily misery for so long in the first place? I don't get it.

[orsorna]

Well I just explained what I actually enjoy about programming, which is the results of it. Many jobs have intermediate boring steps that build to something satisfying.

>but why were you subjecting yourself to daily misery for so long in the first place? I don't get it.

It just meant it took a lot longer to build something, to get that satisfaction.

[bluefirebrand]

> Well for one, programming actually sucks

Speak for yourself. Programming is awesome. I love it so much and I hate that AI is taking a huge steaming dump on it

> So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains

Growing and building rapidly at all costs is the behavior of a cancer cell, not a human

I love model trains

[orsorna]

Your cancer cell analogy is moot unless you paint all AI generated applications to be unusable trash, which is not the case, and I wouldn't describe my own work with it. It's true that standards have dropped to the floor where anyone can "ship" something but doesn't mean it's good. I think I have a better handle on how to steer GenAI versus the average linkedinbro. But the divide between journey and destination is valid, I guess it's something that hasn't been explored until GenAI.

[estimator7292]

For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible.

Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.

The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.

[the_af]

What's the basis for this assertion? It seems wild:

> The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.

If it's just a case of keeping a positive attitude and self-help, I can accept it. A sort of white lie one tells themselves.

[raxxorraxor]

I heavily use AI for coding, but you cannot skip the understanding part. At some point it falls apart and then you need someone to wade through the results. If you understand the architecture, server and service configuration and how they interact, you can use AI to be quite productive. But you still need the deep level understanding.

[riantogo]

Exactly this for me as well. When I was a SWE I thought what I loved was problem solving. So after many years of doing that I decided to move upsteam and took Product roles so that I can identify and address big business problems. It was only after I switched that I realized that I was not in love with problem solving. I was in love with art. Programming was art of me.

I kept at it on the side as a hobby. But stacks evolved and I was left behind. Now with AI it's back on.

[em-bee]

do i read that right, you didn't enjoy addressing big business problems?

i learned programming in high school and i enjoyed it, then while starting computer science i did and internship at a software company, and i hated it, and i thought i hated programming and wanted to give up studying computer science, but when i discovered programming MUDs and then web development with the same language i loved it again. turns out i always loved programming, what i didn't like was the corporate work environment, 9-5, using CASE tools (remember those?) on windows, maybe the feeling of inferiority as an untrained intern among everyone else.

what i hate about LLMs is the tediousness, the unreliability, having to try over and over to get a result.

i often work with customers directly, less technical ones too. seeing their satisfaction when i solve a problem for them (no matter how) is what allowed me to keep going doing even non-programming work, though i admit that i prefer programming if that customer interaction is missing. so i too love the art, but i still love problem solving if there is someone who appreciates the solution.

so maybe it wasn't problem solving that was your problem, but the big business environment, and how it constrained your role and didn't give you the feedback you needed?

[manmal]

I've felt this exact same way until very recently. But in the end, it's slop that never quite does what it's supposed to. Anthropic is proud of themselves that they brute-forced the world's crappiest C compiler into existence. Guess what, nobody will use it.

[zurtri]

I'm the same, it's about the "Act of Creation".

[applfanboysbgon]

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane

Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since you're not the one writing them, and apparently were not capable of writing them before so are not qualified to review them very much.

> having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me

Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part. The hard part was in all of the hundreds and thousands of little details that go into building the ideas into something actually worthwhile, and that hasn't changed. LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend. I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale, once, ever, other than LLM wrappers. Either every person who is all-in on vibes only has ideas that consist of making .md files and publishing them as a "meta agent framework", or LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software.

[542458]

> Anyone can be an "ideas guy".

I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!

[applfanboysbgon]

I do agree that having good ideas is a skill in its own right. But people with bad ideas are idea guys too! You see them all the time in the indie game development scene in particular. "I need a programmer, and an artist, and a composer, to build this amazing idea for me!", together with an 8 paragraph wall of text (the paragraphs are if you're lucky) describing the idea, and as you'd expect from somebody who couldn't be bothered to develop a single skill, their game ideas are exactly as good as their programming, art, and music.

I find that the strength of people's ideas tends to be highly correlated with their overall skills. I don't know that you can develop the capability for good ideas without getting your hands dirty learning a field, experimenting, absorbing all kinds of information and understanding what really goes into the making of a good idea. In that way, the person with good ideas always ends up being more than just a ideas guy. They don't just have good ideas, they have good ideas and the skills to back them up. Whereas the "ideas guy" label is usually applied to people who have nothing to bring to the table other than their ideas, and wouldn't you know it, they aren't nearly as good as they think they are.

[Aurornis]

I think the Product Manager title was (and still is) one of the most abused titles in tech. A great product manager is indispensable for setting product direction in a way that can't be accomplished by others doing it part-time or advocating for their own needs. I've worked with some truly great product managers.

I've also worked with a lot of awful product managers. The product manager title is squishy enough that it gets assigned to people with charisma or confidence without actual skills to follow through. A bad product manager can blend in to a company for years by relaying ideas around from one group to another and having ChatGPT write documents. The engineers on the ground see the incompetence long before it becomes undeniable at the higher ranks.

When I read Hacker News and other sites I suspect a lot of engineers have only ever worked with bad PMs from the latter category.

[angrymouse]

What do you think the good ones do? And how do they set direction in a way that’s good compared to a bad one?

[Aurornis]

Great product managers know the current customers, industry, potential additional customers, and the company very well. They communicate well. They can optimize the match between customer needs, marketing benefits, internal company priorities, and reasonable developer asks.

The best ones I’ve worked with have been so good that their roadmaps and conclusions feel obviously correct, and everyone has bought into the direction because their input was considered.

[paavope]

The good ones have original thoughts and can combine knowledge from different domains in nontrivial ways

[moduspol]

Anyone can be an "ideas guy" because there's no failure event that stops you. Contrast this with being a plumber. Not anyone can be a plumber.

[tekacs]

I think that the point about building with agents though. Your ideas meet reality sooner and you actually get feedback on whether they are worth anything or not. So you're not really being an ideas guy in the sense of just throwing ideas out there. You're being an ideas guy in the sense of testing your ideas, which is really the essence of what building startups is: figuring out what people want.

[moduspol]

That's true. I was just responding to the post above, which seemed to be inferring a different meaning (i.e. that there are no bad or good ideas guys) than how I interpreted it.

[jmuguy]

A lot of this is also missing understanding the software we're creating. I have a deep knowledge of our SaaS because I've spent years working on coding it. If I had been prompting an LLM this entire time, I can't imagine I would actually have near the same understanding. That is assuming purely planning and prompting could actually result in a product that's in active use for years and not just a pile of prototypes which apparently desperately needed to be created and were just waiting for AI to come along to make it possible.

I've been using AI tools more but this idea of never actually writing any code seems way too black and white to be serious.

[supern0va]

>Anyone can be an "ideas guy".

I think there's way more nuance to this than you're willing to admit here. There's a significant difference between the guy who thinks "I'm going to make X app to do Y and get loaded." and the person who really understands the details of what they want to create and has a concrete vision of how to shape it.

I think that product shaping and detail oriented vision of how something should work and be used by people is genuinely challenging, wholly aside from the lower level technical skills required to execute it.

This is part of the reason why I wouldn't be surprised at all to see product manager types getting more hands-on, or seeing the software engineering profession evolve into more of a PM/SDE hybrid.

[cgg23]

Disagree massively.

A proper PM should be moving towards owning design and marketing pieces - not production of software. Software is a means to package an experience captured by the design and communicated via marketing. It's that simple.

Most PMs don't match this description. So I understand the frustration's of engineers who have had to work with PMs.

[supern0va]

A well constructed BRD is a very large chunk of the context needed for more successful use of an LLM. You're welcome to disagree, but I've found increasingly that the work artifacts from PMs are becoming even more essential to the actual development.

If you understand the design and user experience end to end and can express that effectively in writing, that's...your agent context. Why do a context hand-off to another human, or at least why remain as silo'd as we have historically been?

[thangalin]

> LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software

Here is the source code for a greenfield, zero-dependency, 100% pure PHP raw Git repository viewer made for self-hosted or shared environments that is 99.9% vibe-coded and has had ~10k hits and ~7k viewers of late, with 0 errors reported in the logs over the last 24 hours:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

[BoorishBears]

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/pages/Templ...

Did it really have to be zero-dependency...

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Frankly, I created dozen of such projects in the last weeks. Recently I just deleted them all. I feel like there's no point. I cancelled my Claude subscription, too.

I got back learning from books and use LLMs for "review my code in depth and show me its weak points" occasionally.

[baq]

LLMs in teacher mode instead of solver mode can be great. ("review this change" is kinda sorta teacher mode.)

[tovej]

How is this greenfield?

[thangalin]

How is it not?

You can trace the back commits to the first to show that it was started from scratch:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/commits/c7742cb3c580d...

[tovej]

It's using a mature data model from an existing framework (git), and it's essentially a simpler clone of other similar projects.

That's brownfield to me. Greenfield would develop a completely new system. This is a utility for an existing system, one whose design is clearly a copy of existing utilities. Both of those make this brownfield.

[thangalin]

I'm building something from scratch, with no existing code base, and no requirement to integrate with or extend an existing implementation. The only constraint is Git's raw file format. Brownfield, to me, means constraints from existing software. It gets a little fuzzy, but no existing code base was used, no existing architectural constraints were imposed, and I was free to design the implementation from scratch; a greenfield implementation of a legacy protocol.

[thunky]

> Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part.

Sure it's easy to create bad ideas. Not easy at all to create good ones.

[xg15]

> LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend

Just to nitpick, because I think the difference is relevant: "Idea to prototype in a weekend" was possible for a spirited coder already before LLMs.

Now it's "Idea to prototype in a few minutes".

[bartread]

> You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth.

That’s because when it comes to delivering value, code doesn’t matter: outcomes do.

If I spend 10 hours hand coding something versus prompting an LLM to create a solution that delivers the same outcome in a few minutes, and I can get that solution into production in under an hour from the moment my fingers first touch the keyboard to start writing the prompt, well, whilst these solutions might both deliver the same value, the ROI differs significantly.

[awesome_dude]

> because having ideas is not the hard part.

I agree. It's the "buy in" from the market.

The biggest names in Software Products have (other peoples) ideas to sell, they're selling the buggy versions of those ideas - Microsoft, Salesforce, even early Facebook, these weren't triumphs of 'monk-like discipline' in the code. They were triumphs of market buy in and timing.

[paultendo]

Anyone can be an "ideas guy", very few are good at it.

"I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale" - so Microsoft using Claude Code doesn't count?

[applfanboysbgon]

Nope. I specifically excluded LLM wrappers, which I think is a fair qualification for a "first useful software at scale". If it turns out that LLMs can produce useful things that aren't LLM wrappers, then maybe later we can evaluate whether LLM wrappers are worthwhile. But if LLM wrappers are only used to produce other LLM wrappers, which are used to produce other LLM wrappers, it's merely indicative of a pyramid scheme wherein people are trying to sell you on hype because they can't sell you anything that actually produces utility in the real world (browsers, compilers, IDEs, production databases, music production software, photo editing software, Excel, viable Discord replacement, any of the reasons people used computers as tools to accomplish things).

On the note of Microsoft specifically, they've shipped a critical OS-destroying bug every month for several months straight now, and people seem to be generally in agreement that Windows 11 has only been going further and further downhill. I have literally not seen a single person with a positive opinion on anything W11 or associated programs have done in the last 6 months. Which does not create a compelling case for translating LLM wrapper into real-world useful code.