[verdverm]

Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature

[georgemcbay]

> but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent.

Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software.

"I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.

[IanCal]

When my wife has a thing she says she needs to do and I can help, I now ask “do you want this done or do you want to do it?”. I think this is a similar kind of split.

Sometimes I want to cook, that’s a thing I want to actively do. Sometimes I cook because I want to put dinner out, dinner being out is the thing I want and cooking is just a required step.

Sometimes I want to solve a problem, sometimes I want a problem solved.

Here’s the tricky part for me now and I think others are hitting it - when a machine can solve the problem does that devalue the feeling of doing it by hand? Solving a sudoku feels good even though I know I have multitudes of machines in my house that could solve it faster than I could pick up the pen. Games that place a dollar value on some item I can also achieve makes me feel like the effort is only worth $ though. This isn’t logical but I’m ok being human.

So for a personal project do I get the same feeling doing it by hand? Will it feel like I’ve just made my life harder for no reward or will it be a nice satisfying thing?

As the models get so much better the goalposts shift too, the less I direct the less I was needed.

It’s a weird time. Fascinating, exciting and definitely useful - but so much of what I’ve learned is rapidly becoming less and less important for many tasks. Still, I’ve argued for many years that more people should code because it’s such a powerful tool even used basically, I guess I’ve got my wish (and that side I genuinely love, seeing people make things with their domain knowledge and not having to learn exactly how brackets work in order to automate something)

[nibbleyou]

I used to get overjoyed and would tell my partner how amazing programmer I am every time I built something that felt difficult at the beginning.

Now for every problem I know Claude/Codex will do it, and they do. I just don't get that feeling on finishing 10 features now.

[j1elo]

We're just getting used to the invention of the washing machine. All clothes are equally cleansed on average, with good enough results even if afterwards some particular pieces need a bit of extra care, while before we had to clean them all one by one and paying attention to minutia and details on each piece's needs. Nowadays you just control a couple buttons and hope for the best.

Better to find joy in other parts of the process! Hanging clothes out is still a widespread practice in Europe, and some enjoy it. Likewise for software quality controls, testing, and full product lifecycle.

[bob1029]

> Better to find joy in other parts of the process!

I recommend the joy of helping the customer get what they truly want. Spend more time on client calls and intercept additional hot potatoes now that we have extra free time to work with.

The technology is a blank canvas. These LLMs are like 600DPI color laser printers. The customer cannot tell the difference between hand painted and LLM generated at even a short distance. Once you get your head out of the worry that not hand painting everything is somehow an abdication of your professional capacity, you may find this whole thing goes a lot better. Try to think of it more like a heavy equipment operator climbing into the cab of a Caterpillar D9. You could do the job by hand, but the customer would probably get upset with how long it takes. Why not just finish the damn thing? Fire the infernal machine up for a few minutes and then move onto the next task.

You may find that by using the big scary machines that you get to engage with far more interesting technology problems than if you had insisted on hand coding. The only real difference is that you get to enjoy the problems from the comfort of an air conditioned cabin rather than a hot, muddy field.

[encyclopedism]

That's such a naive take, the joy of helping the customer ha! That's a situation your employer sets up for you!

Try reading your sentence above and swapping in 'EMPLOYEE':

'These LLMs are like EMPLOYEES. The customer cannot tell the difference between EMPLOYEE painted and LLM generated at even a short distance. '

[bob1029]

> That's a situation your employer sets up for you!

Who says you need a boss or other human coworkers?

Start your own consultancy and take 100% of the pie. The term "employee" evaporates in this context, as does an entire universe of lazy, negative tropes about work ethic, etc.

[encyclopedism]

> Who says you need a boss or other human coworkers?

I didn't. However most people on here and around the world are employed I am merely pointing out that your employer dictates so much of what you do.

> Start your own consultancy.

Great, but realise then that you are talking about creating a business. Which is a whole other field altogether. You can have a business in software, or in legal, or mining etc. But that's a different conversation. It's about business and not about software or LLM's.

[baq]

The customer can absolutely tell the difference between a Caterpillar digger and a dude in it vs 100 dudes with shovels

[encyclopedism]

Attempting to illustrate why your analogy is flawed and explain myself a little better I would add that there are quantitive things and qualitative things. If the object was to remove some volume of earth (quantitive) then whether it is moved by a Caterpillar or by 100 men with shovels does not matter.

If you're 'no longer looking at the code' or 'looping everything' then you are implicitly moving towards a more quantitive outlook of software development. How it does so becomes less and less meaningful and why would you even care?

[dnemmers]

Disagree.

The 'washing machine' problem, was solved decades ago.

Improvements in detergent allows basically anything to be washed with cold water.

Added 'features' from late model machines do very little to improve the experience, and instead drive up purchase price, and decrease lifespan.

It's weird that so many pro-LLM arguments rely on bad analogies of other technologies that aren't perfect, and say, "We're not perfect either. That stuff is embedded in society, so you should do that for us too!"

[j1elo]

I think it's not as bad of an analogy. Where you dedicated time and perfectionism for each piece of clothing (line of code), now you push a button and get them all done for you.

You mention improvements on how good clothes are washed for you, after decades of technical progress. Oitside of the analogy, we are literally living through that, but in 10x speed on a day to day basis regarding how well AI writes code.

[DanielHB]

It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.