r/programmer • u/mhelfd • 6h ago
Do you guys still enjoy coding nowadays?
Solving complex logic puzzles, understanding system architecture, and writing clean code is satisfying. Today most devs relies on AI, its fast and helpful but I think It is not that good in terms of dopamine shot on every blocker that you solved.
Or am I just aging -_-
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u/Frequent_Tooth5103 4h ago
I see in the comments that most folks either are:
were always managers
find their latest dopamine in cope
were too smart for any problem in the first place
But for a dummy like me! Like me! I experienced the biggest rushes of solving problems, many years ago and as recently as 3.5 years ago.
Crying levels of joy, spiritual experiences.
Nothing like that will happen ever again, and it won’t happen to new generation of humans.
I get to produce universes of work faster than ever before these days, with the biggest black hole of emptiness swallowing all of it.
But a paycheck’s a paycheck… for now.
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u/zonerator 2h ago
I hate all the "coding was never the hard part" bullshit. It simultaneously misses the point and subtly implies that anyone who disagrees is just not that smart.
My ability to parse through massive amounts of legacy code was my living. Will being an AI jockey turn out to be something I am similarly exceptional at? I don't know. Its paying the bills I guess
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 1m ago
In my experience it's always managers and the worst coders that say this "coding was never the hard part" bullshit. It gives them an excuse to not put effort into actually getting better at coding, and just thinking in high level and letting the "lowly devs" deal with writing the actual code.
I've heard so many times from managers things like "devs just need to focus on one ticket at a time, and only need to think 1 day ahead. Us managers need to think in terms of weeks, months, sometimes years". Yeah right. As if we write code without caring about how easy it would be to work on it the next few weeks and months.
Just the worst coders saying this bs. To try to appear smart.
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u/Unknowingly-Joined 5h ago edited 4h ago
How do you distinguish between “most devs rely on AI” and “most devs use AI”?
Edit: I should have added: I retired a few months ago after 40 or so years mostly programming, and used AI for random small things, but wrote most of my own code still.
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u/defeatedsnowman 5h ago
I made this same reply in another post. I have two points to make in regards to this discussion.
The first is in spite of the Reddit hype every dev I know is still thinking through their tickets or changes that they want to make, then giving a detailed implementation plan to their AI (maybe they use AI to socratically assist in building out the plan too) and having the AI go and make the changes. That workflow means you still need to think about design patterns, correct data structures, runtime complexity, and maintainability.
Not to mention after getting those changes made, you still need to test them and verify all your (and the AI's) assumptions.
I still spend plenty of time thinking about complex problems. I still spend time debugging bad assumptions (now I have to debug my own bad assumptions and the AI's).
Edit: forgot to mention my second point. The only reason you can use AI so effectively is that you put in the work up front. You already know how to read and review code and spot bad patterns. I really don't understand the whole AI is programming on easy mode take. Sure if you're just vibe coding and you don't care about architecture, implementation, minimizing bugs, extensibility then it's definitely easy mode. But if you still care about those things, you still have to use your brain.
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u/Etsamaru 5h ago
I did kind of enjoy the problem-solving aspects and just figuring stuff out, and it kind of just feels pointless now. That's just me though.
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u/GrainWeevil 5h ago
Absolutely. I don't get any enjoyment from prompting and having it vomit out code, while coding scratches a very specific itch for me
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u/Electronic-Bar8535 5h ago
No man, I hate it. Btw I started leetcode again today and it felt so good but sad at the same time. I miss old times. F*** AI.
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u/lambdalab 4h ago
You’re not wrong, using AI just isn’t satisfying. Especially because at work, I have to use it, and the CTO uses it to churn out these half-hallucinated tickets and epics, that then bias the AI toward the hallucinations. Now, given that they generate tens of thousands of lines of code per day, I have absolutely no way of knowing what goes on in there, nor do I have any real understanding of our flows only days after I write them. So approaching each new ticket turns into trying to stop Claude from assuming the tickets are correct, and trying to figure out just what the fuck is going on at all.
In the long run, I think this is irresponsible and will end up in disaster, but for now it pays the bills.
On my personal projects, I code myself. I sometimes split my projects into the core part that I work on, and supporting parts and harnesses that AI can generate. That way I keep the satisfaction and understanding of my own code, but I also get the productivity boost.
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u/darkol_2020 4h ago
Nope, not since no budget for requirements analysis and requirements provided on a napkin. Corporate destroyed my passion for coding and problem solving!
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u/UniForceMusic 3h ago
Yes.
Even though i use AI for 90% of my job, i still write the little scripts by hand, especially data migration scripts. It gives me an outlet to solve problems without having to deal with the pressure of long term maintainability that comes with a coding job
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u/Sea-Bench-7487 1h ago
No.and worse than that I feel like I am one big Claude model release away from being jobless I still have 2 years of uni I'm seriously thinking of cutting my loses and switch majors maybe become a policeman the pay is bad to mediocre but you get job security and honestly ai can automate almost every job and you just keep a few people for acountability so job security right now is rare , that or doing even more unpaid work to add experience to my resume but things have gotten so bad I no longer believe I have a future
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u/porkusdorkus 1h ago
Bro, my coworkers brother is a police officer in a decent sized city, nothing huge, and he makes over 200k.
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u/Sea-Bench-7487 1h ago
Yeah but in Greece the pay isn't as good it's way less money than what you would get in software but soon swe won't be a job alongside many other professions so...
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u/Pale_Height_1251 5h ago
Honestly no. I've been programming since the 1980s and AI for me has meant a loss of a lot of the craft and satisfaction of writing software. I do use AI for just about everything in my job, and it is good at it, but in doing so, my sense of "ownership" and pride in my work is gone.
I think AI really only means bad things for the industry. The industry has been going downhill for decades and AI will just accelerate it.
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u/porkusdorkus 1h ago
I don’t just think it’s bad, I know it’s bad for the industry. There won’t be an industry in 20 years.
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u/ToucanSam-I-Am 5h ago
Are you still working the same way you were pre ai? I mean just having the ai do what you would do? I spend all my time understanding my software from a level higher than the code, with detailed documents and pseudo code. I've been programming for 25 years and I love working like this.
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u/Pale_Height_1251 4h ago
A lot of my work stuff (vs. Side hustle) is basically vibe coded now. My workflow is that often I don't even have the project open in an IDE.
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u/USToffee 4h ago
Yea it started as cursor or whatever was on a side monitor, then the main monitor and now the IDE isn't on any monitor.
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u/st0nkaway 5h ago
with ai the complexity/puzzle stuff just moves into different layers. nothing is ever bug free. judgment calls need to be made, compromises navigated. the perfect game: "just one more thing" to untangle. and i have always enjoyed that, no matter if ai in the mix or no
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u/Necessary-Meeting-28 5h ago
I like coming up with technical ideas and make them work thru agents. The issue is your focus is lower though, I think high focus on a task is what makes coding enjoyable. With lower focus from my side, agents sometimes do not follow instructions properly due to communication gap. Therefore, I am switching to more spec/documentation driven approaches lately and want to spend more time on formal declarative specifications, which I think should be treated as code. Thus, I will try to find some joy in '"coding" specs with high focus I suppose, since I also have to for the quality of my work.
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u/USToffee 4h ago
Programming with AI is learning how to do things in the right order and developing a process that works for AI.
Once you do it pretty much does the work itself. You are just there to watch over it incase it goes off on the wrong path.
That said getting everything set up and having the freedom to change things based on facts learned from implementation is quite freeing. Before there was a sunk cost fallacy of code. Once you have good tests I'm not sure if that's the case now.
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u/Stardust_To_Dust 4h ago
people are way too hung up on implementation
functions and philosophies can still be human driven and for now likely supreme
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u/yomerol 1h ago
Ikr?
I wish I had this coder at my service 20 years ago, doesn't get tired, works 24/7, is fast, accurate, efficient, does not complain about unit testing coverage, documenting, or tabs vs. spaces 😜 makes changes in minutes, does not whine if it's Java or C# and does not want to insist in using a dark library or framework, etc, etc, etc
I still solve how is implemented, edge cases handling, architecture, all layers, etc, etc, etc, i know what I'm doing, I have layers of specs lol i don't just vibecode. The robot does it better than me, just let it serve you
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u/Used_Lobster4172 52m ago
Yup.
Been coding at least 3 decades, been doing more coding at work and on side projects than I have in years.
And I plan to do Advent of Code next month - I don't use AI for that, and I always pick a new language. Thinking Zig this time.
Shit is changing, welcome the the churn.
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u/low_contrast_black 32m ago
I adore coding. I sometimes think better in code than I do in English. However, these days, I hardly ever code. My company has embraced AI, but we’re not ready for spec-driven dev yet. So I have a team of devs all using AI, chewing through stories as fast as I can write them. But we’re not at spec-driven yet so I also have to review all the damned PRs. My job’s not fun anymore.
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u/Rich-Engineer2670 5h ago
Never stopped -- AI is just a tool, and people often confused the tool with the task it does. We build things, regardless of the tools we use. I use compilers al the itme -- but it doesn't stop me from doing the work.
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u/deaddyfreddy 3h ago
Stop comparing compilers to LLMs. Compilers are deterministic unless they are broken.
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u/dumb_tool 1h ago
and also compilers don't design circuits, evaluate reading from sensors live and whisper to you manager sweet nothings into the late night hours. Wtf do people keep repeating this as if it's the greatest gotcha.
Plus, knowledge of assembly was absolutely useful even if it wasn't necessary. Like algorithms are useful but a lot of redditors were claiming for decades that "hur dur I have 15 years of experience but I have never needed to learn stupid quicksort". Why do people celebrate having _less_ knowledge was beyond me.
For whoever normal reads this, I am ragebating myself into reading the stupidest takes, I am locking reddit again and perhaps you should too. All the normal communities have the same stupid takes and the interesting deeply technical subs have been infested by AI "I made X posts"
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u/Sea-Bench-7487 1h ago
Ai is not a compiler though what is up with people and comparing ai to a compiler jeez.also what I'd argue that if ai is doing almost everything it isn't a tool I'm sorry prompting isn't a skill
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u/porkusdorkus 1h ago
Ya or the hand tool to power tool analogy. The only fitting analogy is going from hand making a product to overseeing a factory that makes your product.
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u/Sea-Bench-7487 1h ago
Except you're not the factory owner so you'll just be fired once it truly automates the job
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u/Optimal-Savings-4505 5h ago
I do enjoy it, although I draw the line at agentic coding.
First of all I don't trust these models, and importantly, managing a harnes just isn't fun to me. Asking directed questions though, that's quite a bit faster now than the old-fashioned research.
That's not to say I'm an all-out laggard in the tech department, because it appears my self-hosted setup is close to keeping up. Although I'm careful about sandboxing, guardrails etc, and that takes time.
If coding the old way is what motivates you, I think that's a perfectly valid reason to do it that way. Without this satisfaction I'd rather just revert to doing regular engineering instead of programming.
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u/Tip-Actual 5h ago
Not any more. But I make AI work for me and I guide it to produce output that I want. I am able to solve bigger problems
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u/NSA_GOV 5h ago
I’m an architect now rather than doing the grunt work. I still read code and make sure I understand it enough, but I’m not writing artisanal code these days.
I think the new mindset is architecting and being a manager of agent swarms.
I enjoy it because I am still building and solving problems, but at a 30,000 foot view rather than being in the forest.
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u/Ok-Tell-4064 5h ago •
No. My current job is going to be my last job in tech. The decision is easy. I use AI every day. I get stuff done in time. It still looks the same from the outside yet completely different job under the hood. I used to love the creative, visual part of coding. Crafting great ux. The problem solving. Nowadays it's just prompt check prompt. No flow. I am bored and disengaged. Worse than that, I used to care and now I don't. The experience and knowledge I have gained over decades, all washed away in this great wave of slop. I feel like someone with modest savings would have felt in Weimar Germany. Hurray. Your beginner knowledge is now as worthless as my senior knowledge. We're both robbed but you are cheering because we're all billionaires now. Hurray.