[lmorchard]

What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you.

[chung8123]

For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI.

[mbirth]

The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something. If you ask an LLM to do it for you, you’re none the wiser.

[jimbokun]

The difference is whether or not you find computers interesting and enjoy understanding how they work.

For the people who just want to solve some problem unrelated to computers but require a computer for some part of the task, yes AI would be more “fun”.

[phil21]

I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc.

Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot.

I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the result I desire. Maybe that’s creating a service for friends to use, maybe it’s a personal IT project, maybe it’s having commercial quality WiFi at home everyone is amazed at when they visit, etc. Sometimes - even often - it’s the understanding that leads to pride in craftsmanship.

But programming itself is just a chore for me to get done in service of whatever final outcome I’m attempting to achieve. Could be delivering bits on the internet for work, or automating OS installs to look at the 50 racks of servers humming away with cable porn level work done in the cabinets.

I never enjoyed messing around with HTML at that much in the 90s. But I was motivated to learn it just enough to achieve the cool ideas I could come up with as a teenager and share them with my friends.

I can appreciate clean maintainable code, which is the only real reason LLMs don’t scratch the itch as much as you’d expect for someone like me.

[ben_w]

> The difference is whether or not you find computers interesting and enjoy understanding how they work.

I'm a stereotypical nerd, into learning for its own sake.

I can explain computers from the quantum mechanics of band gaps in semiconductors up to fudging objects into C and the basics of operating systems with pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, and copy-on-write as they were c. 2004.

Further up the stack it gets fuzzy (not that even these foundations are not; "basics" of OSes, I couldn't write one); e.g. SwiftUI is basically a magic box, and I find it a pain to work with as a result.

LLM output is easier to understand than SwiftUI, even if the LLM itself has much weirder things going on inside.