[gherkinnn]

> People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software.

Speak for yourself, OP. I have my gripes with LLMs but they absolutely can and will help me create and understand the code I write.

> At least, they value it far less than the end result.

This does not appear to apply to OP at all, but plenty of programmers who like code for the sake of code create more problems than they solve.

In summary, LLMs amplify. The bad gets worse and the good gets better.

[dgacmu]

The thing that gets me is the assumption that we're not complex creatures who might each value different things at different times and in different contexts.

As for me, sometimes I code because I want something to do a specific thing, and I honestly couldn't be bothered to care how it happens.

Sometimes I code because I want something to work a very specific way or to learn how to make something work better, and I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep.

Sometimes the creative expression is in the 'what' - one of my little startup tasks these days is experimenting with UI designs for helping a human get a task done as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it's in the 'how' - implementing the backend to that thing to be ridiculously fast and efficient. Sometimes it's both and sometimes it's neither!

A beautiful thing about code is that it can be a tool and it can be an expressive medium that scratches our urge to create and dive into things, or it can be both at the same time. Code is the most flexible substance on earth, for good and for creating incredible messes.

[PaulHoule]

I'll argue the the LLM can be a great ally when "I want to have my brain so deep in a chunk of code I can see it in my sleep" because it can help you see the whole picture.

[simonw]

Right - it's not that I don't value "the act of creating & understanding the software" - that's the part I care about and enjoy the most.

The thing I don't value is typing out all of that code myself.

[nobleach]

I think I can get on board with this view. In the earlier LLM days, I was working on a project that had me building models of different CSV's we'd receive from clients. I needed to build classes that represented all the fields. I asked AI to do it for me and I was very pleased with the results. It saved me an hour-long slog of copying the header rows, pasting into a class, ensuring that everything was camel-cased, etc. But the key thing here is that that work was never going to be the "hard part". That was the slog. The real dopamine hit was from solving the actual problem at hand - parsing many different variants of a file, and unifying the output in a homogenous way.

Now, if I had just said, "Dear Claude, make it so I can read files from any client and figure out how to represent the results in the same way, no matter what the input is". I can agree, I _might_ be stepping into "you're not gonna understand the software"-land. That's where responsibility comes into play. Reading the code that's produced is vital. I however, am still not at the point where I'm giivng feature work to LLMs. I make a plan for what I want to do, and give the mundane stuff to the AI.

[horsawlarway]

Just to poke at this a bit -

Isn't this a bit like saying you love storytelling, but you don't value actually speaking the words?

Because this feels very close to skating across a line where you don't actually understand or value the real medium.

Basically - the architectural equivalent of this leads to things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse

Where the architects are divorced from the actual construction, and the end result is genuinely terrible.

[lifeisoverforme]

I think you’re in the pleading stage. The AI tools this year will do the whole process without you. Reading the code will be a luxury for little benefit.