[abcde666777]

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part.

Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing.

'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'

'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.'

Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.

[capyba]

Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!

[jatora]

I dont really understand how this is possible. I've built some very large applications, and even a full LLM data curation,tokenizer, pretrain, posttrain SFT/DPO pipeline with LLM's and it most certainly took far less time than if i had done it manually. Sure it isnt all optimal...but it most certainly isnt subpar, and it is fully functional

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

[sowbug]

That is what's hard about transitioning from coder to lead. A good coder makes full use of a single thread of execution. A good lead effectively handles the coordination of multiple threads. Different skills.

An LLM coding assistant today is an erratic junior team member, but its destructive potential is nowhere near some of the junior human engineers I've worked with. So it's worth building the skills and processes to work with them productively. Today, Claude is a singular thing. In six months or a year, it'll be ten or a hundred threads working concurrently on dozens of parts of your project. Either you'll be comfortable coordinating them, or you'll nope out of there and remain an effective but solitary human coder.

[karmasimida]

Then you are using it the wrong way

Driving is a skill that needs to be learnt, same with working with agents.

[andoando]

Are you giving it huge todos in one prompt or working modularly?

Claude set up account creation / login with SSO login, OTP and email notifications in like 5 mins and told me exactly what to do on the provider side. Theres no way that wouldn't have taken me few hours to figure out

There is no way its not faster at a large breadth of the work, unless youre maybe a fanatic with reviewing and nitpicking every line of code to the extreme

[wtetzner]

> I would have finished the project in the same amount of time

Probably less time, because you understood the details better.

[verdverm]

Have you added agents.md files?

You have to do more than prompts to get the more impressive results

[throwaw12]

skill issue.

sorry for being blunt, but if you have tried once, twice and came to this conclusion, it is definitely a skill issue, I never got comfortable by writing 3 lines of Java, Python or Go or any other language, it took me hundreds of hours spent doing non-sense, failing miserably and finding out that I was building things which already exists in std lib.

[wtetzner]

> It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'.

I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc.

In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding?

Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.

[falkensmaize]

What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.

[geetee]

Writing the code is where I discover the complexity I missed while planning. I don't truly understand my creation until I've gone through a few iterations of this. Maybe I'm just bad at planning.

[thwarted]

At first I thought you were referring to the debates over using vim or using emacs, but I think you mean to refer to the discussions about learning to use/switching to powerful editors like vim or emacs. If you learn and use a sharp, powerful editor and learn to type fast, the "burden" of editing and typing goes away.

[simonw]

Have you really never found writing code painful?

CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change?

I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up.

I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent.

These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

[sevensor]

What you’ve described is very much not writing code though. It’s the tedious and unpleasant outcome of having a flaky or under resourced CI setup or pulling in a misbehaving dependency. Neither of those is typing code per se. I don’t think it’s fair to conflate that kind of problem with the creative work involved in implementation itself.

“Writing code is boring and tedious” says more about the speaker than it does about programming.

[g947o]

Not everyone thinks this way. For sure, I don't enjoy every repetitive/tedious tasks or having to put out fires under time pressure, but I happen to be someone who enjoys solving problems. Many times, I helped others find and understand the root causes of bugs after they spend hours cluelessly debugging. (And often LLMs are completely lost as well, provide terrible suggestions or fixes) In an extreme case, I helped fix a bug an entire team of people (of several people) failed to address. And I always learn from such experiences, try to come up with solutions that would prevent it from happening in the first place, and think through the whole thing to be even more efficient at Debugging.

The point is that, LLMs can't always do all of this, they don't necessarily help you think about the root causes or address the human part of the causes, they don't help you build technical skills that you can use in the future. They fix it and it's done (possibly with a terrible, short time solution), unless the human wants to dive deep. For sure this happens all the time, in fact probably more than not, but LLMs are not going to help the situation.

[enraged_camel]

Incidentally, I've been using AI to deal with the weird bugs, cryptic errors and generally horrendous complexities of a framework we've been using at work (Elixir's Ash). It's really nice to no longer have to read badly organized docs, search the Internet for similar problems and ask around in the developers' Slack/Discord.

[verdverm]

You have a solution, I've seen them recommend some pretty terrible bug fixes, especially in the ci realm because they get rather clueless as the perspective gets higher or broader

[throwaw12]

> I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

Same experience, I don't know why people keep saying code was easy part, sure, only when you are writing a boilerplate which is easy and expectations are clear.

I agree code is easier than some other parts, but not the easiest, industry employed millions of us, to write that easy thing.

When working on large codebases or building something in the flow, I just don't want to read all the OAuth2 scopes Google requires me to obtain, my experience was never: "now I will integrate Gmail, let me do gmail.FetchEmails(), cool it works, on to the next thing"

[everforward]

I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code.

I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should.

I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file.

It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.

[jesse_dot_id]

People are different. Some are painters and some are sculptors. Andy Warhol was a master draftsman but he didn't get famous off of his drawings. He got famous off of screen printing other people's art that he often didn't own. He just pioneered the technique and because it was new, people got excited, and today he's widely considered to be a generational artistic genius.

I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.

If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process.

I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.

[thwarted]

I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.

If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.

[jarjoura]

Your comment is spot on, but the nuance people who are still new to these LLMs don't yet see is the real reason "he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead."

1. That prompt is always a slot machine. It's never 100% deterministic and that's why we haven't seen an explosion of claude skills. When it works for you, and it's magical, everyone is wowed. However, there is a set of users who then bang their head, wondering why their identical attempt is garbage compared to their coworker. "It must be a skills issue." No, it's just the LLM being an LLM.

2. Coding agents are hyper localized and refuse to consider the larger project when it solves something. So you end up with these "paper cuts" of duplicated functions or classes that do one thing different. Now the LLM in future runs has to decide which of these classes or functions to use and you end up with two competing implementations. Future you will bang your head trying to figure out how to combine them.

3. The "voice" of the code it outputs is trained on public repositories so if your internal codebase is doing something unique, the LLM will consistently pick the voice it's trained on, forcing you to rewrite behind it to match your internal code.

4. It has no chill. If I set any "important" rules in the prompt then it sometimes adheres to it at the expense of doing the "right" thing in its changes. Or it completely ignores it and does its own thing, when it would have been the perfect time to follow the rule. This is to your point that, if I had just written the code myself, it would have been less words than any "perfect" prompt it would have taken to get the same code change.

[kmac_]

Current models won't write anything new, they are "just" great at matching, qualifying, and copying patterns. They bring a lot of value right now, but there is no creativity.

[throwaw12]

95% of the industry wasn't creating creative value, it was repetitive.

* auth + RBAC, known problem, just needs integration

* 3rd party integration, they have API, known problem, just needs integration

* make webpage responsive, millions of CSS lines

* even video gaming, most engines are already written, just add your character and call couple of APIs to move them in the 3D space

[Aperocky]

Tolkien's book is an art, programs are supposed to do something.

Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want.

> Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'

Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.

[alainrk]

I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?

[estimator7292]

If you're gonna take this track, at least be honest with yourself. Does your boss get more value out of you? You aren't going to get a kickback from being more productive, but your boss sure will.

[milowata]

I had this moment recently with implementing facebook oauth. I don’t need to spend mental cycles figuring that out, doing the back and forth with their API, pulling my hair out at their docs, etc. I just want it to work and build my app. AI just did that part for me and could move on.

[marginalia_nu]

I honestly think the stuff AI is really good at is the stuff around the programming that keeps you from the actual programming.

Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single release does things differently and no advice stays valid for more than 25 minutes.

It's a comically torturous DevEx. You can literally spend days trying to get your code to compile again, and not a second of that time will be put toward anything productive. Sheer frustration. Just tears. Mad laughter. Rocking back and forth.

"Hey Claude, I've upgraded to this week's Gradle and now I'm getting this error I wasn't getting with last week's version, what could be going wrong?" makes all that go away in 10 minutes.

[wtetzner]

I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.

[dkersten]

“ What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.”

Yeah, this was always the easy part.

[bilekas]

Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out.

When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to see a happy path draw a shadow of s solution, iterate over your plans and then put some real "code"/foundation in place.

It's a beautiful process. Starting out I used to just jump into s project deep with the code first and hit that workaround button one too many times and it's far more expensive, we all know that.

[kaydub]

So waterfall sdlc...

[bdcravens]

I don't find writing code painful, but I do find it tedious. The amount of time wasted on boilerplate keeps me from getting to the good stuff. LLMs let me speed run through all of that.

To take it back to your example, let's imagine Tolkien is spending a ton of time on setting up his typewriter, making sure he had his correction tape handy, verifying his spelling and correcting mistakes, ensuring his tab stops were setup to his writing standard, checking for punctuation marks, etc. Now imagine eliminating all that crap so he can focus on the artistic nature of the dialogue.

[mycall]

Isn't that what Tolkien did in his head? Write something, learn what he liked/didn't like then revise the words? Rinse/repeat. Same process here.

[irishcoffee]

If Tolkien had not lived an entire life, fought in a war, been buddies with other authors, and also been a decent writer, the story doesn’t exist. And an LLM won’t come up with it.

An LLM isn’t coming up with the eye of Sauron, or the entire backstory of the ring, or gollum, etc etc

The LLM can’t know Tolkien had a whole universe built in his head that he worked for decades to get on to paper.

I’m so tired of this whole “an LLM just does what humans already do!” And then conflating that with “fuck all this LLM slop!”

[karel-3d]

Sometimes you are not writing Lord of the Rings.

Sometimes you are writing a marketing copy for a new Nissan that's basically the same as last year Nissan, yet you need to sell it somehow. Nobody will REALLY read it more than 2 seconds and your words will be immediately forgotten. Maybe some AI is good then.

[g947o]

Copy & paste will do the job as well. Just remember to update the year number with a tool we have had for decades named "find/replace". Since nobody reads it, nobody knows it's almost the same thing, and there is no chance you get fired because LLM made things up that you didn't review/catch.

[bufordtwain]

I didn't fully realize how much pain there was until I started delegating the coding to AI. It's very freeing. Unfortunately I think this will soon lead to mass layoffs.

[n4r9]

Pain can mean tedium rather than intellectual challenge.

[wtetzner]

I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.

[franze]

Claude Opus 4.6:

“He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.

[Calavar]

Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are, what their respective character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.

[dmbche]

Do you find this interesting to make and read?

[echelon]

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.

Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?

If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.

I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.

I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.

God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.

The future is exciting.

Bring it.

[abcde666777]

I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints.

I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.

What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.

Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.

[wtetzner]

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation.

> The future is exciting.

Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.

[cruffle_duffle]

> If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

To go off the deep end… I actually think this LLM assistant stuff is a precondition to space exploration. I can see the need for a offline compressed corpus of all human knowledge that can do tasks and augment the humans aboard the ship. You’ll need it because the latency back to earth is a killer even for a “simple” interplanetary trip to mars—that is 4 to 24 minutes round trip! Hell even the moon has enough latency to be annoying.

Granted right now the hardware requirements and rapid evolution make it infeasible to really “install it” on some beefcake system but I’m almost positive the general form of moores law will kick in and we’ll have SOTA models on our phones in no time. These things will be pervasive and we will rely on them heavily while out in space and on other planets for every conceivable random task.

They’ll have to function reliably offline (no web search) which means they probably need to be absolutely massive models. We’ll have to find ways to selectively compress knowledge. For example we might allocate more of the model weights to STEM topics and perhaps less to, I dunno, the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek gods or the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. But perhaps not, because who knows—-maybe a deep familiarity with Bio-Dome is what saves the colony on Kepler-452b

[objclxt]

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement

I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.

[creata]

> I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games.

Then make them. What's stopping you?

[estimator7292]

Burn the planet to the ground because your life is boring. Extremely mature stance you've got there

[plagiarist]

Oh, no, you're imagining the wrong subgenre of sci-fi. These robots are actually owned and operated by billionaires.