[furyofantares]

I love everything about coding. I love architecting a system, and I love tending all the little details. I love to look at the system as a whole or a block of code in isolation and find nothing I want to change, and take pride in all of it. I also love making products.

LLM-agents have made making products, especially small ones, a lot easier, but sacrifice much of the crafting of details and, if the project is small enough, the architecture. I've certainly enjoyed using them a lot over the last year and a half, but I've come to really miss fully wrapping my head around a problem, having intimate knowledge of the details of the system, and taking pride in every little detail.

[xaviervn]

Me too, and I'm glad to see that this point keeps being brought up. I noticed that what shapes my satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) about working with AI depends on whether have understanding of what's being built or not.

For a prototype, it's pretty amazing to generate a working app with one or two prompts. But when I get serious about it, it becomes such a chore. The little papercuts start adding up, I lose speed as I deal with them, and the inner workings of the app becomes a foreign entity to me.

It's counterintuitive, but what's helping me enjoy coding is actually going slower with AI. I found out that my productivity gains are not on building faster, but learning faster and in a very targeted way.