I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.
My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.
And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.
Yes. There is also reason to believe that the ecosystem is on the path to migrating to one where human developers are an afterthought at best. In the current phase we have lots of more stuff in markdown and other human readable formats and programming languages for sure but there’s little reason to believe that they will stay that way as humans get further from the code in general and the primary consumers and producers are AI. It would be strange if it remains optimized for English-speaking humans for very long.
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit because we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-participating, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.
My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-participating, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
The dumbest people always win temporarily.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...
There's been a huge overlap the whole time.