r/programming • u/chriskiehl • 9d ago
It's still OK to enjoy programming
https://chriskiehl.com/article/it-is-still-ok-to-enjoy-programming304
u/sweetno 9d ago
Guys, this guy is suspicious. They have time for weekend programming.
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u/topological_rabbit 9d ago
Hell, I even chip away at a personal project in the free hour I have before I have to go to work. Progress may be slow, but it's mine and it's fun.
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u/soupgasm 8d ago
Before your work? When do you find time for that? Genuinely curious
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u/topological_rabbit 8d ago
I don't get the confusion. After I get up and go through my morning routine, I'll have anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour before I have to leave for work.
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u/max123246 9d ago
Yeah this has been my issue. After spending a week slopping out ai code, the last thing I want to do is go home and program some more, even if it's by hand. It's ruined the passion I had for the field by proxy
To be honest this was the case even before ai code because my company never valued quality or devx
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u/RandomHabit89 9d ago
This is my hardest part. I have so many passion projects I want to get to, but with this being my career, I usually want to rest when I'm home and not get back on the computer. One of my coworkers just keeps working for lower wage after hours... I don't get it this company is draining my soul as is I can't imagine giving them even more time
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u/OffbeatDrizzle 9d ago
swings and roundabouts. having a digital slave has reignited my passion. I'm more productive and motivated than ever
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u/deathhead_68 8d ago
Its much better for the kind of boring programming you can do but is just tedious. But I really prefer coming up with fun and clever code myself - also means I understand things a little better as my mental model is stronger as writer than a reader
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u/zappellin 9d ago
According to my engineering manager, no
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u/unrealz19 9d ago
Right, every time I mention I actually enjoy programming, their response is like: “well I just enjoy the finished product”… epic sigh
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u/grady_vuckovic 8d ago edited 7d ago
"I don't like climbing mountains I just like the view from the top of them."
"I don't like raising children, I prefer going to university graduation days and celebrating someone else's child finishing a degree."
"All this time you're spending making a painting feels wasteful, wait here a moment, I'll just use a digital camera and take a photo for you instead."
"Placing those individual pieces of pancake in your mouth and chewing them is less efficient than my IV drip."
*pop* "- Well, hello mother, I am born, in the interest of efficiency can you please put me straight into a coffin?"
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u/Adventurous-Hunter98 9d ago
Your manager probably doesnt know anything about engineering
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u/LegendarySoda 9d ago
His wngineering manager probably doesn't want him to enjoy work.
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u/zappellin 9d ago
Well considering I'm leaving software engineering and going to train myself to do something else, you guys are spot on
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u/grady_vuckovic 9d ago
I'll be honest. I didn't really care if it was or not. I've had people looking at me strange my entire life when I say shit like 'I'm gonna spend my weekend writing a raytracer in assembly' or whatever and they ask why and I say 'For fun'. Folks always looked at me like I said I'm planning to spend my weekend sticking sewing needles under my fingernails or bath in vinegar after running through a field of thorny rose bushes.
So nothing has really changed for me in that regard.
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u/chuckknucka 8d ago
Any definition of "fun" that includes writing assembly by hand is a bizarre one. That ranks below sitting for hours in a big wet diaper on the fun scale. You do you, but don't act like folks are wrong to have a confused reaction to that.
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u/grady_vuckovic 8d ago
Yeah that's a good example of the kind of reaction I don't really pay attention to any more.
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u/in_need_of_oats 9d ago
I'm jealous of anyone who has the motivation to hand code after 40 hours of what the job has turned in to
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u/grady_vuckovic 8d ago
I'm kinda the reverse. I couldn't handle that 40 hours of what the job has turned into without at least a little bit of time each week still writing some code by hand to feel like I'm still in touch with the reasons why I wanted to make software in the first place.
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u/BogdanPradatu 9d ago
It's still ok to do woodworking by hand, with basic tools, yet very few people earn their living like this.
It's still ok to sew by hand, yet very few people earn their living like this.
It's still ok to hand build whatever the industry builds in factories, on assembly lines, yet very few people earn their living like that.
It's still ok to fish with a cane rod, but very few... I'm gonna go with none on this one. No one is eaening their living like that.
And so on and so forth. It's not a problem of if we can still do it, but can we still get paid to do it?
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u/BaNyaaNyaa 9d ago
There's a bit more to woodworking than cutting wood and nailing it together. You have to know how to shape your pieces and how they should be attached together to make your final product sturdy enough and esthetically pleasing. And wood is a complex material that's sensitive to temperature and humidity, and when you're building something, you also have to consider the direction of the fiber.
They are still controlling the machine closely. They decide where to make their cuts and holes. The machine just does it with less effort. And even then, the machines might not be appropriate for more delicate work, and woodworkers still need to do some manual work to get to an actual quality product.
Sure, as a moron, I could make a table: I need a big plank and 4 long pieces of woods, I cut everything to the right size, and just drill the plank to each long piece of woods. It will be ugly and probably very fragile though.
The problem that we have when we talk about AI in software development is that we underestimate all the knowledge and control that a SWE needs to make a good software. Fuck, I think the whole hype about AI decimating white collar worker is that we underestimate what someone's work require. It doesn't mean that it's useless, but that we still need to be smart about how we use it.
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u/Blecki 9d ago
It's the doorman fallacy. The people pushing this think programming is just typing.
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u/AeroNotix 8d ago edited 8d ago
And the people with their heads in the sand try to pretend that AI is just automating away the typing.
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u/mightshade 8d ago
Not all of them, but the "I don't miss the typing" people do exist. Got some funny replies to "but aren't you typing prompts now instead?"
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u/lurco_purgo 9d ago
Yes, you can. The world is much larger and more varied than what LinkedIn, Reddit or other influencer-infested places would make you think. There are export controlled industries, teams where the leaders don't trust AI, places where the demand for the developer output has not increased dramatically for all sorts of reasons or simply projects that require utmost precision where the size of the code output is of no concern to the business side (which should be the case everywhere of course).
In general people and businesses move at their own pace - it's easy to forget that, when we're hyper focused on a small subset of the industry. It's the reason so much of modern web still runs on PHP and Wordpress. I'm not denying the general trend for the future of the industry, but if you think every dev team in the world is currently working by using hunderds of agents using ralph loops, spec driven development or whatever else is currently being peddled by LinkedIn frauds and marketers than fallen prey to their scare tactics.
I personally work in a company that's more of a hardware company and even though our marketing side prattles about AI and we have some limited budget for GitHub Copilot, there's plenty of project with strict bans on using AI and the expectation of our leadership is that we treat its output with a lot of skepticism (that's not accounting for the fact that my monthly budget goes puff in a week easily).
Couldn't be happier! I know this won't last forever, but I'm certain there's plenty of places that will still only accept hand-written code a decade from now (unless something truly transfomative happens to our global society because of LLMs, but I'm still not sold on this happening).
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u/dyingpie1 9d ago
Can I work at your company? I desperately want to work somewhere like this.
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u/lurco_purgo 9d ago
Seriously, check out industries with export controlled technology such as defense, space, telecomunication, encryption, avionics, biotechnology etc.
Companies with bigger and more advanced portfolio than just SaaS web applications.
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u/Iggyhopper 9d ago
It's a culmination of the AI movement and also the general economy being a crapshoot right now.
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u/mpyne 9d ago
It's not a problem of if we can still do it, but can we still get paid to do it?
We've had people programming without being paid for it for far longer than people being paid to do it. It's worthwhile and fulfilling.
But if your focus is just on punching in, working, punching out and getting paid, then yeah you may have to keep up with the times or get left behind, just as with every field of endeavor that's ever existed.
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u/EveryQuantityEver 9d ago
That's not my focus, but I still want to be able to pay my bills and support my family by doing it.
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u/mpyne 9d ago
Well, we’ve put quite a few humans in the same situation since the machine computer was invented, maybe some of them can give us advice for how to adapt?
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u/OffbeatDrizzle 9d ago
funny how this gets downvoted. people on reddit complaining about the advancement of technology that literally allows them to be here complaining in the first place. we'd all be in the fields wondering where our next meal was coming from, if it weren't for advancing tech (e.g. the invention of tractors). why aren't we all complaining about our potato picking jobs? smh
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u/Nopium-2028 9d ago
We've had people programming without being paid for it for far longer than people being paid to do it.
I think this is objectively false. Anyone who had access to computers/calculators at the beginning was getting paid, or like an entrepreneur trying to sell something. The hobbyist programmer emerged dramatically later.
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u/GregBahm 9d ago
I think, broadly, the anxiety about AI is the same anxiety everyone always feels about all new technology. This is a constant of the universe and it's dumb.
However, I think there's a specific type of programmer, especially specific to reddit, that is maybe right to be anxious.
This programmer doesn't think of themselves as creative. They probably hate agile workflows and think waterfall is like, some form of virtuousness. In their dreams, a PM would slip an immutable spec under their door in the night. They'd transform the spec into code, and then they'd slip the code back under the door a couple years later. Any communication about the code would strictly come in the form of exhaustive bug reports filed by QA.
They might have been pressured by their parents to get a degree in CS. Their aging parents have an even more aged understanding of programming from the 80s. They assumed programming was right for their son because their son was antisocial.
This programmer believe learning is the thing that happens in college, and after you're done with college, you're done learning.
This programmer desperately wants to work from home. They are aggressively uninterested in programming in their free time. This programmer is wracked by imposter syndrome, as all new programmers are, but this programmer deflects the anxiety outward at everyone else instead of just bucking up and learning how to be a real programmer.
AI kills this programmer.
Time also tends to kill this programmer. I've seen a zillion of them wash out of the industry in my 20 years programming. It's always a mystery what becomes of them. I know they're not employed at my company anymore, but their linkedin profile either says #opentowork forever, or lies and says they're still employed at my company forever. Do they move back in with their parents? Do they become waiters? The eternal mystery.
Anyway, whenever I see anxiety on r/programming, I assume it's anxiety coming from these guys. All the competent programmers at work seem to generally love AI.
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u/Number127 9d ago
I don't mind working with AI -- I enjoy it so far -- but I do want to continue to make a decent living, and anxiety about job security is warranted whenever a tool increases productivity.
Sure, maybe an AI boom would create new opportunities and new jobs, but I like the job I have now. I like the company and the people I work with, and it's normal to feel anxious about losing that when there's pretty clear writing on the wall that we can get the same amount of work done with fewer people.
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u/cdb_11 9d ago
They are aggressively uninterested in programming in their free time.
Ah yes, of course. We're all using our free time here on r/programming, reading and talking about programming, because we don't give a shit about programming.
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u/LordoftheSynth 9d ago
They are aggressively uninterested in programming in their free time.
This is one of the most toxic attitudes I've seen in the industry, as if Real Programmers(TM) go home after a 40 or 50 hour week writing code and then spend their weekend writing more code.
Do we expect CPAs to go home and do more accounting on the weekends?
Do we expect mechanics to go home and spend their off days working on cars?
No, we don't.
But with software engineers there's a bunch of people who think that if you don't eat, breathe, and sleep code, you're some sort of hack who is just in it for the money and isn't any good.
Look, if you love programming enough that it's also your main hobby outside of work, more power to you.
There's too many interesting things in the world to see and do for me to work on programming projects 7 days a week. I work on personal projects: I accept that making my career SWE means those projects go slower, offset somewhat by my career having taught me all about what not to do in my personal projects.
I'm not an AI doomer either, mind you, aside from the fact that it's going to mess with junior level employment in a serious way and you only get good seniors by growing good juniors. I have family in school majoring in CS and my advice to them is they have to learn how to use AI effectively as it not going to go away.
The last thing we want in the industry is an environment where you have a shitload of "amateurs" with degrees desperately trying to break in to "the industry" like you see in creative fields like music, film, art, etc. You have to provide a path for inexperienced people to earn a living doing what they trained in. Do you really want the software industry to end up being like Hollywood?
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u/5gpr 9d ago
All the competent programmers at work seem to generally love AI.
They are competent programmers, not economists. LLMs are the death knell of software engineering as a profession. We're already at a point where the project owner - a person who has no engineering degree or engineering experience at all - can implement about 50% of feature requests or bugfixes with Opus 5 and a simple agent loop one of our competent, AI-loving programmers has set up. My company is restructuring and will replace entire departments with what they euphemistically call "top teams", meaning a senior, 2 juniors, and LLMs. As inference gets cheaper and models better, most of us, competent or not, loving AI or not, will be made redundant. Because we literally are.
And as a side-note, the people I know who love working with "AI" don't love programming. They are competent professionals, but in their spare time they don't program.
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u/BogdanPradatu 9d ago
I'm pretty sure sewing by hand or woodworking by hand produces better quality than mass produced items.
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u/deceased_parrot 9d ago
I'm pretty sure sewing by hand or woodworking by hand produces better quality than mass produced items.
Eh, having tried both: there are parts that depend on individual skill, but when it comes to accuracy, it's better to let the machines do it.
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u/hpyfox 9d ago
Woodworking by-hand can have a few inconsistenties compared to a lathe, but allows more intrinsic designs.
Sewing by-hand allows more freedom in how you sew, though with newer consumer sewing machines, you can program them now.
Now with programming.. at least right now, it's better suited to replace the Rubber Ducky's job than the programmers. It can debug just fine, but it can't match a human with design, maintenance, or testing.
Especially economically, while AI-bros and companies say that it's "cheaper and faster" than a human programmer, one month of token usage (with multiple agents) for a company could exceed a salary or multiple of them.
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u/heisian 9d ago
skill varies wildly, and there are things that machines can accomplish that would be very difficult by hand.
that being said, i’m not condoning a total shift of programming skill to the machines. i think young programmers should learn to code by hand with supplemental assistance lest they fail to understand what they’re actually doing.
database architecture, programming concepts (oop, dynamic/typed, concurrency, etc), tooling, i think should all be studied and experimented with intensely before letting a machine do it for you.
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u/trinde 9d ago
At the end of the day the primary purpose of software development is to translate tasks into instructions a computer can understand. Programming languages and humans doing the translating is means to an end.
I've been programming for 20+ years and 15+ commercially. The leading models are getting really really good at producing decent code, to the point where I basically haven't written much code in the last 4-5 months. However I still need to be thinking a lot about the projects.
I had ChatGPT and Claude make a custom specialised 3D modelling app for hobby purposes the other week. It did it in a couple days and it's entirely functional (native, web and android) and the code is pretty readable. I am not vibe coding it, it's taken dozens of back and forth revisions and me telling it where it's going wrong.
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u/trafficnab 9d ago
This basically, a factory churns out IKEA furniture in the millions, but humans still have to actually design them.
At this point, AI is more than capable of doing exactly what you tell it, you end up with generic slop if you give the LLM a one paragraph design summary and then let it make most of the design decisions itself. It'll probably mostly work but it'll be the most average way <thing> could be accomplished, basically a minimum viable product.
If you want it to make anything good, you have to actually do the design work and then tell it to make something good.
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u/JamminOnTheOne 9d ago
If it were economically viable to build those other things by hand, people would be employed to do so. But it’s not (or only is for a small niche audience willing to pay the price for it).
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u/GregBahm 9d ago
It's weird to argue artisanal bespoke hand made clothing is inferior to what a machine churns out.
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u/max123246 9d ago
Uh no, all of those machines started out by producing worse materials than humans. That's what the luddites argued about. Then one day it got good enough
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u/-WorstWizard- 9d ago
Would you look at that, a post targeted perfectly at me! Feels good to see others feel like this. Still staunchly avoiding LLM's for programming because I'm worried about losing the joy, but also that it would inhibit my growth as a programmer. I've been lucky in my job that I don't yet need to chase the kinds of efficiency that demands it.
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u/Chii 9d ago
don't yet need to chase the kinds of efficiency that demands it.
yet being the keyword there. The expected outcome in 5-10 yrs time is that your employer would either perish from uncompetitiveness, or they're forced to adapt, hence so would you.
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u/RegularReaction2984 9d ago
There's no "expected outcome in 5-10yrs time" tbh, things change so fucking fast right now that there's no way to predict that far ahead.
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u/grady_vuckovic 8d ago
Yeah, could you imagine how anyone's predictions made in 2016 are currently looking? I wouldn't dare try to predict where we will be in 2036. At the rate of change in the industry right now, who bloody knows what another 10 years will look like.
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u/Chii 9d ago
looking at general trend, it is possible to see the trajectory, even if you can't predict the specifics.
Back in the dot-com boom, you could easily see that online commerce is going to take over. You just didnt know the exact form, but the trend is very clear.
The same can be projected for LLM.
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u/grady_vuckovic 8d ago
It sounds like you and I have a lot in common in regards to genuinely having joy for programming. I will say if you're worried I wouldn't be. Yes using LLMs to write code is boring, but I would also say it didn't ruin the joy of writing code for me. Writing code is still fun even after using LLMs, in fact if anything I think I enjoy it even more now. In a 'Oh man it feels so good to be doing this' again way. That said if you truly have a job where no one is pressuring you to do that, then by all means keep your job the way it is and enjoy it. Be prepared of course that it could change one day but in the mean time, I say live it up and enjoy living the best version of the job.
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u/Dunge 9d ago
It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it
Except it could not
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u/skroll 9d ago
Is there really a ton of people out there who have work where Claude is one-shotting their daily workload? I feel like an outlier because the work I do absolutely could not be one-shotted (and it isn’t, I’ve tried). Is there really that many devs just doing basic CRUD apps all day, every day?
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u/deathhead_68 8d ago
I think many many developers are actually quite bad at programming and therefore Claude is extra impressive to them. Its impressive to me by its very nature, but for really complex tasks, it needs a strong guiding hand. And you can tell from other people's PRs when it doesn't have one.
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u/James20k 9d ago
I consistently find that there is a huge gap between:
Everyone I know's experience of AI that is an actual verifiable human being who's opinion and experience I trust
What the internet has been saying AI can do for the last 2-3 years
That gulf hasn't really been shrinking as time goes on. The more you dig into many big AI stories, the more it becomes apparent that they are very fake
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u/Chii 9d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_uf5OfMGio
one shotting a working game engine, ala unity-like. Skip to 28min to watch the result if you're not interested in the prompts and explanation.
These LLM models have advanced enough to do pretty complex tasks. Plus one-shotting is not absolutely necessary - you as the engineer should examine the results, and iterate.
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u/crunchmuncher 9d ago
Some of the simple things, some of the time. The kind of work I actually have to think about? Not at all.
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u/somkomomko 8d ago
I am no longer trying to one shot, this is not what I am interested in. I decide what gets build and how. What bugs me is that even tough I can build systems the programming aspect itself is getting lost. The other part is that doing code reviews has become worse not because the code quality is worse but because the quality is at least as bad as before but now I have to review 3 times as much.
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u/geft 9d ago
I feel like those one shotting daily workload are happening to people where there is no proper QA in place. The checks are all green, all tests passed (AI written) and that's it. A bit of manual testing will reveal bugs here and there. I don't expect perfection and AI is still very helpful in tackling the 90% but I need to intervene for that last 10%.
Kinda like what that Langchain guy did (4mil diff).
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u/Informal-Group-1815 7d ago
Its the CEOs people.. In the last month I've done 5 more projects in order to "check if these could be prtofitable" which were absolute shit. All I did was prompting because we needed these in a day or two as mvp. Did they work? Yes. Did it look like absolute shit in terms of code and would be a nightmare to maintain/fix? Yes. Did I not know if it worked correctly instead of simply seeming so? Still yes but the only one I cared was myself. It does not matter how capable we are and how good the software you make is as long as the client is happy. If he is happy with an one week trash, he won't care to pay you for two months work for it to be "proper".
And that was the case before ai too. It's not devs capabilities. Its that at the end of the day, only you care how good the code behind it is, how fragile it is etc. Every 15 year old these days sells websites he made in a day. Client doesn't care wants a website. As the price goes up, client wants smth more, a slightly more talented person appears. No need to do it properly.
(Hate this period of life guys, i was in it for the fun of it and for pursuing perfection)
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u/lechatsportif 9d ago
The field will never be the same, but people didn't stop being doctors because an xray or vaccines were invented. Take pride in your craft, there is a future and your knowledge and attention to detail is still critical, regardless of what the current out of the loop flailing C suite are fucking up at your current company.
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u/Intelligent_Edge3385 9d ago
Gee, thanks. I was feeling so anxious, but this guy Chris here said 'It is okay to enjoy programming' and I felt like I was allowed to enjoy programming again.
Who is this aimed for, anyway? Web husslers? Mainstream money making programmer?
I just feel funny reading all of this after writing BASIC and Assembly in VICE Commodore 64 emulator for recreational purposes. At the end of the day - whoever remains last standing is the winner, so maybe it is good that bulk of contemporary programmers would take a hike.
I know I'd be programming regardless, even for garbage cleaning level salary or median salary.
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u/TheMurmuring 9d ago
Commodore 64
I did hobby programming back when it was new in stores.. /collapses into dust
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u/hpyfox 9d ago
Better start learning cybersecurity or keep maintaining your programming knowledge for the future (if that'll come) because AI in its current state could only sufficiently replace the Rubber Ducky's job.
For the meantime, a job in real programming is dead (if you want to use that word). But the bubble is real as the cost of AI is unsustainable, future maintenance of codebases are gonna be unmaintainable, and market speculation is all gonna crash down once people realized it's as useful as having a bunch of juniors/newbies maintain a codebase.
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u/Delicious_Chard590 9d ago
The rift is puzzlers vs builders. Both have and had merit but doom posting is cooler
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u/shozzlez 9d ago
Just like people do blacksmithong at renaissance fairs, I don’t care what people enjoy in their own time.
They’re probably not making their living doing it though.
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u/Electronic-Equal-616 8d ago
needed to hear this tbh. feels like between placement stress and everyone obsessing over leetcode, coding turned into just another chore. the only time i actually have fun is when i'm building some random, completely useless project at 2 am just to see if it works lol
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u/__RLocksley__ 3d ago
I am still not satisfied with the code output of AI if I don't supervise it hard, I feel like a micromanager. ^
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u/ficiek 9d ago
This article manages to exist by conveniently completely missing why everyone is upset. The correct title for this article is "It's still OK to enjoy programming AS A HOBBY". But that's not what people are upset about! They are upset about the fact that it's hard or impossible to enjoy our jobs because they changed so much this is not what we signed up for.