Comment by conductr

Comment by conductr 9 days ago

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As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of guy that has a shop he built, builds his own patio deck, home remodeling, Tinker with robotics, etc. Kind of just like to be a maker following my own creative pursuit.

All said, it’s hard on me knowing it’s possible to use llm to spit out a crappy but functional version of whatever I’ve dreamt up with out satisfaction of building it. Yet, it also seems to now be demotivating to spend the time crafting it when I know I could use llm to do a majority of it. So, I’m in a mental quagmire, this past year has been the first year since at least 2000 that I haven’t built anything significant in scale. It’s indirectly ruining the fun for me for some reason. Kind of just venting but curious if anyone else feels this way too?

carpo 9 days ago

I'm the complete opposite. After being burnt out and feeling an almost physical repulsion to starting anything new, using AI has renewed my passion. I've almost finished a side project I started 4 weeks ago and it's been awesome. Used AI from the beginning for a Desktop app with a framework I'd never heard of before and the learning curve is almost non-existent. To be able to get the boring things done in minutes is amazing.

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  • crm9125 9 days ago

    Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.

    But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.

    I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.

    Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.

    I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.

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    • carpo 8 days ago

      That's awesome! That's a lot of data and a great speed increase. I think that as long as you test and don't just accept exactly what it outputs without a little thought, it can be really useful.

      I take it as an opportunity to learn too. I'm working on a video library app that runs locally and wanted to extract images when the scene changed enough. I had no idea how to do this, and previously would have searched StackOverflow to find a way and then struggled for hours or days to implement it. This time I just asked Aider right in the IDE terminal what options I had, and it came back with 7 different methods. I researched those a little and then asked it to implement 3 of them. It created an interface, 3 implementations and a factory to easily get the different analyzers. I could then play around with each one and see what worked the best. It took like an hour. I wrote a test script to loop over multiple videos and run each analyzer on them. I then visually checked the results to see which worked the best. I ended up jumping into the code it had written to understand what was going on, and after a few tweaks the results are pretty good. This was all done in one afternoon - and a good chunk of that time was just me comparing images visually to see what worked best and tweaking thresholds and re-running to get it just right.

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  • theshrike79 8 days ago

    I'm on this boat. I can use LLMs to skip the boring bits like generating API glue classes or simple output functions.

    Example:

    I'm building a tool to grab my data from different sites like Steam, Imdb, Letterboxd and Goodreads.

    I know perfectly well how to write a parser for the Goodreads CSV output, but it doesn't exactly tickle my brain. Cursor or Cline will do it in minutes.

    Now I've got some data to work with, which is the fun bit.

    Again if I want to format the output to markdown for Obsidian, the LLM can do it in a few minutes and maybe even add stuff I didn't think about at first.

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    • carpo 8 days ago

      Yeah, I've found it great at XML too. All sorts of boilerplate stuff works so well. As it the project gets bigger Ive had to think for longer about things and step in more, but as you said, that's usually the fun, meaty bit that you want to work on anyway. My app is about 15k lines of code now, and it's a bit more work than at the beginning.

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    • tediousgraffit1 8 days ago

      this is the key idea right here. LLMs are not replacing good coders, they're electric yak shavers that we should all learn how to use. The value add is real, and incremental, not revolutionary.

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  • FeepingCreature 8 days ago

    Same for me. The lack of effort to get started is amazing, as well as the ability to farm the parts I don't like out to the AI. (As opposed to me, it's actually passable at graphical design.)

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  • ManuelKiessling 8 days ago

    I'm very much in the same camp as you. I'm having the time of my (professional) live right now.

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dmamills 9 days ago

I can echo your sentiment. Art is the manifestation of creativity, and to create any good art you need to train in whatever medium you choose. For the decade I've been a professional programmer, I've always argued that writing code was a creative job.

It's been depressing to listen to people pretend that LLM generated code is "the same thing". To trivialize the thoughtful lessons one has learned honing their craft. It's the same reason the Studio Ghilbi AI image trend gives me the ick.

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  • carpo 8 days ago

    I agree, but only to an extent. For me, the passion changed over time. I used to love getting an O'Reilly tome and learning something new, but now I don't really want to learn the latest UI framework, library/API or figure out how a client configures their DI container. If the AI can do most of that stuff, and I just leverage my knowledge of all the frameworks I've had to use, it's a huge timesaver and means I can work on more things at once. I want to work on the core solution, not the cruft that surrounds it.

    I agree though that the Studio Ghibli trend feels off. To me, art like this feels different to code. I know that's probably heresy around these parts of the internet, and I probably would have said something different 15-20 years ago. I know that coding is creative and fulfilling. I think I've just had the fun of coding beat out of me over 25 years :) AI seems to be helping bring the fun back.

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  • bigpeopleareold 8 days ago

    Just think what the 19th century craftsmen were thinking! :D (i.e. they were right, but really good stuff is hard to make at scale)

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hombre_fatal 9 days ago

I know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.

On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.

I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.

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  • conductr 8 days ago

    I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort

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    • hombre_fatal 8 days ago

      I had this in my comment but deleted it, maybe you were responding to it, but in case you didn't see it: I found multiplayer browser games to be a good example of a hard project that LLMs help a lot with so that you can focus on the rewarding part.

      LLMs can one-shot pretty good server-authority + client-prediction + rollback netcode, something I've probably spent weeks of my life trying to build and mostly failing. And they can get a basic frontend 'proof' working. And once you verify that the networked MVP works, you can focus on the game.

      But the cool thing about multiplayer games is that they can be really small in scope because all of the fun comes from mechanics + playing with other people. They can be spaceships shooting at each other in a single room or some multiplayer twist on a dumbed down classic game. And that's just so much more feasible than building a whole game that's expected to entertain you as a single player.

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Hojojo 8 days ago

I've become so much more productive in my hobby programming projects, because it lets me skip over the tedious parts that suck the life out of me (boilerplate, figuring out library dependencies, etc), and I can focus on the parts that are actually interesting like experimenting with different solutions, iterating and learning new things.

It also lets me explore other libraries and languages without having to invest too much time and effort before knowing if it's right for what I want to do. I know that if I want to continue in a different direction, I haven't wasted tons of time/effort and getting started in the new direction will be much less effortful and time consuming.

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woah 9 days ago

Try being a drummer!

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  • conductr 8 days ago

    I’ve actually been considering it. Although I think I’m probably tone deaf or rhythmically challenged and my rotator cuff is kinda messed up from an old injury, I’ve been trying to convince my 6 year old to take it up so I could justify having a kit around the house

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johnnyanmac 8 days ago

I'm mixed on the "craft" aspect of it. I don't hate coding, but there's definitely times where it feels like it's just some time plumbing. I don't get satisfaction out of that kind of stuff.

I'm pragmatic and simply don't trust current LLM's to do much in my domain. All that tribal knowledge is kept under lock and key at studios, so good luck scraping the net to find more than the very basic samples of how to do something. I've spent well over a decade doing that myself; the advanced (and even a lot of intermediate) information is slim and mostly behind paywalls or books.

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fragmede 9 days ago

Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.

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  • Aurornis 9 days ago

    I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.

    So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.

    I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.

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    • fragmede 9 days ago

      absolutely! It turns out that the code is just this one little corner of the whole thing. A critical corner, but still just one piece of many.

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  • conductr 9 days ago

    Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same”

    I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time.

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    • carpo 9 days ago

      I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.

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    • fragmede 9 days ago

      which turns it into passion. the side project that I'm only interested in because it could maybe make some money? eh.

      a project in a niche where I live and breath the fumes off the work and I can help the whole ecosystem with their workflow? sign me up!

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      • conductr 8 days ago

        Agree, I’ve been searching for the latter for a long time

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  • caseyohara 9 days ago

    > I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week

    This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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    • fragmede 9 days ago

      you don't get to choose why you get Internet famous, it chooses you.

      thankfully, I'm not important enough for my comment to amount to the same thing.

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  • cglace 9 days ago

    So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?

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    • fragmede 9 days ago

      like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.

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      • caseyohara 9 days ago

        But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".

        Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.

        What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.

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