Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

Have you considered not doing that? It's not obligatory to have an LLM shit out unreviewed code for you, you're making a choice to do that, and you can make a choice not to.

Review the code. Hell, maybe even write some code yourself.

What you're describing is how I feel whenever I use an LLM for anything more than the most basic of tasks. I've gone from being a senior level software developer to managing a barely competent junior developer who's only redeeming skill is the ability to type really, really quickly. I quit the management track some time ago because I hated doing all my software development via the medium of design documents which would then be badly implemented by people who didn't care, there's no way you're going to get me to volunteer for that.

Technology is about efficiency, and for people to adopt it you need to be 10x more efficient. LLMs took a 15 years process of burning out, and shortened it to 1.5 years.

I think that's just the way you're doing it?

I feel the opposite. I appreciate the ability to iterate and prototype in a way which lowers friction. Sure I have to plan steps out ahead of time, but that's expected with any kind of software architecture. The stimulating part is the design and thought and learning, not digging the ditch.

If you're just firing off prompts all day with no design/input, yea I'm sure that sucks. You might as well "push the big red button" all day.

> If it fails, I just switch to another model—and usually, one of them gets the job done.

This is a huge red flag that you have no idea what you're doing at the fundamental software architecture level imo. Or at least you have bad process (prior to LLMs).

I always enjoyed problem solving, and programming was more of a means to that end for me. These days, focusing on syntax feels a bit tedious, especially when LLMs can handle so much of it. That being said, I still find myself obsessing over code quality, reading and reviewing code, and thinking a lot about architecture and best practices. I still get a lot of satisfaction from building things well, even if the actual mechanics of typing out code aren't always the most exciting part.

Is AI genuinely that good for you all? I can't leave it to its own devices, I have to review everything because (from experience) I don't trust it. I think it's an amazing technological advancement, perhaps will go down as one of the top 10 in the history of our species. But I can't just "fire and forget".

And that's not just because its output is often not the best, but also because by doing it myself it causes me to think deeply about the problem, come up with a better solution that considers edge cases. Furthermore, it gives me knowledge in my head about that project that helps me for the next change.

I see comments here where people seem to have eliminated almost all of their dev work, and it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong.

What I have found is that using LLM’s to do the same stuff I already knew how to do is not super enjoyable. I know web application development, and having some agent build it for me is just a productivity gain with no job satisfaction. So I’ve been where you are recently.

But on the flip-side, using the AI to help me learn the bits of programming that I’ve spent my whole career ignoring, like setting up DevOps pipelines or containerisation, has been very enjoyable indeed. Pre-AI the amount of hassle I’d have to go through to get the syntax right and the infrastructure set up was just prohibitively annoying. But now that so much of the boilerplate is just done for me, and now that I’ve got a chat window I can use to ask all my stupid questions, it’s all clicking into place. And it’s like discovering a new programming paradigm all over again.

Can 100% recommend stepping outside your comfort zone and using AI to help where you didn’t want to go before.

Vibe coding sounds miserable. I use LLMs pretty heavily but never as a replacement for my own mind. I'm glad it exists for the people who can't program but it's much less pleasant than being explicit myself.

First, I get it.

Second, you can look at it differently.

AI is going to do most of the coding in a very short time. That's a fact. The opportunities are going to come to those who know how to prompt the AI and hold it accountable.

So yes, you're no longer going to be the hero for the code you type out.

But you CAN be the hero for being the Senior Developer or Project Manager who know what needs to be done and knows how to get the AI to do it right the first time.

I actually got out of coding a number of years ago because I was tired of keeping up with the latest changes in languages, standards, best practices, etc.

When AI became a thing over the past couple of years, I decided to try again ... and I'm actually enjoying it a whole lot more. I make a lot more progress a lot faster, which means I get to see faster results.

You can't control the direction that coding is going. It will go where it goes. But you can control how you think and feel about it. So what choice will you make?

>Recently, I realised I no longer enjoy programming.

You don't? Sounds to me like you just don't enjoy prompting. Try doing some programming again. Engage your brain with a challenge and try to solve the problem itself not just explain it to an ai and never even look at the code. You enjoy the driving not the destination, getting a taxi there is removing your purpose.

I had to rip all the LLM crap out of my editor to feel like I was doing anything. My programming ability has gotten better and if I do actually need to use an LLM I just open ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or punch stuff into Ollama.

The majority of what I end up using langle mangles for is trivially verifiable but tedious to do things like "turn this Go struct into an OpenAPI Schema" or "take this protocol buffer definition and write the equivalent in Rust prost".

You're doing it wrong, even with language model...

You stopped reviewing the code..? You're not gonna make it.

You still need the visceral feel of writing the code, this builds the mental model in your head.

No, I feel the exact opposite. This post makes me want to stay away from agentic coding all together. Idk about everyone else but I love programming, more than any other thing I do. I do not want to end up like this.

I feel you, but I think that if you want to make exceptional software, and not just a large volume of mediocre software, the best way is still to write code manually.

I feel like the more we rely on AI, the stupider we as a whole in society becomes. There no longer is this sense of accomplishment of actually doing the work yourself, so you rely on an AI that just spits out the answer. No more digging around the web for a solution, google AI has got you. The old days of learning how to go to the library to get an encyclopedia to do a homework research article is over, there is something about the effort that goes into solving a solution more so than the solution itself, ergo the journey not the destination

Suggestion - pick up a new hobby that is engaging outside of work

I’m an amateur who likes to hack stuff for fun. So what’s the point of an LLM doing this for me? I may as well go on the hunt for an Apple II because I loved writing machine code on it in the 80s.

>> Recently, I realized I no longer enjoy programming. It feels like I’m just going through the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want, then sitting and waiting for it to finish.

This isn't programming. Delete the AI stuff and start programming again. It's fine to use LLM's if you want but nobody is forcing you to.

> I Lost Joy of Programming

I found the joy of making things.

As a technical person who is not a professional programmer, but finds or makes whatever I need, LLMs (Gemini) are dizzyingly powerful.

I've made so many things I never would never have even attempted without it: a change-based timelapse tool, virtual hand-controlled web-based theremin, automated sunrise and sunset webcam timelapse creator, healthy-eating themed shoot'em up, content-based podcast ad removal tool, virtual linescan camera, command line video echo effect, video player progress bar benchmark tool, watermark remover, irregular panoramic photo normalizer, QR code game of live, 3D terrain bike share usage map, movie "barcode" generator, tool to edit video by transcript, webcam-based window parallax effect, hidden-image mosaic generator, and all kinds of other toys I've already lost track of.

I get it. However I find without significant direction from me it architects things badly and/or introduces poor patterns or lack of maintainability so it’s not like you can just let it run. However manual coding does seem more tedious now and I try to get it to a point where it writes most of the code while I make adjustments.

I go through waves. Sometimes I'm in awe of what the LLM does for me, the rapid progress through boilerplate code in seconds that would have taken me forever, leaving me to ponder the actual core issues of the problems I'm solving.

Sometimes I want to hunt it down and erase the lazy, lying, gas-lighting **** from existence.

Maybe 20 years ago I read a book on Henrietta Leavitt who was a 'computer' in the 19th Century. Her and many other women did (mostly hand) calculations for a living. She analyzed photographic plates of stars. She discovered Cepheid stars. After I read that I thought 'Holy Shit'. That's what I do for a living - the moral equivalent of long division by hand on 20 digit numbers all day long - and someday this is going to be automated. People will one day say - I can't believe people coded by hand for living - how tedious. I just didn't think it would happen so fast.

That said, I have loved writing software for 40 years, but I too have lost some joy. I am retired now and am having trouble finding joy in my personal projects. I use the LLM's to write functions for me and I do the rest (and I like not having to deal with minutia any more - but one time I loved taking apart binary files by hand and getting paid well).

I liken it to too many choices. If you have 2 cars to choose from, you can feel good about your choice. But from 40, you are always saying, Hmmm, maybe I should have gotten that 17th choice instead of the 26th.

Back then. A C compiler, a linker, a manual and a couple books. Get to work. Create something by your own hand.

Now when I find the right project, usually music related, and it get's under my skin, I get those old vibes and I love it.

I guess I'm glad I'm out of the rat race - but in all honesty - I little envious too of the younger gen who embrace the new tech. Yea - I wish I had it back then!

I fully concur, we've automated away the enjoyable and creative part of the job. I used Windsurf for a project recently, and while it was impressive, I don't feel I was notably more efficient at delivery. I often had to intercede to refactor what it had churned out to make the solution legible. My takeaway was that AI coding is a fairly joyless experience, you're effectively writing JIRA tickets for it, and the labour switches to coaching and PRs. It feels like we're just accelerating the speed at which we build legacy code bases, which no-one will understand.

I use LLMs like I use Google. I will go to the website, type in the prompt, and read over the results. I would never embed LLMs into my whole workflow, let alone allow the entire code base to be analyzed by one.

I feel the exact same way (using the tools they force on us at work).

I've became very lazy. Most tasks, I explain to the LLM, and go browse the web while it computes. More often than not, it fails, and I re-iterate my prompt several times. Eventually, I need to review the changes before submitting it for review, which isn't very fun.

Overall, I feel I'm losing my skills and the competitive advantage I had at my role (I'm a decent coder, but don't care too much about product discussions). The way I'm using the tool right now, I'm pretty sure I'm not more productive.

We'll see how it goes. It's still a pretty new tech and I think I should learn when not to use it and try to have good hygiene with it.

I'm definitely on the opposite side where despite being in the nascent era of code assisting agents, they've become a productivity multiplier and I shudder thinking about how productive my last 25 years of programming could've been if we had coding agents back when I started my career. Young aspirational developers graduating now are going to be able to accomplish much more than us over their entire career.

It's also got me to explore a lot more domains than I would've considered otherwise, e.g. using Python to accomplish tasks with local pytorch/onnx models and creating ComfyUI nodes or using bash for large complex scripts that I would've previously used bun .ts shell scripts to implement.

Even non dev tasks like resolving Linux update/configuration/conflicts have become a breeze to resolve with Claude/Gemini Pro being able to put me on the right track which no amount of old-school Google searches were able to.

Although it's not all upside as LLMs typically generate a lot more code than I would've used to accomplish the same task so code maintenance is likely to require more effort, so I don't like using LLMs to change code I've written, but am more than happy to get them to make changes to code that other LLMs have created.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think there’s a parallel to coding.

Thanks to LLMs, I actually enjoy writing more than before. I spend less time typing and more time thinking about the core idea. Every time AI rewrites my messy draft, I find myself saying, “Yes—that’s exactly what I meant.” Then I get to fine-tune it and add my own voice, which makes the process fun.

I also love this quote from Paul Graham, "Writing, Briefly": “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”

Personally, I never really enjoyed coding.

I enjoyed building products and creating value with those products. Coding was just an implementation detail. It wasn’t even the hard part or the real work - the real work was understanding and clarifying business requirements.

I can understand why you would feel this way.

As someone that enjoys the problem solving, creativity, learning, and sense of ownership that comes out of building software, I would feel less fulfillment if I hand over everything (or most tasks) to an LLM. It's like being a painter but not painting.

Hence I choose not to do that.

LLMs can be good if used responsibly and when it makes sense. It should not be at the cost of taking away something that matters to you.

I don't know your current situation. Maybe you are doing this at your workplace. Maybe you are under pressure of using LLMs. I get it. But you have a choice.

Now that you have come to this realization, you'll know what to do. Find the right balance.

i agree. Initially i felt liberated that it is doing all the tedious work for me so i can concertate on the "good stuff" of creative thinking.

I usually start out with good intentions like

1. planning out work

2. crafting really good prompts

3. accepting bare miniumum code changes

4. reviewing and testing code changes

But most 'agentic code tools' are not really well aligned with this philosophy. They are always over eager and do more than what you ask them to. Like if you ask it to change button color, it goes and builds out a color picker .

They sneak in more and more code and vex you with all the extra junk that you slowly stop caring about extra stuff that's being snuk in and the whole thing spirals out of control. Now you are just doing pure vibe coding.

I suspect that you never were truly interested in programming otherwise you wouldn't have preferred talking to several LLM models instead of writing code yourself.

Nobody forced you to switch LLM models until eventually one of them solve your problem.

Reread this: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

Long story short, LLMs are great for people who never wanted to become "code artists" (aka hackers) which many people within CS and SWE do not wish to be.

If you goal is to be able to express your ideas fluently though, you'll have to get good at coding. The differentiator is how you look at the pain and struggle involved. If your goal is to improve yourself, the struggle has value. You learn by trying to do harder and harder things. If your goal isn't to learn though, you may as well outsource the struggling to a bot.

I actually brought back some of the joy of programming for myself by leveraging LLMS

Context. I'm burnt out,doing web software development for business apps for 15 years now and going

I started to get into game development. I started to test out chatGPT and claude to assist and it's been going great. I make so much progress and the results are fun which makes the coding process fun. The LLM covers gaps in my knowledge of math and physics and game dev strategy and architecture. But since I know how to code I can take what it gives and accomplish all kinds of things that would be much more difficult going on my own.

I've had the opposite experience. Now I can give an LLM my requirements, ask it to create a plan, I'll review the plan, then I have it implement the plan. I have it add test cases before doing a refractor to make sure everything is still covered. I get to be an architect, a product owner. In this way I get to create and not have to worry about implementation too much. I'll just make tweaks with a review. It's been a joy to describe my end state and watch it get built.

I think you're doing fine. The practice of programming is commoditized, so it no longer feels meaningful. But, that isn't to say it isn't. Just the mental association is now gone.

"Doctor it hurts when I do that..." ;)

(e.g. did you consider simply not using LLMs to write code and maybe just use them for rubberducking, cross-checking your code and as StackOverflow replacement?)

The problem is most software engineers are disconnected from why their work even matters. It's hard to be motivated when you can't see the impact your work has on others and you don't get any recognition for it.

I just wrote a new book about how engineering leadership has to change and this is one of the key problems. https://productdriven.com/book

Funny enough, I’ve had the opposite experience. Using LLMs made me enjoy programming more. I spend less time on boilerplate and chasing down syntax quirks, and more time thinking about the bigger picture, what the system should do, how it should scale, where it might break.

You're more or less describing what happened to me when I changed from dev to dev team lead. I couldn't affort the time anymore to make code reviews, left that to my colleagues and only tested the resulting software. When it didn't work, I returned a bug task and then we iterated this until it worked.

No more joy in writing software. Instead my time is spend in writing user stories and specifications as good as possible.

No, because I only use LLMs as code assistants (and I don't think they do that great a job in spitting out code without me needing to review it). Typically I use LLMs to write stuff that K find boring and repetitive (unit tests, glue code for APIs - like JSON mapping for example), Dependency configuration, that sort of thing.

The actual meat I prefer to code myself with minor LLM support (for example, I ask it to review my code).

Use the LLM to code away the boilerplate if you must, but get stuck in and deal with the novel stuff and get yourself the dopamine hit of doing the hard thing.

Sure, get an LLM to suggest an approach, but how can you feel joy when you've turned yourself into a system architect working with a particularly stupid and relentlessly optimistic bunch of idiots who never really learn?

You can choose how you do your work. You have autonomy. So, choose.

You should take a break, it's normal to go through down periods. Work coding is also generally dissatisfactory compared to personal fun coding.

Personally I have found that the sky is now the limit thanks to AI assistants! I was never the best coder out there, probably a median level programmer, but now I can code anything I imagine and it's tons of fun.

Find some creative projects you want to work on and code them up!

> At this point, I’ve even stopped reviewing the exact code changes. I just keep pushing forward until the task is done.

This is definitely going to end well.

If you see "programming" as "writing code" then I can see where that joy is lost. If you see "programming" as "creating software" then you can maintain that joy. I would argue the goal has always been to write less code. That has driven the design of programming languages for the past 50 years.

I've been through this a few times during my career.

This book helped me put it in perspective: https://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer...

These posts are so exhausting and telling of those who never enjoyed programming in the first place. Wish these were a wake up call to those posting that they’ve been in it for reasons they haven’t been able to understand till now.

I don't understand why people only think in extremes.

You don't have to give up anything you did before at all.

LLMs just here to increase your productivity, but cranking out unreviewed code where you don't want to do that is just silly to me.

Generally I agree, I use LLM to solve work problems faster but I work on my own personal projects by hand only using LLM to teach me concepts, give me direction or help with complex portions of code (learning rust)

Seems like you have given the part you enjoy in software development to LLM.

There's programming for fun, and it's programming for work.

Why would you program in a non-joyus way if you're doing it for fun? For professional work I fully get why you'd want to optimize.

Sounds like you are going through the classic transition to management

I think the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want is what's kept me from using AI at all so far

I can't escape the feeling that in 2-4 years no one will be even looking at the code and the IDE+chat interface of today will be a weird relic and most people will be just prompting finished artifacts.

I'd say if you used to find pleasure and satisfaction if the art of writing code unless you're willing to stop using AI it might be worth finding a different pursuit to channel that energy into. If you don't enjoy prompting now it's only going to get worse from here and your energy will be better spent finding something you do enjoy.

[phenomenological questions with today’s first mug of coffee]

then sitting and waiting for it to finish. If it fails…

I could not help but think that sounds like the old days of batch processing and even somewhat recent compilers.

¿Maybe waiting is an ordinary part of programming?

¿And maybe LLM’s fill a vacuum created by desktop systems with abundant memory and fast bulk storage?

¿Could it be that waiting is a fundamental dimension in our relationship to machines and when we change the mechanism to remove one cause of wait, another wait often whack-a-moles itself up? [1]

——

Anyway, my empathy on your job frustration. My advice is programming, no matter how much you love it, is still a day job when programming is your day job. What matters most are the things your day job allows you to do, e.g. Friday night pizza for your children, vintage rollerblades, or a trip to Guam.

And if your mental health is suffering, there’s nothing wrong about talking to a clinical therapist. In fact there can be a lot right about it.

Or not. Good luck.

[1]: We might do something else while we wait for the laundry to finish the dryer cycle or microwave popcorn to pop. Often this can be just filling time and the completion interrupts us with buzzers and beeps.

[2]: The nature of machines is that we tend to eat more popcorn and have cleaner clothes ^and^ spend more time cooking popcorn and washing clothes because it is less bother. Particularly when it comes to our day jobs…the machines of the call center increase the number of calls the call center handles per employee.

Seems like you were never programming in the first place. If by programming we mean solving engineering problems with code.

interesting, i have the exact opposite reaction. I had kinda become bored and disillusioned by coding. These tools have brought back the joy of creating things in code for me. Went through all my long forgotten side projects and managed to finish them. So happy to have all of these things done and up and running.

Nope.

I’ve always done software engineering that wasn’t programming: QA, QA automation, devops, operational sustaining (legacy maintenance).

The whole reason I got into software (besides it being easy money) was my childhood of typing in code from magazines and making it my own.

I didn’t go to university, and I didn’t focus personal time in developing coding skills enough to get me a job in it full-time. I know lots of the fundamentals I’m just not fast, and I fail to memorize lots of idiomatic stuff that’s necessary.

What changed for me? Two years ago I discovered Golang, love it. In the last few months I set aside my aversion for AI, and it’s amazing. I know AI code is mediocre sometimes, so is what I write myself. But the feedback loop is way encouraging. It has me engaged. I feel I can maintain the code. If I don’t feel comfortable with anything I take the time to review and rewrite, or run just that piece of code through a different AI.

Whether it’s right or wrong, I’m now engaged daily, instead of working a full day in “adjacent” engineering and then trying to push through tutorial hell.

Which products are you working on so I can be sure to avoid using them?

May I suggest stop eating cats and the joy will come back.

I’ve had the same feelings. It’s tough for sure.

I’ve pivoted to architecture and higher level problem solving to continue my growth.

I have also found I do my best work when I’m happy. It’s important that the tool works for me and I don’t work for the tool.

> At this point, I’ve even stopped reviewing the exact code changes. I just keep pushing forward until the task is done.

How is this the future of software engineering?

I don't feel the same, I just have a bad under the skin feeling just thinking about what your code could look like as of now. I feel like there won't be enough human/processes/money to clean up all the slop, hoping for a big reset at some point. And no a sci-fi future AI won't help us clean the slop

Man these comments are a rancid minefield of soapboxing.

OP, take some time off and evaluate what you want.

yeah don’t do that

have self-respect

Yea, a little. I think it's fun to see what it can do, but that gets old quick.

The real kick in the nuts is that people don't care about quality. Honestly they never have, but now it's just worse. People see productivity gains and that's literally all that matters. I guess they know they can ship bad stuff and still sell it. Only when retention numbers get bad do they complain - not even think about taking the time to do things proper of course - about it and demand higher quality.

I think there's going to be a high demand for AI slop fixers in the future. Don't get me wrong, it's not that AI itself is incapable, it's that people aren't putting any effort in.

I think we'll push the people who code for enjoyment away and they'll be replaced by people who aren't as senior.

[dead]

[dead]

Using LLMs is just a different way of programming. Think of it as a high-level language, similar to how conventional programming languages relate to assembly.

Getting tasks done, tasks you would never have had the time or courage to tackle the traditional way, is another source of joy.

I feel exactly the opposite. To explain, programming became very tedious, looking through endless lines of code, and lately it appears everything is generated, and not making sense of it. With programming bots I can focus on what I want rather than spending inordinate amount of time finding just the right syntax for something that itself was generated by another machine. Honestly and simply, get with the program

I've always found it a bit strange that people enjoy the act of coding so much that LLMs make then sad. For me it's always been about what I can make, not the actual typing of code into the editor. With LLMs I can make better stuff, faster, and it's really exciting. It used to be that if I needed to use a new library for one little task, it would be hours or days of reading the manual and playing around. Now it's minutes and I can understand how the API works, and write good, robust code that solves my problem.

Maybe it's more of a problem with your job and the tasks you're assigned?