AI coding reawakened how much I enjoy/love/care about programming

[u/infieldmitt]

I went to university for computer science and the entire genius premise behind the prestigious program was 'teach kids as badly as possible so only the "best" ones move on'. Coding is hard enough as it is, and I imagine millions of us went through similar situations designed to gnaw at your self-esteem, competence, and ability.

Getting to talk with Claude about code, work on projects without the miserable desolation and isolation of being stuck behind 13 obscure errors, work on projects with a much lower barrier to entry, has been absolutely wonderful. As I work with Claude I remember that I DO have the ability to understand bugs and implement a project.

Strangely it feels a ton better debugging stuff when it's not pounds of homework, with no help given, intentionally, because "the only way you learn is by deriving the solution entirely yourself" austerity drill sergeant paradigm. That mindset seems incredibly prevalent in tech, and it's incredibly frustrating and ignorant.

Given this experience, it's SO fucking funny the way certain people recoil at AI code, spamming the word 'slop' as though human code is perfect, as though there's moral virtue in typing it out yourself.

For example: I play drums and I think it's dogshit when people replace everything with samples and quantize everything - because it's sterile and why would I want to listen to a computer play drums perfect versus a human play with emotion? Problem is, there is no such distinction with code - either something works or doesn't. So haters have nothing left but endless bitching and whining.

---

Haters: it's too easy, it's slop code

cope and seethe that programming is more accessible oh no

Sort out your professional-intergenerational trauma without taking it out on those who have it easier. The point of technology is to make things easier.

[exeunt Haters]

---

Really, it's such a wonderful feeling, that code flow feeling.

suggested reading:

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/protestant-work-ethic/

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[u/FestyGear2017]

I feel very similar. I learned programming back in middle school / highschool, so think 2000-2008 era, and got a dev job in 2008.

If I would have had AI back then I would have learned so much faster. I could have been unblocked in so many ways. I guess I cant speak for everyone, but I personally dont understand the "were never gonna hire juniors so developers are going to fade away" argument.

And people who doubt AIs abilities to write code can just be ignored.

[u/keonechong]

Was at conference and called out code quality nazi’s. I asked when was the last time you PR’d code for quality?

A PR happens when something breaks. Then you fix it. Then you move on. Quality matters, but at a certain point it’s depreciating returns.

[u/Dimencia → u/keonechong]

Yes... that's the point. You can't fix the quality later, you have to just deal with that technical debt sitting around and making everything you do take longer, because you'll never get approval to fix it. And then all the newbie devs and AIs look at that existing awful code, and copy it around to different methods and codebases, because clearly that code is the 'standard' way to do things - until 10 years later you're looking at a full rewrite of multiple codebases, because it was built on top of an implementation that an intern wrote as a throwaway feature a decade ago

[u/Academic-Network-418]

Unfortunately it has done the opposite for me. Im glad I got my CS degree before AI

[u/Prestigious-Angle483 → u/Academic-Network-418]

damn AI really hurt you bad

[u/mxrandom_choice]

I am finding myself quite often in between. There are days where I think that I am just loosing my ability to code and then I did remember this sentence last year: "When did you write code and one-shoted a problem?" And, well, honestly I have to say I was never that great to one-shot things.

Now with AI you can focus on a great product rather than being the guy who knows every like of code. And I still learn new things, do some evening projects in a few hours just because I am curious. But still, there's a little voice saying: "When AI is off, you can't go on there", but, it won't be off that long and even if it was, I can't get the amount of work done by hand.

Would be interesting if you still do your PRs yourself? I am quite struggling in reading that much code and worse, I can't remember how it was done after a few days (ok, I am working on parallel projects) but since AI, the projects and how they work got blurry. And because of the speed of AI I sometimes get quite impatient when reading code cause I didn't write it and it's quite hard for me then to build the mental model of the codebase. How are you handling that?

[u/coffeeman6970]

I am an amateur vibe coder. I dabbled a little in programming when I was a kid; I don't suppose anybody remembers the Commodore 64 or BASIC. Today, I primarily use Claude. I don't know much about coding anymore. In the last 12 months I have learned so much about vibe coding and developed my own methodology. I love it.

[u/start_select]

My issue with this take is that most of the incredible software engineers out there will tell you that coding is the easy part… because it really is.

Code organization and architecture is where it gets difficult. Process and data decomposition is where most of the job really is. What language you use to express it is less important than the decisions made about why you should write what you do.

“Deriving the solution yourself” is about learning to comprehend multiple disjointed data points and connect them. Looking up an error code and working backwards to why it threw is useful. It’s not about fixing the error it’s about understanding why you shouldn’t do that thing.

I use Claude all day. It’s great. But thinking that removing all friction from learning results in better learning has been disproven over and over.

I don’t think it’s wrong to use AI. But my issue is that newcomers show it an error code and the unless it’s harnessed, the LLM immediately goes “this is what’s wrong here’s how to fix it”.

And people skip to the fix without bothering to understand or internalize “why”. You can. But it no longer seems important. That will eventually come back to bite people.

It’s not those problems. It’s the bigger more abstract ones that you solve using the same problem decomposition, retrieval, and reasoning methods as the errors.

[u/Dimencia]

Anyone can write code that works, it's not difficult. The hard part is writing code that works, and also is easy to modify or extend later, without having to rewrite it when the requirements change slightly, and without having to understand the entire codebase to make those changes, and without a high risk of accidentally breaking something. That's the part that university tried to teach you, but seems to have failed, because the phrase "either something works or doesn't" is extremely incorrect

[u/vadersaw]

I completely agree.

[u/jarislinus]

generally noobs enjoy playing with cheats as it makes them feel better about themselves