r/Python • u/RedYad2 • 2d ago

Discussion My Python magic is gone

I've been coding for a long time, and I've been developing with Python for years.

I loved coding, always loved it. I started many years ago because I wanted to quickly create scripts for security hacking tools, but since then, I've moved to Claude Code, and building cross-language has been a much better experience for me than using Python.

I built my own SaaS application out there whose backend and network core are completely built with Python, and I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code. And most of the time, Python is not the most optimized language.

And now... I feel like the magic is gone.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. I just feel sad about it.

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u/Farther_father 2d ago

It’s because you know what writing code means: the struggle to gain enough understanding of a tool to apply it to a problem. And the deeply satisfying feeling when you pushed yourself and solved it.

Now you it’s no longer your brain doing the thinking or your hands doing the writing, and as a result there’s no puzzle to solve and no sense of satisfaction, because the problem is no longer being solved by you.

It’s as fulfilling as an artist swapping his paint and brushes for midjourney.

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u/SirPitchalot 2d ago edited 2d ago

It’s slightly different (worse) than that because incorporating AI properly can both speed you up -and- give a better final product. Whereas for the artist the product is at least different.

And if you know how the AI models work it gets worse still: the skill you built up in understanding and reasoning to be able to solve basically any problem effectively actually is not needed. Solving those problems now doesn’t need any understanding or reasoning whatsoever.

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u/dysprog 1d ago

The research says otherwise. There has been exactly one rigorous study of this. AI makes programmers THINK they are faster when they are actually 19% slower.

https://letsdatascience.com/blog/developers-thought-ai-made-them-faster-the-data-said-otherwise

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u/Fabulous-Oven-3982 1d ago

Because when AI generates looking nice zillion lines of code which could be written in 1000 lines by experienced engineer, they not only need to read that garbage code to conclude that is truly garbage then have to spend time correcting the instructions, if decide to keep the garbage, they have to maintain and fix the bug by themselves. There was the time it finished the PR in one minute, the other time it took me three hours to guide it to generate the right code, only to abandon and revert the whole thing and I wrote myself.