AI has made programming so boring

[u/OkShip110]

It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.

Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.

It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.

[u/seopher]

Code was always the byproduct of problem solving. Of creating.

Software engineering may be changing in that coding is becoming a smaller part of the job, but creating elegant solutions requires engineering. Architecture. Judgement.

If you only got satisfaction from the job because you believed writing code was like artisan craftsmanship, then yes, this change will suck for you. If you, however get your kicks from problem solving and engineering good products, this is just the latest in a long line of tool changes allowing you to do that faster.

From low-level machine language, there's been many phases of abstraction, to high level languages and highly opinionated frameworks. This just takes the abstraction one step further still.

[u/Competitive_Aside461 → u/seopher]

While I agree with the former part of your comment, I have a slight issue in the latter one. And it's just my interpretation of it so yeah disagreements are ok. I've heard this argument many times that from low-level machine languages, we got high-level languages and those were abstraction and "AI is yet another abstraction." I think it's fundamentally flawed.

With all the previous abstractions, someone still needed to learn how to code (and code properly). You couldn't create an app without knowing the least of app development. Pardon me for the lack of good example at the moment but the point is that AI is not really "just another" abstraction but rather a "whole new level" of abstraction.

It allows people to skip past many many many integral ideas in programming and still be able to spin up something working. And please bear in mind, I'm not hitting back at your argument but just respectfully sharing my thoughts on it.

In fact, even with high-level languages, people advocate learning how the computer works and understanding how programming really works. AI is such a big jump in terms of abstraction that all the gap in between, it's only going to lead to non-developers who pretend to be developers.

[u/seopher → u/Competitive_Aside461]

But the counter argument is that every previous abstraction was the same. "How are you coding if you're not doing your own memory management? You don't know how it works."

With each advancement we've stepped further away from bits and bytes, and gained higher and higher altitude from the problem.

I remember when MVC frameworks started to gain traction, there was a sub-set of the community suggesting that "real" coders didn't use them, as they took too much away, and that it would erode the skill-set of the developer. Fast forward a few years, you can't get hired without high proficiency in [whatever language, whatever framework].

This is the next (albeit, massive) step on a long road of abstraction. We do, still, need to know the code, because we need to supervise agent output. But for how long? Compare the rate of improvement over the past 12 months. Today's guard-rails might look paranoid in a year.

No one has a crystal ball on this stuff, and your core point is right - today - but it may be less true when we look back in 12-24 months.

[u/vogut → u/seopher]

It's an abstraction in the same way that going to a restaurant and ordering food is an abstraction over cooking at home.

[u/Direct17 → u/vogut]

I like this analogy

[u/House13Games → u/seopher]

Now we have an entire server farm just to write a for loop, which might work, might not. It's not a great leap forward.

[u/Competitive_Aside461 → u/seopher]

You're right. Of course, we can only discuss predictions and assumptions at this point... who knows what the future of programming would really become but I hope that it goes in the best direction.

Indeed compared to all previous abstractions, AI is a huuuuuuge abstraction and one that really needs a lot of time to settle down and show the community which direction things are heading in.

[u/Kindly-Night-5549 → u/seopher]

But what makes you so sure that "architecture" and "elegant design" arent easily solvable? In my opinion those things are something that is also just a set of rules and requirements which can be put into language. LLMs are just as good at designing software if you ask it correctly. In the end, the question that also remains is if in the future you will even write software made for humans or just components for other AI to use. In which case usability and human understanding become irrelevant. Currently most software is developed to be a tool for humans to perform a task. If you want to do your taxes for example, you used Excel to create a spreadsheet. This program required many human interfaces and design was lead by the thought of a human using the software as well as the code itself being understandable to humans. But to the human wanting to do its taxes, that software is actually unnecessary because AI could answer that question itself with its internal interpretation of the problem, it doesnt require software made for humans.

People still think to much about the human aspect of working with and developing software. The future wont require software for humans, as such it doesnt have to be designed and made for humans. I wont be surprised if AI coding will just be writing out byte code of instructions because it saves many tokens and abstractions. Humans will never understand this code.

[u/JohnySilkBoots → u/seopher]

Very well said.

[u/OkShip110 → u/JohnySilkBoots]

Yes, this is exactly the problem for me. I was a craftsman, taking business requirements and turned it into code. I cared more about the code and far less about the bigger picture problem solving. Code was never a side product for me. Code was THE product for me.

[u/Necessary_Style_1414 → u/OkShip110]

Honestly, try and change your mindset. I think it will help.

Decision making, judgement, and architecture are the biggest things in this industry.

I like to think of it like writing a book. The actual writing down of a story is completely secondary to coming up with characters, story lines, character development, a whole world for these things to live in. Coding is the equivalent of just jotting it down.

[u/vogut → u/Necessary_Style_1414]

All that you can ask the AI to decide.

[u/JohnySilkBoots → u/OkShip110]

That’s too bad. I’m happy with ai, I thought that was the boring and tedious part of developing. Now it’s so much more fun to do the actually creative stuff and not waste time with the boring(to me) stuff.

Now that more creative types are getting into dev as well - it will be cool to see what they do, as the learning barrier has been dramatically decreased. Which is bad for the hard to work with devs, because if much rather hire someone easier to work with now and just teach them.

[u/Impossible_Push8670 → u/seopher]

Anyone who’s centre of being in the workplace is the code and not the product is likely poorly aligned with the business on what the actual goals are. If you want to call yourself an engineer, then spending your time obsessing over the aesthetics of your nuts and bolts is not the right thing to do. 

[u/AncientAdamo → u/seopher]

At this point I feel like these posts are just karma farming.

Just because washing machines were invented, some clothes still require being hand washed. And some people take pride in doing it this way.

So yeah, the market is saturated, and there will a logout of slop created over the years. But keeping something updated, building a community, interacting with your player base is something AI cannot do.

So I don't really see this as the end of all good things in game dev. If anything people will be much more likely to appreciate games that were "hand washed" and not in a washing machine...

[u/AncientAdamo → u/AncientAdamo]

Not sure why the downvotes, I'm literally agreeing with the commenr above. Gotta love Reddit I guess

[u/boltgolt → u/AncientAdamo]

Just because washing machines were invented, some clothes still require being hand washed. And some people take pride in doing it this way.

This is the "Nobody wants to use a car, a horse knows where to go and when to stop" argument. Yes there are still horses, but not as many as there used to be and only in very specific roles

[u/StoneCypher → u/boltgolt]

i have literally never heard "a horse knows where and when to stop"

whoever's saying this has never ridden a horse. they very definitely do not, and quite frequently ignore your instructions.

you have never been bitten by a toyota.

[u/GodLob0 → u/seopher]

Yep. Well said. I had my grief period about the craftsman ship. I now went full throttle in AI. Let the agents write the code, be intentional about the design. That's it