I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me, joy. I spent a little more than an afternoon writing a parser to parse a new ad-hoc file format I created to represent the IDs (class name and ID names) I will use in my CSS, and it was just fun. Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what? So I can dig directly back into complicated actual engineering issues? Where would my breaks be?
Ironically I have a somewhat of a different view - I love rubber ducking and tinkering with LLMs. Sometimes they come up with a use case that I would not have thought of, but I would have liked to have maybe 2 weeks later. Other times it is nitpicking each others' code etc.
I think we are presented with a false dichotomy here, as you can use llm tools for menial tasks and code whatever scratches your itch at the same time. For me, I really do not enjoy writing any frontend, html, javascript, whatever; I just want to bring some website I need to light. I focus on other code and that is what brings me joy.
> Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what?
One reason would be to raise the ceiling of what your project can do within the budget of time and motivation you have. Or, as it often happens, to be able to finish the project at all.
I write for fun, to organize and articulate my thoughts, and I love doing that in vim. The same is true for note taking (I just write .md files and sync them with syncthing). I also like working neomutt. It's just fun working with (relatively) simple, stable tools that seem to grow on you over time for every day tasks. Writing code is just one of those things.
> It’s not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times).
This sounds very strange.
I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's very good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.
We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.
To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.
Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task from my backlog.
There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.
If it truly brings you joy we have hat covered: it's a simple enough hobby!
The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't see demand for those decreasing.
AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100% bringing me joy in this way.
I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.
I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me, joy. I spent a little more than an afternoon writing a parser to parse a new ad-hoc file format I created to represent the IDs (class name and ID names) I will use in my CSS, and it was just fun. Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what? So I can dig directly back into complicated actual engineering issues? Where would my breaks be?
Ironically I have a somewhat of a different view - I love rubber ducking and tinkering with LLMs. Sometimes they come up with a use case that I would not have thought of, but I would have liked to have maybe 2 weeks later. Other times it is nitpicking each others' code etc.
I think we are presented with a false dichotomy here, as you can use llm tools for menial tasks and code whatever scratches your itch at the same time. For me, I really do not enjoy writing any frontend, html, javascript, whatever; I just want to bring some website I need to light. I focus on other code and that is what brings me joy.
> Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what?
One reason would be to raise the ceiling of what your project can do within the budget of time and motivation you have. Or, as it often happens, to be able to finish the project at all.
I write for fun, to organize and articulate my thoughts, and I love doing that in vim. The same is true for note taking (I just write .md files and sync them with syncthing). I also like working neomutt. It's just fun working with (relatively) simple, stable tools that seem to grow on you over time for every day tasks. Writing code is just one of those things.
> It’s not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times).
This sounds very strange.
I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's very good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.
We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.
To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.
Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task from my backlog.
There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.
[0] code using Claude
> We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.
Author here. It was what I assumed would be a fairly simple task, fixing some duplicate closing frontmatter delimiters.
I think the LLM took a wrong turn early on, and then just spiralled. It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
If it truly brings you joy we have hat covered: it's a simple enough hobby!
The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't see demand for those decreasing.
AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100% bringing me joy in this way.
I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.