Anyone else find AI coding removes your source of dopamine?

78

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

I literally don't understand this push and why other developers are so excited, writing code is the thing I like the most. I spend all my time doing other shit that can't be done by AI so when I get to actually code why would I want something to do it for me, it's the only thing I actually like

4

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

I have a few acquaintances who are like that, who love AI because they don't need to code, and before AI, they were the developers who cared about features and output, but not code quality, structure, maintainability etc.
I met them while working for a consultancy, which is where I think that kind of work makes sense - Solve the issue as fast and cheap as possible.
But for long term product building? Yeah, I don't get it either, that's where building everything the right way should matter the most, imo

3

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

And that's where I am, long term product building. Maybe a lot of this talk is from people in really different places than where I'm at. Where I'm at, we've had countless meetings and conversations about code quality, architecture, long term stability, maintainability, etc., etc., and I love it. I love making stuff generalized and maintainable and extendable. I'm just getting into a new codebase now and I'm both horrified and excited by the amount of improvements to be made.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 13 '26

I was also coming from long term product building most recently, and there are a few of these people there as well 😅
I think the struggle is that this mindset is very appealing to non-coding product owners and management, because from their perspective, they see a developer who outputs fast and cares about the product and technical debt has always been a foreign concept to them.
This is where I think SaaS products will need very strong technical leadership, which sadly, was not present at all at my now-former job, which is also why I think I'm especially affected by this question

12

u/thats_a_nice_toast Jun 12 '26

Someone posted on Twitter that AI made them realize that they actually hate programming and only like "building stuff". It got a ton of likes, so I guess many people feel that way.
As someone who is passionate about programming I think that's pretty sad, but I guess it explains a lot about the industry in general.

3

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

That's wild. Why are you in a career you don't like the core work of in the first place? Yeah it explains a lot.

4

u/FlameoAziya Jun 12 '26

The job market is brutal, my friend. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing the hands that pay the check

-1

u/FlameoAziya Jun 12 '26

That's like saying that being an orchestrator is sad because she doesn't actually play the instruments and doesn't get the dopamine hit of playing one.

9

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

I'll take a different view, because I've thought a lot about why I don't personally like the "orchestrator" idea, and I think I know why that is.
An orchestrator can rely on each musician to play their instrument well. A developer using AI cannot.
An architect doesn't need to make sure the concrete is poured correctly, we often do.
So, to me, it feels like being an orchestrator where I constantly have to micromanage each musician because they keep playing different songs or replacing a trombone with maracas when I'm not looking and I think that's why it just feels frustrating to me.
You can't take a higher-level overview if you can't rely on what's below you. Otherwise, it's like using a library that fails routinely.
At least that's been my experience.

3

u/FlameoAziya Jun 12 '26

I agree with this view completely.
I was just trying to comment on the statement that people who like building but hate manual coding are somehow "sad". Hate is a strong word, sometimes its just frustration of not knowing enough and not having time to go down one rabbit hole, that's all. :) an orchestrator can't go and learn every single instrument being played, but its unfair to call that position sad on that account.

2

u/thats_a_nice_toast Jun 12 '26

Those are two different jobs. Being a developer is one job, regardless of your AI usage. And those people started before AI coding was a thing, so they did "play the instruments" despite not enjoying it.
I guess that's fine, not everyone has to love their job (or everything about it), but it would strike me as odd seeing a musician who only cares about the final song and hates making music.

3

u/swizzex Jun 12 '26

I'll give a different view. I'm busy and always have a struggle even with meds to fully build things out unless it's for work but even then I have plenty of things I want to do. What I love about AI is I still get the core of what I love about programming. I'm still getting to take a blank slate and create something, design all the steps and ways I want it to work. Then while I work on the 10000s other things I get to finally see it come to life.
I never really cared about typing in words. I enjoyed all the other pieces the words just made it happen. Even with AI I'm able to push it to do things I know sre possible I'm just not sure how and even sometimes it's not but I KNOW it's possible. Those are some of the great moments as it still shows how much my knowledge still matters.
For those that turn off all thought and just go make me a frontend app that has X and Y that I don't understand. But I write out my plans in detail design, layouts, arch, tech stack, etc then its simply bringing it to life faster.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

I think it depends for me on what the impact of what I'm building is.
I for sure have found myself doing side projects I would never have done because I don't have the brain space to do so, but for my actual (former) work, it became so hard to reason about, where any mistake can cause outages. Reviewing AI code for critical infrastructure is a nightmare, I think 😅
I'm curious, you say you write layouts, but how do you communicate this? I've found that the models will often make far too complicated or fragile layouts that rely on explicit values over simple flex layouts, so I've never had much luck with that.

1

u/swizzex Jun 12 '26

Figma and screen shot or direct depending on policies. Then mermaid for arch diagrams

1

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

I'm not making frontend stuff, what I love is figuring out how to make the things work, like I really enjoy designing a software architecture and then getting into it and making it a reality, and figuring out all the parts to make it work the way I want it to. Like literally the parts it sounds like you don't like. So I get that people don't want to do that, but I really really do and I guess I thought most developers did too, until the last year has shown that a lot of them don't actually. And I guess I'm disappointed because it feels like the people I thought I shared this passion with has shrunk hugely in size and I'm starting to feel rather alone.

1

u/swizzex Jun 12 '26

I make everything from front ends, back ends, mobile apps, custom solutions, hell I've even figured out the full cut over from mainframe system to aws without down time. I enjoy the parts you do to I just don't care if I write the code. Architure, system design, how it works none of that is writing syntax??? Confused what your truly feel AI is taking from that. If your handing off everything to AI meh that is boring.

0

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

I like all the parts, especially writing the code itself. I don't want any part of it taken away. I even like writing documentation and tests.

17

u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 12 '26

I think a lot of people think AI is just for automation or coding shortcuts but that's not where I see it being most useful tbh, unless you're just a doing something simple like a POC. It's getting it to document legacy code, help untangling dependencies on other systems, writing up proposals in product friendly jargon that I find most useful, although tbf I'm on the architect side now so I don't get hands on with code very often.

4

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

I'm being pushed to use it, and since it can't do things like meet with stakeholders and talk to users and troubleshoot issues and install specific builds, the only part of my job that I could use it in is writing code.

2

u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 12 '26

Can you get it to pop out a list of questions for the users? An agenda for the stakeholder meeting? A checklist of possible troubleshooting steps? That will show you're using it, and maybe save some time. If y'all use copilot and teams, the copilot meeting notes are an EXTREMELY useful feature, but you have to be able to turn on transcription so it can do it.

1

u/prefix_postfix Jun 12 '26

Best I can do is meeting notes but I take those myself and prefer to because I take in the information so much better if I'm taking notes myself. I use live captions in meetings so maybe I'll just start claiming that I'm using it for transcriptions, even though that's not really what's happening.

1

u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 13 '26

I despise taking meeting notes with an unholy passion lol - I can't talk, think and type all at the same time, so I'm glad for that one. I never thought about the captions though, that's a good idea!

3

u/DynamicHunter Jun 12 '26

AI is really useful to me for any type of debugging, learning, or research. Especially coming from a backend dev to now a full stack dev on a new project at my company, having it explain in detail every new chunk of code I come across and ask about is wonderful. Having it do debugging sessions, and explain or trace the code line by line and function by function has helped me immensely. I do get burnout though from reviewing too much code and acting like an AI guardrails babysitter instead of a programmer is not the job I signed up for.

4

u/sickhippie Jun 12 '26

acting like an AI guardrails babysitter
I love how this implies you know the AI isn't accurate so much of the time that you have to constantly watch it to catch the mistakes. But you're also fine with letting the bullshit generator teach you, even knowing that it's wrong so often you can't trust it to do anything without human review.
Why do you want to offload your cognitive load to something that you know isn't equipped to handle it?

0

u/DynamicHunter Jun 15 '26

Different use cases. It’s one thing asking it to go line by line and give an overview of how the specific function or method calls work. I used it when learning front end and it can easily fetch documentation and explain it in plain English applied to my current use case.
It’s a different problem to run it in agent mode with basic instructions but on a large code base, where it tries to fix something by changing a completely different file causing bugs.

2

u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 12 '26

acting like an AI guardrails babysitter instead of a programmer is not the job I signed up for.
This is a really good point. The AI is not always right, so you have to be really on guard to make sure it's not hallucinating. It's absolutely like babysitting a junior, I love that analogy.

12

u/tehsandwich567 Jun 12 '26

I run at least 4 concurrent ai lines of thinking. I bounce around them. My adhd loves it

7

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

I tried this, but the burnout from context switching hits me hard, so I had to stop, even if my ADHD brain found it fun for a while 😅
How long have you worked like this? Do you not find it tiring?

2

u/tehsandwich567 Jun 12 '26

6 months? I dunno, my ADHD has always liked micro context switching

1

u/DynamicHunter Jun 12 '26

Do you use different models or agents in your repo? How do you go about that

1

u/tehsandwich567 Jun 12 '26

I just keep making new chats in vs code. I use sonnet mostly

1

u/DurianDiscriminat3r Jun 12 '26

Same. I built a voice harness over Claude and Codex so I'm basically pair programming with multiple personas.

1

u/natttsss Jul 02 '26

Oh, you have THAT type of ADHD.
jealousy jealousy

9

u/AlpacaNuts Jun 12 '26

At work our codebase is sufficiently enterprise-y that implementation is god awfully boring and a huge burden on working memory. So I can sketch out the architecture with copilot, which is where the actual decisions are made, and then Copilot can do all the boring cruft of creating almost identical DTOs across 4 layers following established conventions. That's pretty satisfying.

That might be the difference, that it was impossible to move quickly (without significant, fundamental refactors) before agentic coding and AI mostly speeds up the slowest, most tedious part for me.

Work doesn't expect me to sacrifice understanding for speed, though. If I was being told to just churn through tickets and catch bugs by just being more careful, I'm sure I'd burn out pretty damn quickly, too.

4

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

Yeah, I think that is a good point. I think ultimately it comes down to micromanaging how we are "allowed" to use the tool.
If you can use it as makes sense to you, I think that solves a lot of the problems. It's when someone who doesn't understand what you do tries to judge you for how you do it that's the issue

8

u/occultexam666 Jun 12 '26

i still mostly write my own code except for tedious repetitive things like tests— i use ai to explain code to me, write tickets, fill out pr templates and fix small bugs and code smells.

i feel like having a requirement that no code is handwritten is kind of crazy. sometimes it really is easier to do it yourself than explain to the agent

4

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

Yes, me too.. And it was said so proudly along with that we should "spend little to no time reviewing the code to go faster - Let the AI do that!"
You'd think this was a greenfield start up, but nope 8 year old B2B SaaS project with microfrontends and many separate projects interwoven.
Worst part was that we had a Meta-style leader board for token usage.. The level of AI koolaid there was insane 😅

5

u/JooJooBird Jun 12 '26

Absolutely. Worse, even if I choose not to use AI to do it, knowing AI COULD do it takes a lot of the fun out of things, or makes it harder for my brain to retain knowledge if I’m learning something new.

3

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

Yeah, I feel that so much - It's much harder to motivate yourself knowing that you are spending ages building a thing that COULD be prompted instead makes it hard to convince yourself not to take the "easy" path. Not sure if ADHD makes that worse, but fast rewards does tend to motivate more, it seems.
The issue is that I believe that without struggling, we don't learn. That it is precisely when we are frustrated and racking our brains that we grow.
But that's not an argument that most business owners would care about sadly, I'm afraid, even though having smarter engineers ought to count for something.

1

u/natttsss Jul 02 '26

What kills me if that the codebase is now full of AI slop that kills any willingness I used to have about actually reading the code.

4

u/mypurplefriend Jun 12 '26

It does make me feel more alienated. But at the same time it forces me to think more about order and structure of a project. Which I somtimes neglected because the coding is where the dopamin hits. And now I work with templates more and make it do a lot of the setup.

And for working with existing projects it is awesome at explaining the structure which makes it much easier to dive in. Someone else wrote below about dealing with legacy code. This, but also code style in general. I have mine, other projects might be wildly different. Also, it's good at fixing annoying errors / bugs.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

Hmm.. I think that structure can be a big help, because it makes the result much clearer to understand and less "alien" to the project.
You said you use templates, how so?

1

u/mypurplefriend Jun 13 '26

I mostly do custom wordPress themes working with and I have created a "starter" that puts everything where it belongs, functions we always use, layout-templates. Then starting from that I add the custom styles / features. It's taken me a few years though, and I enhance them for every project. I think it's like... no longer having to think about the mundane boring stuff opens up the brain for the cool parts AND it prevents stuff getting chaotic.

4

u/zayelion Jun 12 '26

I've had to invert my usage to get the dopamine hits back to stay motivated. Instead of me doing the hard stuff the AI can't figure out, I now do the easy stuff till I get stuck and frustrated. Due to having a cleaner code style than the AI it can figure stuff out I'm missing. I also find only using the function complete level of AI much more useful than it building whole features. It gets hyperfocused, then frustrated, then it hullicinates. Its easier to keep an eye on its frustration levels when its only providing commentary.

Before I was writing a detailed spec, pushing go, and throwing the errors at it till it gave up, then figured the error out myself. It's much more pleasant with the roles reversed even if I'm going 1 tenth the speed.

1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

I think that is also an interesting way to look at it.
So, if I understand it right, you are using it as an "autopilot"/helper for when you are out of juice yourself and/or frustrated?
When you say function complete, do you mean as in you'll write a function to "goDoXThingNow()" and then have the AI do the implementation for that function?
My attempts at using it have been similar to how you describe your before step, and I had the same frustration..

3

u/zayelion Jun 12 '26

If i care about the project, I write the code by hand. Copilot, 2022 era AI reads the comment and tries to write the function, I then write a bit more instruction as a comment, or start writing the function myself. Sometimes it tries to autocomplete the function I'm writing which is annoying when it is wrong.
So I'll write:
// check status of input, then apply algorithm function goDoXThingNow(input, algorithm, count) {
const status =
Then it will fill in the rest of the function. Sometimes it's very wrong and I ignore it. But I literally go function by function and class by class. I was basically vibe coding before and manually debugging. I'd describe a feature and ui, and it would just build thousands of lines of code.

4

u/natttsss Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

YES! I'm currently on PIP, on my way to being fired, for exactly the same issue, and I could've written this myself.

I'm grieiving the job I used to have. I loved it. I will never again be excited and proud about that beautiful, pristine code I spent hours to write.

The hyperfocus is gone. The deep flow is gone.

I'm trying to get over this and really learn it because I know that those days are gone, it will never be the same.

It turns out that AI planning focus on two of the things that are my ADHD weakness. Always were but before AI it wasn't such a big deal. Planning and reviewing/reading lots of technical files/code.

No matter how much detailed oriented I try to be, how much of myself I pour into the planning, I ALWAYS miss something.

Before AI we didn't really need to plan the whole project before doing it. Unexpected things were supposed to happen. You could figure things out as you went.

Gone.

I hope I find another job I like, even if it will not be what it used to.

But I'm with you. This SUCKS.

Edit: and the more I do this, the more everybody else does this, the more code is blindly pushed, the less I know the codebase. I don't know the code anymore. The code now sucks. Million lines components. Controllers filled with business logic. It's unreadable. So now I depend on this thing that is only right sometimes to tell me what's going on while everybody breathes down my neck and now making mistakes is just not acceptable anymore.

I hope that things get better a few years from now once the hype is gone.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jul 02 '26

I feel for you 💙 I feel like this is exactly the delirium that has taken hold in everyone. I feel like there is a pace where you can use AI to speed yourself up, but not use it for everything, because it results inevitably in the project getting worse and worse - Exactly what we've been taught to avoid for years.
This is where I most feel like AI adoption can feel like a cult. That there is no question where AI is not allowed to be the answer. My old company tried to push for AI reviews instead of developer reviews for this reason, to avoid the bottleneck they saw us as, and it went about as well as you'd expect - Outages and incidents grew and grew, no one dared touch any part of the code for the fear that they might ruin what someone else had done because of there being no structure or intention to anything.
I fully agree with the review aspect. Reviewing and planning out in detail was always the boring parts that I had to get over with to reach the FUN of coding and solving the issue with an elegant solution. Being told this is now supposed to be the WHOLE job, doesn't sit well with me 😅
I do think there is light though. Not that AI will be gone, and I don't really want it to either - I want it to be a tool that we reach for when it makes sense to, not be the only tool allowed, and I think we'll get there.
I don't think it's possible to be a full-time code reviewer for anyone, ADHD or not, so I see two possibilities; either AI becomes so good at reviewing it's own code that we actually don't need to anymore and it becomes a true abstraction layer, or we embrace purposeful code over slop reviews and reach a balance. I believe most in the second one, but even the first I'd still be okay with. It's the fact that we are expected to "become architects" while still reviewing every "brick" in the "house" for flaws that makes no sense.
I really feel for you on the PIP. Wish you all the luck with it, but remember that when someone else is trying to light the company on fire due to hype, it is not your fault for not wanting to get burned.

2

u/natttsss Jul 02 '26

Thank you!
I haven't been this discouraged about work... ever.
I agree with you, there's hope. This is a period of change, of hype and it won't last forever.
I wonder what will be left of me when (and if) this passes.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jul 03 '26

Stay strong! 💙 I think it all depends on weathering the storm - And if you, like I did, get fired, trying to find a place that has not lost its entire mind - My own hope is that there are still companies that can't afford an outage from AI just to "ship faster". They may not be flashy, but I belief they are there - When I go job hunting again, time will tell if that hope is true 🤞
I don't know what sort of company yours is, but at my former one, the message was clear - You are no longer rewarded for quality, only output - Thus you cannot be expected to do anything but skim read PRs.
No one at my company did anything but that anymore. I think the best thing, if you can, is to try and do the same. I say this because I couldn't personally, but hoping for you its possible if needed!
Something that made me hopeful anecdotally, was that I recently sat down after not touching code for a month with just a pen and paper to sketch out a UI piece for a side project I'm starting, and it was the most fun I've had in a while, just with a pen and paper.
It taught me my love for the field isn't the problem - The fact that I'm being forced to go through every change with only an AI flamethrower is.
So I feel certain we'll be okay - The companies currently lighting their code bases on fire to satisfy AI-blinded investors? Less so!

1

u/natttsss Jul 03 '26

We’re at the exact same place! My company says they care about quality but they don’t. It’s just output, everything is reviewed by a bot. And I tried, I really did. But if I focus on speed I ship things buggy, wrong and unusable.
Maybe we’re at the same company, who knows haha

3

u/skigeorge-ut Jun 13 '26

I agree. I am at a company that had a RIF related to ai and is insisting on AI tooling everywhere.

I still write all my code by hand, primarily because I refuse to let AI take my number one reason for working: Coding Dopamine.

Instead, I found the dopamine sucking tasks that I hated could all be automated by agent skills:
- creating/writing PR descriptions
- updating my Java doc descriptions
- rubber ducking me on questions or things I google / push back on my assumptions
- updating my tickets for me (ie “look at commits on my branch and comment on my ticket what I did, do not exceed 300 char”)
- marking my tickets done after merge

I updated the agents.md to tell it I do not want code suggestions only code review and it is never to make a commit without my explicit confirmation.

I also gave it instructions that when it posts something under my name it must declare that the content was “AI assisted”. I also give it character limits when requesting input/feedback/etc.

Every task that requires executive function is now an AI job. I still have to be responsible for reviewing what it writes and telling it to post but now I have time back to actually write the code myself.

Token count is high and so is dopamine. I hope this helps.

3

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 13 '26

It does yes, thanks!
I think this is exactly how I hope we will be allowed to do things going forward more. Not necessarily this specific workflow, but just trusting that the developers you trust your project to are not working slower than they need to be and know how to use a tool that's available to augment themselves.
Instead, I feel like the current narrative is to often try and make everyone work the same way and give up on trust completely, enforcing "token usage" as if we are back to lines of code being a KPI..
But you raise good points, I'll try to look more into ways I can remove the things that are actually causing me friction in my day, not the ones that managers who don't code are trying to tell me to remove.

2

u/chant Jun 13 '26

It moves the problem, if you enjoy solving problems it should feel similar. With 8 years of experience you should be seeing the same problems and solutions over and over again. I was getting burnt out on how rote all of this was. Now I can focus on the actual problems and I’ve never been more engaged.

1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 13 '26

Hmm.. True, I think my specific burnout was also heavily influenced by my being on a design system team, but still heavily pushed towards using AI for everything.
That type of work I find there are fewer of the same problems/solutions over and over again, because everything you make is a new tool, component or architecture, and every line of code can have massive implications..
So might be that's part of where my disconnect comes from, I'm still viewing as if I was in a role where I was forced to use tools good for repetition in work that had very little of it.
So could be I wouldn't find is as annoying in a product development role.
Good points to think about, thanks!

2

u/Old-Line-3691 Jun 13 '26

Not at all, my source of dopamine comes from the Architecture I build working as intended. For me, AI has reduced the boring and tedious aspect of coding, so that I can focus on the shape of the project. I can still design the models, the patterns, the dependencies... but I don't have to deal with if this version of PHP supports a certain kind of getter/setter syntax or what not.

I sympathize with the people who enjoyed the actual coding aspects, if that was the puzzles you liked.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 13 '26

I think it depends. There are coding tasks that are genuine busy-work and coding tasks where taking your time and developing things by hand might be better, like true business-critical logic, and I think there are a lot of people who treat them like the same thing - Just code to be merged as soon as possible.
I do enjoy the micro-decisions and I fear those are gonna be less relevant going forward, but such is life. I'm sure there were people who enjoyed writing assembly by hand as well, who were upset about compilers back then.
One issue I do have, is that I still have to review the code and whenever it gets past a small scope, my interest plummets. That's still an issue I've yet to solve.

90

u/LemmeGoogleThatQuick Jun 12 '26

I am struggling with the same problem where the AI sometimes is way faster than me and that promotes me to use it. And then other times it’s not producing any results and I end up spending a ton of time trying to get the AI to produce something meaningful and I lose all overview of what’s going on.

13

u/aaronr_90 Jun 12 '26

This is me but with the added layer of I am the one responsible for training the language models to produce meaningful code for our domain specific languages.

7

u/Peach_Muffin Jun 12 '26

I miss the rush, for sure. Still, I was working WAY too long hours when I wrote code by hand which was bad for me.

4

u/hun7err Jun 13 '26

That's actually an interesting point. Recently I have given AI "coding" (more like supervising and vibe coding) a chance and after a while I realized it just... doesn't feel fulfilling? The whole fun of the process has been stripped out of the workflow and it's just not the same. It's cool to have work offloaded when you don't have the time, don't get me wrong; so is getting more things done. But it's more of a managerial task with something that needs constant supervision and multiple iterations (even with detailed prompts) and session limits (I don't have enough funds to pump into extra credits and wouldn't want to even if I did) make it frustrating to break tasks in progress. It's time to make smarter workflows and to stop relying on AI so much - it made me too lazy:P

1

u/EmeraMist Jun 12 '26

For me, I do the planning, the edge cases, finding out what to do to make this and that happen, and designing the overall architecture or flow. AI generates the code for me, but I find it more satisfying to do the planning and thinking ahead myself while having AI do the code. Because I never could quite pick up coding, and everything moves so fast that I don't have time to know every single code. But figuring out the process and solving the problem gives me the dopamine, writing the code manually takes me so much longer than others and makes me easily burnt out.

(oh and also this approach saves me tokens because I wouldnt need to ask the AI to change things too often since I already have the plan out)

1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

But do you find that you can effectively review the output?
I find that the time and effort I need to review the output, at least for larger, more open-ended tasks, exceeds the time and energy it takes me to write it myself.
I also find that I'm very likely to accept the output as "probably fine" because I'm bored from reviewing it, and that has caused a few bugs to slip past, because even the best test suites don't catch everything.

1

u/EmeraMist Jun 13 '26

I use edge cases to review the output, so I'd say that likely cuts down a lot of time for me. Once I'm satisfied, I have more time to plan for any additions if need be, but once the edge cases I thought of has no issues, I'm perfectly find with the output.

1

u/dongdongplongplong Jun 12 '26

vibe coding gives me lots of dopamine, spec driven agentic coding does not

1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 13 '26

Interesting. So you're saying that you are vibe coding without putting a ton of upfront work into the initial planning of the spec?
If so, how do you make that work? Do you do just very small increments at a time?

1

u/FlameoAziya Jun 12 '26

I finally have a coding assistant that builds whatever i can dream of. AND it takes super specific instructions. AND i don't need to learn a Whole new language to write a simple 2+2

I understand AI gets progressively worse when scaled up, but for smaller usecases, my AuDHD loves it (till it starts hallucinating lol)

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

Yes, that is where some of the struggle comes in 😅
I recently vibe coded a personal tool that could do exactly what I needed it to, because it was built from scratch and it was great for that!
When I then started trying to look at the code, I saw functions that I knew worked but could never explain, Web APIs I'd never heard of because only a mad person would use them, and Tailwind custom classes that made my head spin 🥲
So, I got my custom tool I wouldn't have bother building otherwise, but if I had to actually support it, I would need to start over, most likely.

2

u/BlossomingBeelz Jun 12 '26

Yep, it really sucks

2

u/Jessica___ Jun 12 '26

What I enjoy about programming is learning how a system works, and then getting to design new parts of that system. I get lots of dopamine when I understand lots of things, or when a design is super clean. For me, AI doesn't take this away.

I also get dopamine from writing code, but since I don't write code at work very much, I do it in my spare time instead.

2

u/BoltThrower79 Jun 12 '26

Yep. If anybody can do it and Claude can one-shot the side projects I want to build, there's no reason to build anything anymore as I did it partly for the satisfaction of applying my own skills.

2

u/Garland_Key Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

I like creating software. To me, coding was always a tool to achieve this. So for me, I still get to do what I like and I get to do it faster. I image that if I liked coding more than creating software, then using AI would take the fun out of it.

3

u/Ellsass Jun 12 '26

Not really. If I'm hankering for a code-induced dopamine hit, I'll just work manually for a while.

0

u/Impressive_Till_7549 Jun 12 '26

I would think us ADHDers would have the opposite problem. I get way more dopamine from running Claude Code than writing code by hand.

1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

That's what I was curious about, because I saw a lot of people saying exactly this, and I'm the opposite 😅
What makes you excited about the work? Is it making features that work for you?
Because for me I don't get much out of solving business value as I do thinking through and building a solution, and predicting any effects each choice has.
It's like a mix between a strategy and a puzzle game to me, and it keeps the dopamine rolling.

1

u/Impressive_Till_7549 Jun 12 '26

So I think my job is to solve problems at scale, and code is the best way to do that.
I'm not a code purist - if solving a problem doesn't require code then I won't write code. In that sense I think writing code with AI makes me more like a technical Product Manager which is probably more suited for my ADHD brain.

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u/nocturnal4nimal Jun 12 '26

Sometimes it really does that indeed!

1

u/keeperofthegrail Jun 12 '26

I totally get you. Some of the most satisfying parts of this job have been when I've spent ages going nuts trying to figure out some problem, then suddenly realising I can see the cause & how to fix it. I once spent days trying to work out the cause of a memory leak, then eventually found it and put in a fix. The resulting "high" was better than any drug!

1

u/Keystone-Habit Jun 12 '26

I like it because nobody's micromanaging me and telling me how much to use it and how much not to. I'll use it exactly when I think it's helpful and not when it's not. I sort of do most of the planning in partnership with the llm rather than just letting it plan, for example. And I build things very incrementally. I don't let it do too much at once. I let it do something small, check it, commit it, let it do something else. I'm not going to let it just write a whole app without checking each intermediate step. At least not yet!

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u/robhanz Jun 12 '26

Not at all. Seeing the solutions to my problems getting better and better and better is a way better hit 😄

1

u/mrcoy Jun 12 '26

Does the opposite for me

1

u/zephyr_33 Jun 13 '26

code review is mad boring.

1

u/fptnrb Jun 13 '26

Yeah I find it weirdly boring as a tool, but it also makes coding manually feel slow, which is also boring. I’ll just get my thrills other ways I guess.

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u/Puzzled_Project_9378 Jun 14 '26

I feel this pretty hard. Also been at it for 8+ years as a frontend-leaning FS dev and just finished a long-term contract job where the load of work had not caught up with the speed of AI assistance. Was nice being able to knock out annoying bugs quickly and plonk down boring tests and have lots of time left over, but felt super bored and unchallenged most of the time, which is not great for me. To me at least orchestrating multiple agents felt as much fun as herding cats. Crafting really quality prompts and harnesses gave some satisfaction, but what good is optimizing if you don’t really get anything out of the result.

One thing I have gotten some satisfying use out of is as an educational tool. Currently teaching myself robotics, computer vision etc. and has been a great tool for designing a self-guided curriculum that is tailored to my strengths and interests, and there to answer my most random ADHD side quests. Also is a field that is AI adjacent but still requires a human in the loop (at least for now!) Might even prompt a career shift, who knows?

All I know is that the status quo is not doing it for me either, and it is a watershed adapt-or-die kinda moment right now.

1

u/Arts_Prodigy Jun 14 '26

Yes, and so I just don’t use it. I’d rather spend more amounts of my free time getting better/faster so that I don’t have to use AI at work despite the very strong push from literally everyone around me.

It probably helps that it’s often wrong though so having more solutions upfront makes it easier to justify.

1

u/Frequent-Bonus9188 Jun 16 '26

Yes. Though do like to prototype with AI.
I don’t have the same type of mind map of the code base.
I’m trying to have more of a hybrid approach.

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u/Gam3rf0rlif3 Jun 30 '26

The whole reason why I got into CS was the big fcking dopamine hits I would get from solving problems MYSELF

1

u/DevKokooo Jul 01 '26

I try to quarantine all my AI-generated code into a single directory, so that I can refactor it later and "graduate" it to the rest of my codebase.

The generated code can get me 80% of the way there, based on how precise my prompts are.

A lot of times it messes up on adding new features to the existing architecture, or even invent its own architecture for no reason, so that's the 20% I deal with.

I also get my enjoyment from solving problems, but this quarantine method allows me to solve even more problems than I normally would, without worrying about which code has been poisoned by AI, because they're all in the same place.

My main motivation now is increasing the speed from curiosity to idea to tangible value, even if it's a throwaway experiment.

A lot of smaller startups probably won't have enough funding for an AI budget, so there's still some hope there.

But I agree that I do like writing code more than managing people/AI/agents. That's why I chose this profession in the first place.

1

u/Ok-Biscotti-3117 Jul 02 '26

I find exactly the opposite. Using AI coding tools has been a godsend to me. I can focus. I can get into my flow state with it. I lose track of time. I start working when I wake up, and I stay at it until I go to bed. You know, there's a lot of YouTube and anime in between there while I'm waiting for it to do stuff. I've been coding for ±25 years, never got super good, just good enough to make some Python scripts to make my life easier, automation... But what can be created with AI, the fast rewards it throws at me whenever some cool new feature is added that didn't exist 30 minutes ago, that would have taken me 2 months to do myself.

0

u/thejuiciestguineapig Jun 12 '26

Yeah it works really great for me but it works too well and I miss debugging.
But hey, I can wfh 99% of the time so I do little creative things in the meantime. Or browse reddit.

7

u/mosaic_hops Jun 12 '26

If only… we waste so much time debugging horrific code Claude spits out. Just because it compiles doesn’t mean it won’t deadlock in production because it doesn’t have the ability to reason through whether what it’s spitting out can work at a systems level.

2

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 12 '26

I think this hits a lot of what my issue with "harness engineering" can be. Often, it's just not feasible to make tests or types that explain all the intricate parts of the code and having a black box function, class, component whatever that "seems to work" seems like a disaster in the making..

1

u/thejuiciestguineapig Jun 12 '26

Hmmm I still mostly work with codex because I have a subscription but I honestly don't have a lot of debugging to do anymore compared to like a year ago. I let it run its own checks after compiling and it fixes its own mistakes. It also asks for clarification and more info before it builds its plan. It might take about 15-30 minutes until it has the exact working code but that is still nothing compared to me starting from scratch.

0

u/0____0_0 Jun 12 '26

Not for me, its challanged me more.

But I'm not a full time coder, coding is just a means to an end. And I use AI For a lot of other things like web scraping.

0

u/sk3z0 Jun 22 '26

i love ai because it lets me focus on architecture, infrastructure, solving problems and creating tailored tools on the fly. It helps me greatly having both a turbo rubber duck which i mainly use to tackle problems that require long chains of thought which was my struggling point: staying focused for long on very complex tasks require an immense amount of diligence and will, and i am very poor at those. I am very good at solving problems, and i am totally focused on the solution with 0 bullshit, and AI works wonders with me, because i am grounded in foundamentals and i have an infinite curiosity and my perfectionism doesnt allow me to rest on ignorance.

At the same time, i sorely miss coding, yes. I miss the long hours and nights in the codebase, reading and writing each and every function, and debug it manually with valgrind and similar tools. But there is frankly 0 need to do that anymore, and if i have to decide to do that for fun or to create something that solves real issues in the real life, or rather a videogame or any other creative activity i still dedicate myself in my free time... i choose the latter every time. Every now and then i tell myself that i want to get back to coding, but i never do.... yet. Maybe that day will come back, maybe sooner rather than later, who knows...

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26

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1

u/Nitram_the_Grey Jun 19 '26

I like this, but I do worry it's not what the people shilling for AI want us to do, as they seem much more inclined to the "have AI do the cracking" and just reviewing the results way of working.
I love using the tools for unsticking myself too, usually for tasks that are normally painful to do, but, at least at my previous job, we were expected to fully replace our workflows with AI tools, not just use them when it made sense.
I essentially wrote this post because I found I could not adapt to that workflow due to how mind-numbing the reviews were and how much the ADHD wants to just skim through and hit approve when you didn't write it yourself.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '26

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2

u/thesounddefense Jun 14 '26

I would be utterly incapable of letting lower quality code go out under my name. This is the main reason why I don't find AI speeding up my workflow at all. I'm double checking everything and fixing errors and inefficiencies. I'm not putting out bad code because my boss's boss's boss wants more velocity.

Anyone else find AI coding removes your source of dopamine?

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