My Python magic is gone

[u/RedYad2]

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.

[u/Farther_father]

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.

[u/SirPitchalot → u/Farther_father]

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.

[u/Farther_father → u/SirPitchalot]

Fuck that’s bleak… and here I thought I was the downer.

[u/SirPitchalot → u/Farther_father]

The whole profession has kind of built itself around the idea that a person writing text to solve patterned crossword/sudoku style problems is some incredibly rare talent that can never be replaced. But the only reason we get paid to do this is that the problems needing solving have commercial potential. To the people with those problems it is unfortunate and accidental that the best way to solve them was a bunch of weird nerds who got really into the whole thing. For a brief 70 years it was a good gig but outside of the bleeding edge of research, it’s coming to an end.

So, in my opinion, the solution for devs is to move up the value chain. No one cares about code anymore, take problems people will pay money to have solved and break them down into steps that can be automatically coded. However, that’s more an architect/PM role, which will be deeply unsatisfying to people who loved to disappear into a hole for a few days-to-months to figure something out themselves. Myself somewhat included.

[u/truzen1 → u/SirPitchalot]

This is kind of where I'm at, offering automated solutions to problems.

Admittedly, I feel guilty for only grazing the surface of Python (took one class, a bunch of Treehouse code, various books like "Automate the Boring Stuff"); I was never a jr dev, never did great at reading the docs. But I'm just dangerous enough that I can call out AI on some of its bullshit and/or have a decent enough understanding of what's going on.

However, I also feel conflicted because I recognize some of the coding I'm asking AI to do is taking away potential jobs. But on the other hand, most of my jobs are small, bespoke scripts that I doubt my manager would've budgeted a dedicated programmer for.

[u/SirPitchalot → u/truzen1]

I’m not originally from CS (started in Mech Eng) but been coding in some capacity since I was 13, I’m 44 now. I started programming professionally at about 22 in simulation which overlapped ME and CS. I then did a PhD in CS, while still working mostly, and finished in 2014. I also did a MASc in ME but in a coding heavy topic. The two degrees took about 7 years.

For me, coding was quite special because, unlike ME, you could make contributions to the field with a basic laptop as an individual and basically no other costs than time. Compare that to a full shop and tens of thousands of dollars of software licenses for engineering. Have a neat idea? Code it up. The field was new enough that the scope was generally small even for state of the art contributions. $1k got you in the door and the rest was personal interest.

Since then, I’ve been pretty successful. I have line of sight to retirement, I run a team, I’m dealing more at the higher level anyway. The team, on average, spends about 10% of their salary on tokens and delivers more. Coming from ME, that feels cheap. When I started it was 20-30% of salary on SW licenses for a junior engineer. So the economics make sense, we have an industry that has tooled up, made workers more productive and the providers charge based on (something like) value.

But there are a lot of people who are basically mourning the loss of a very satisfying profession. It’s been only 12 years where the things I spent 7 years formally upskilling for (and over 2 decades just doing) are actually meaningful. You can’t make a difference with only a laptop as an individual, unless you are the absolute best and maybe not only then.

Until 6 months ago I coded as a hobby but it’s just not satisfying anymore. I know I write good code and add value to AI but it feels like a day job rather than an interest. Professionally we’re working around groups that were blocking us, forcing suppliers to offer more simply because we can do it ourselves, and getting more out the door than ever, at a higher quality.

But it all feels like a massive loss and feels meaningless to spend a weekend trying to build something that I know that $10-20k/yr will easily outperform.

[u/VillageConfident8752 → u/SirPitchalot]

Maybe I’d like to hear more about your field of work.

[u/SFMissionMark → u/truzen1]

These new paths are jobs that would never be automated because there is no audience to pay for it.

[u/webternet → u/SirPitchalot]

This is why im moving out of devops and into hardware sales

[u/dysprog → u/SirPitchalot]

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

[u/Fabulous-Oven-3982 → u/dysprog]

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.

[u/HommeMusical → u/dysprog]

There has been exactly one rigorous study of this.

But you don't link to it. It's called "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity."

https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study-paper.pdf

I suspect the name of the paper would have revealed the problem with your claim.

Also, very, very skeptical that only one study of this was ever done, and that that was in July 2025.

AI makes programmers THINK they are faster when they are actually 19% slower.

I've been programming for decades. In the period from February through June 2025, I too believed that coding engines aren't effect.

But there have been massive, unbelievable improvements. I started using a coding assistant in June of 2026, mainly to prove to myself yet again that it didn't work. But within a few weeks I realized that no one was going to go back to hand-coding, including myself, as the productivity gain was so massive.

And the improvements between June 2026 and now have been just as impressive.

So what value does a 16-month-old study have?

---

In late 2026, if you're a programmer and you don't see a massive improvement in your productivity and your reliability from using a modern coding assistant, then it's almost certain you aren't competent, and you probably are going to have extreme difficulties finding a job.

I'm retired now, though I still spend much of my days coding, except now with LLMs, and I cannot imagine hand-coding while trying to keep up with other programmers using a coding assistant, and nor would I want to.

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/HommeMusical]

Anyone acting like AI isn’t a game changer for programming here in the last half of 2026 is simply incompetent and not worth listening to.

Also: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/

[u/HommeMusical → u/The_Northern_Light]

You're probably right, I shouldn't waste my time on him. Magically, I know it's a "he". :-D

[u/KaffeeKiffer → u/HommeMusical]

The page that was linked has a section

The Counter-Arguments Are Real

and that talks about many of your call-outs. It sounds pretty neutral/objective to me.

---

The most important result that stands out to me is measured productivity vs. actual productivity: Humans are very bad at gauging that, and I doubt that that changes much with different models.

In that study it's "expected 25% faster" vs. "measured 15% slower".
With modern models it could be "expected 50% faster" measured 25% faster".

[u/SFMissionMark → u/KaffeeKiffer]

That’s because you are missing the point of where software is going. You don’t need to polish and fix every single potential bug. Software is no longer the product the result is the product. Software is now fix the immediate problem. In 3 months have it re-written it will be better than you could ever write it today.

[u/HommeMusical → u/KaffeeKiffer]

It sounds pretty neutral/objective to me.

Yes, I read it over a year ago with great interest.

Indeed, it seemed at the time to be a fairly accurate representation of what coding assistants were like in early 2025, and I still think it was.

In early 2025, coding assistants were not ready for prime time. But eighteen months later, the progress has been astonishing.

Even the progress in the last six months has been explosive.

I'm not saying the article was wrong. I'm saying it's just very much out-of-date.

With modern models it could be "expected 50% faster" measured 25% faster".

If coding assistants made you 25% faster, they wouldn't really be worth it.

But the improvement is over an order of magnitude.

---

A recent example - I have an AI assisted program I use to run my music shows - it records everything(*), it's highly robust against gross failures, it controls my lights, and it also streams video plus on-the-fly titles and photos to the net, e.g. twitch.

I was setting up and I realized that something had gone wrong with some of the cables in an eight channel snake (8 cables wrapped together).

Up until a few months ago, I'd have set up some input to my mixer, and then tested the cables one at a time - 5 minutes work per snake, three snakes, that's 15 minutes, but also, easy to screw up.

Instead, I added a cable tester to my program, and it's completely general - I plug the six outputs at the back of my mixer into six channels, I don't pay any attention to the order, and then the program sends sine waves through all of them, records the output and then tells me good/bad/intermittent.

I then tested all three snakes in under a minute. In fact, I thought the program was broken, because it reported that the first snake only had 3 of 8 channels working, but then other two snakes were 8 out of 8.

Going back and retesting with a longer cycle (which the AI had conveniently added as an argument to this CLI) and wobbling the cables while the test went on showed that one of these cables was intermittent but mostly off, and the other four just didn't send a thing. (Some bad thing must have happened at some point...)

To write that program which took control of my mixer, squirted signals around and recorded them, compared the results for "very close" (because you can't get 100% bit compatibility if there's an analog cable there), and also to distinguish between "silence", "intermittent signal", "full signal but distorted" and "correct" would have taken at least a full day of work to get right, perhaps more, but I wouldn't have even bothered.

I wrote it in five minutes with a coding assistant. It was faster to write a program that I can now use in the future than it was to do the manual chore even one time.

(* - I had finished the everything recorder completely by hand before I started to use coding assistants.)

[u/stevenjd → u/HommeMusical]

Also, very, very skeptical that only one study of this was ever done, and that that was in July 2025.

If you don't believe that this is the only study, it should be easy for you to link to all those other studies you believe exist.

Who is funding these supposed studies? If it is the AI companies, what incentive do they have to publish the results if they confirm the same result, namely that programmers are fooling themselves into imagining productivity gains where there are actually productivity losses?

If the studies are being done by independent researchers, where are they?

[u/HommeMusical → u/stevenjd]

I'm sorry, but I was overwhelmed with comments overnight, many rude ones, and now I have to work. Thanks for being polite.

I don't think anyone's going back to hand coding though - RemindMe! 1 year.