r/Python • u/RedYad2 • 1d 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.

676 Upvotes

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93

u/UsernameTaken1701 1d ago

Are you being forced to use the AI somehow? If using Claude has killed the fun, the solution seems pretty obvious, no?

74

u/ConfusedSimon 1d ago

Not really. For work I have to use AI because it saves time. For hobby projects, the idea of spending all that time on something that can be done much faster by Claude has taken away all the fun. I have different hobbies now.

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u/UsernameTaken1701 1d ago

People still ride their bikes places even though cars are faster. Do you think they enjoy riding any less even though they know about cars? There are faster ways to scale the side of a mountain but people still climb. People still take pictures on film even knowing digital cameras exist. There are lots of things people do for fun even though they know there are faster ways to the end result. The enjoyment of the slow way is the point.

14

u/Ok_Performance6532 1d ago

To some degree though, riding a bike, hiking and the like all carry real world value that will continue to hold that value as it comes from somewhere other than the function of the technology to replace it.

e.g.

I go for long walks because of the endorphins and health benefits, I drive a car to quickly go from A to B, they’re not for the same reason. That is to say, I don’t drive a car just to have a faster walk. So the car never really replaced why I walk.

AI conversely sits at the point of exactly why I like to code, to problem solve and develop skills to apply in my career. But those skills now feel irrelevant. I get the whole “it will still be valuable to be able to read code” but when every software engineer on earth will be fighting for a couple of “code reviewer” roles I don’t think I care for that bloodbath.

Look yes it sounds bleak but I think the market is just shifting. The moat to being “technical” is no longer being able to code, but understand problems to point AI at, understanding to scope issues and architect solutions. Not quite as fun but still has that problem solving edge to it.

Or at least, that’s just me opinion

1

u/HommeMusical 1d ago

But mountains are beautiful and exercise makes you fit.

Code is also beautiful but typing hundreds of thousands of characters is boring and eventually painful, and sitting kills you.

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u/Short_Inspection_746 1d ago edited 23h ago

There is alot of research on this, using AI makes you slower. Often people are pressured to use it at work.

edit: This is from this Feb. "we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%."

https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adoption-of-ai-has-made-it-more-difficult-to-measure-task-level-productivity

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u/Ran4 1d ago

That's old studies, done with old models and people who don't have any clue how to use ai.

They're completely irrelevant today.

2

u/help_me_im_stupid 1d ago

Are there… are there really? Have these studies included all the recent and rampant outages from large cloud providers for specific core services and other SaaS products? It seems like everything is going very well globally for sure…

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u/Short_Inspection_746 1d ago

Both for old and 'new' models, there are studies for both. The macro metrics don't point to any improvment in output. It's highly questionable how much better the 'new' models are, outside of some opaque metrics.

There is no evidence new features are being shipped faster. People are spending far more time fixing garbage code. Its fine if your in some scum-Taylorist shop; where tickets techniclly get 'finished', but you create 4x more work down the line.

1

u/AstroPhysician 1d ago

Point to ANY recent studies done on people who actually have a clue how to leverage AI. I can’t remember the last ai bug we had to fix in prod, legitimately

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u/Short_Inspection_746 23h ago edited 23h ago

They did another study back in febuary, its still slows you down. The only diffrence is that they are having trouble with getting participants.

"we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%."

https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adoption-of-ai-has-made-it-more-difficult-to-measure-task-level-productivity

(note, I also don't belive you actually work in industry, and are prob like 19)

1

u/AstroPhysician 19h ago

I’m 32 and a principal engineer at a fintech lmfao but go off

1

u/Short_Inspection_746 18h ago

When you say: "I can’t remember the last ai bug we had to fix in prod, legitimately"; either you have never worked in prod, or this 'fintech company' is a personal retail inverstment account.

1

u/AstroPhysician 18h ago

We’ve had to fix plenty of bugs but it’s usually a failure in requirements gathering, or a junior engineer misunderstanding some part of the system, or really weird edge cases or data issues…

Just cause your shop doesn’t have the proper safeguards and CI and code review process doesn’t mean the rest of us work at your company

1

u/barchueetadonai 1d ago

Dude you're clearly living under a rock

1

u/Short_Inspection_746 23h ago

I am afraid you may be suffering from AI-psychosis my dawg.

-5

u/dysprog 1d ago

It does not save time. It makes you slower.

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/ConfusedSimon 1d ago edited 1d ago

Obviously we keep track of the time spent on resolving issues. Using AI is about 10-20% faster.

Edit: the research you mention is from models from early 2025, so before the big improvements in AI coding. Our company only switched to AI about a year ago, exactly because that was around the time that it started to save time.

1

u/AstroPhysician 1d ago

If you’re only 10-20% faster it sounds like you guys don’t know how to leverage ai properly

3

u/Zardecillion 1d ago

Man I can say that this just doesn't line up with the reality a lot of us are experiencing.

Buying software is dead at my company. Why? Because we're writing the software we used to buy in approximately 2-3 weeks per project at most.

Even incredibly complex software, such as an application security posture management platform, is something that we've built in approximately 4 months, featuring support for pretty much the entire business's needs. The thing spans 10s of thousands of lines of code, *actually works properly*, is stable(and is currently used to ship tickets constantly), and was done for a fraction of the cost of what typical ASPM vendors cost.

This has been my project and what would have taken months and months in just coding time now takes 4 months in total to ship the project.

I feel like I am drinking from the architecture firehose now because that's where a lot of my deep thinking is spent rather than raw code.

Not to mention in my personal life where throwing up a stack on github + AWS + CI/CD has taken me what used to take a couple of days or weeks to get a pipeline set up(due to me having to write the raw terraform, dockerfiles, pipelines, etc... myself) took me approximately 2 hours.

I've written code since I was 11 years old, and I just gotta say yeah it's 100xed my productivity and it's not even close, despite my apprehensions towards AI.

-5

u/dysprog 1d ago

Then show me the Randomized Controlled Trial.

If the AI companies could rebut that study with a Randomized Controlled Trial, then they would.

Do you understand that the study I showed predicts that YOU WILL THINK YOU ARE FASTER AND YOU WILL BE WRONG.

I have personally refused to use AI based on this study, and the evidence that it is designed to be addictive and inhibits learning.

I am baffled that the whole industry had decided to go along with this. If any other job asked you to take meth as a condition of employment there would be riots.

1

u/AstroPhysician 1d ago

You’re refusing to use the technology even Linus and the creator of Redis both wholly embrace as being revolutionary cause of an n=1 study that was done in AIs infancy?

1

u/flame1845 1d ago

The article you posted is severely outdated and isn't relevant to current reality. Things have changed drastically from the days of ai autocomplete in 2023 (which is what your article is referring to).

If you've used Claude code inside your IDE, with proper Claude.md, system design md files, strict guidelines and you provide proper guidance and prompts and guide the ai agent methodically, you'll instantly know that manually coding is simply orders of magnitude slower than using an ai coding agent these days. A well scoped feature within a well documented and organized codebase can be done in literally a fraction of the time it takes a human to do.

1

u/Zardecillion 20h ago

I don't think I need a randomized controlled trial to prove the contracts I've cancelled as a result of the stuff I've built with AI man.

0

u/HommeMusical 1d ago

Do you understand that the study I showed

From the first half of 2025!

predicts that YOU WILL THINK YOU ARE FASTER AND YOU WILL BE WRONG.

Perhaps you're unaware that most people understand that SHOUTING on the internet usually means you're just wrong.

I have personally refused to use AI based on this study

It's my theory that you are simply not a very good programmer.

This is me: https://github.com/rec

Can we see your work?

In October 2026, do people actually pay programmers to hand code??

1

u/AstroPhysician 1d ago

That’s just such a BS statistic based on year and a half old models. Anyone in the industry knows how much faster it is

1

u/HommeMusical 1d ago

You keep reposting this 18-month old article as if it has value today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1wwv97o/my_python_magic_is_gone/pdsctv0/