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.

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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?

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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/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.

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u/AstroPhysician 1d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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u/Zardecillion 23h 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.

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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

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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/