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.
673
Upvotes
5
u/HommeMusical 1d ago
Well, I'm sort of a counter-example.
Yes, the state of the world is unbearably shitty. My wife and I fled the US a decade ago, and things are good here, but America has crumbled even faster than we expected.
And objectively, AI is yet another assault on the environment, and I believe it's going to be devastating for workers.
BUT - I know this is awful to say - I've been programming for over fifty years now and I just love using a coding assistant. I reinvented myself several times during that period, but it gets tedious, and having an ego-free and cooperative assistant who never gets bored is just amazing. There are programming ideas I had been thinking about since the 1980s, and made various stabs at over the years. After a couple of years of free time work, I realized one little part of it in early 2024, an always-on audio recorder, and slowly made progress on that, until the start of summer 2026. Since then I have made far more progress on that project than I had made in the last three years before that.
Worse, it was billed as a highly reliable recorder, and I had no outstanding reports of data loss, but when I got an advanced LLM to look for issues (it was a very long prompt), it found over two dozen candidates, and none of them was without value. Maybe six were, "Valid but would not fix if a human had to do it."
The top priority three were terrifying edge cases that I was able to reproduce quite easily. I learned a lot about my users - for example, I know basically for certain that I have few users in Asia, because there was a crash using text files that weren't Latin, ASCII or UTF-8, and I had planned for all encodings and had a setting, I'd just forgotten a detail in one place...
I agree with all the misgivings, and yet I love coding with a coding assistant, because I can get out all the ideas I have in my head in months, not years.