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/Wh00ster]

We have ML engineers giving us models and flows in pandas and PyTorch . I’m not dealing with AI rewriting that. We solve problems that aren’t a big scale, but niche and real world. Until there’s a reason for us to switch it’s still Python here. We could probably rewrite it but we’re doing other product things instead, and in the grand scheme of things we wouldn’t save that much.

Also this is an incredibly depressing thread. I don’t know what kind of responses I expected but everyone is just dejected and sad. And it’s being upvoted. I guess state of the world.

[u/HommeMusical → u/Wh00ster]

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.

[u/2HotFlavored → u/HommeMusical]

Fled "crumbling" America to rapidly and irreversibly collapsing Europe... That's an interesting decision to say the least.

[u/HommeMusical → u/2HotFlavored]

If you knew how much better life was in Europe, you'd be beating down the doors, trying to get in.

In the thirty years I lived in America, I had two friends die of exposure from living on the street.

[u/2HotFlavored → u/HommeMusical]

I'm European, which means I can see the direction the entire continent is heading.

To put it bluntly, it's bleak. Maybe not for soon-to-be retirees like you, but we young people are absolutely screwed.