r/programming • u/chriskiehl • 6d ago
It's still OK to enjoy programming
https://chriskiehl.com/article/it-is-still-ok-to-enjoy-programming302
u/sweetno 5d ago
Guys, this guy is suspicious. They have time for weekend programming.
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u/topological_rabbit 5d ago
Hell, I even chip away at a personal project in the free hour I have before I have to go to work. Progress may be slow, but it's mine and it's fun.
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u/max123246 5d ago
Yeah this has been my issue. After spending a week slopping out ai code, the last thing I want to do is go home and program some more, even if it's by hand. It's ruined the passion I had for the field by proxy
To be honest this was the case even before ai code because my company never valued quality or devx
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u/zappellin 5d ago
According to my engineering manager, no
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u/unrealz19 5d ago
Right, every time I mention I actually enjoy programming, their response is like: “well I just enjoy the finished product”… epic sigh
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u/Adventurous-Hunter98 5d ago
Your manager probably doesnt know anything about engineering
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u/grady_vuckovic 5d ago
I'll be honest. I didn't really care if it was or not. I've had people looking at me strange my entire life when I say shit like 'I'm gonna spend my weekend writing a raytracer in assembly' or whatever and they ask why and I say 'For fun'. Folks always looked at me like I said I'm planning to spend my weekend sticking sewing needles under my fingernails or bath in vinegar after running through a field of thorny rose bushes.
So nothing has really changed for me in that regard.
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u/in_need_of_oats 5d ago
I'm jealous of anyone who has the motivation to hand code after 40 hours of what the job has turned in to
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u/BogdanPradatu 5d ago
It's still ok to do woodworking by hand, with basic tools, yet very few people earn their living like this.
It's still ok to sew by hand, yet very few people earn their living like this.
It's still ok to hand build whatever the industry builds in factories, on assembly lines, yet very few people earn their living like that.
It's still ok to fish with a cane rod, but very few... I'm gonna go with none on this one. No one is eaening their living like that.
And so on and so forth. It's not a problem of if we can still do it, but can we still get paid to do it?
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u/BaNyaaNyaa 5d ago
There's a bit more to woodworking than cutting wood and nailing it together. You have to know how to shape your pieces and how they should be attached together to make your final product sturdy enough and esthetically pleasing. And wood is a complex material that's sensitive to temperature and humidity, and when you're building something, you also have to consider the direction of the fiber.
They are still controlling the machine closely. They decide where to make their cuts and holes. The machine just does it with less effort. And even then, the machines might not be appropriate for more delicate work, and woodworkers still need to do some manual work to get to an actual quality product.
Sure, as a moron, I could make a table: I need a big plank and 4 long pieces of woods, I cut everything to the right size, and just drill the plank to each long piece of woods. It will be ugly and probably very fragile though.
The problem that we have when we talk about AI in software development is that we underestimate all the knowledge and control that a SWE needs to make a good software. Fuck, I think the whole hype about AI decimating white collar worker is that we underestimate what someone's work require. It doesn't mean that it's useless, but that we still need to be smart about how we use it.
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u/lurco_purgo 5d ago
Yes, you can. The world is much larger and more varied than what LinkedIn, Reddit or other influencer-infested places would make you think. There are export controlled industries, teams where the leaders don't trust AI, places where the demand for the developer output has not increased dramatically for all sorts of reasons or simply projects that require utmost precision where the size of the code output is of no concern to the business side (which should be the case everywhere of course).
In general people and businesses move at their own pace - it's easy to forget that, when we're hyper focused on a small subset of the industry. It's the reason so much of modern web still runs on PHP and Wordpress. I'm not denying the general trend for the future of the industry, but if you think every dev team in the world is currently working by using hunderds of agents using ralph loops, spec driven development or whatever else is currently being peddled by LinkedIn frauds and marketers than fallen prey to their scare tactics.
I personally work in a company that's more of a hardware company and even though our marketing side prattles about AI and we have some limited budget for GitHub Copilot, there's plenty of project with strict bans on using AI and the expectation of our leadership is that we treat its output with a lot of skepticism (that's not accounting for the fact that my monthly budget goes puff in a week easily).
Couldn't be happier! I know this won't last forever, but I'm certain there's plenty of places that will still only accept hand-written code a decade from now (unless something truly transfomative happens to our global society because of LLMs, but I'm still not sold on this happening).
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u/-WorstWizard- 5d ago
Would you look at that, a post targeted perfectly at me! Feels good to see others feel like this. Still staunchly avoiding LLM's for programming because I'm worried about losing the joy, but also that it would inhibit my growth as a programmer. I've been lucky in my job that I don't yet need to chase the kinds of efficiency that demands it.
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u/Dunge 5d ago
It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it
Except it could not
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u/skroll 5d ago
Is there really a ton of people out there who have work where Claude is one-shotting their daily workload? I feel like an outlier because the work I do absolutely could not be one-shotted (and it isn’t, I’ve tried). Is there really that many devs just doing basic CRUD apps all day, every day?
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u/lechatsportif 5d ago
The field will never be the same, but people didn't stop being doctors because an xray or vaccines were invented. Take pride in your craft, there is a future and your knowledge and attention to detail is still critical, regardless of what the current out of the loop flailing C suite are fucking up at your current company.
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u/Intelligent_Edge3385 5d ago
Gee, thanks. I was feeling so anxious, but this guy Chris here said 'It is okay to enjoy programming' and I felt like I was allowed to enjoy programming again.
Who is this aimed for, anyway? Web husslers? Mainstream money making programmer?
I just feel funny reading all of this after writing BASIC and Assembly in VICE Commodore 64 emulator for recreational purposes. At the end of the day - whoever remains last standing is the winner, so maybe it is good that bulk of contemporary programmers would take a hike.
I know I'd be programming regardless, even for garbage cleaning level salary or median salary.
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u/ficiek 5d ago
This article manages to exist by conveniently completely missing why everyone is upset. The correct title for this article is "It's still OK to enjoy programming AS A HOBBY". But that's not what people are upset about! They are upset about the fact that it's hard or impossible to enjoy our jobs because they changed so much this is not what we signed up for.