> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
I used to find joy in knowing how things worked inside-out. Whether it was Postgres, or browser engines, or some detail about compilers... I used to find joy in developing the little techniques that made programming NOT building on quicksand. There was satisfation in what you had done being robust.
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like.
When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers?
It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face).
I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
When I would code by hand I often found I was concerned with the house of cards in my head, am I remembering the right variable names, did I forget something that would lead to an exploit, etc. Now I can direct the LLM to do the work and the skill is split between having an understanding of the interactions of the technologies, choosing tech that will be less of a pain to update/migrate. You can even put some LLM-bow grease into finding more efficient approaches catching corner cases etc. And just by asking I can have test frameworks setup, I can drill into some pet peeve and it takes less time. Now we still have lots of ops moments, like the radicel distributed git forge forgetting to use encryption for private repos, and I run into this class of problem in my own casual LLM use, but that's where our taste and attention to detail powers need to be spent in this modern developer world.
I think one thing that troubles me is that I so far have gotten quite far by 'caring about the little things'.
Now we live in a world where this feels, for the most part, unsustainable to keep up with.
When directing LLMs to code something up, it's still occasional useful to have the knowledge and experience of those little things earned over years, but at the same time 1) it seems like I run into fewer opportunities to add to that experience and 2) it seems like you can often just prompt LLMs to 'grill' a design a few times, it will probably surface some of the most important tradeoffs
Yes, the grilling part is where the LLM energy drain is for me, I haven't released any of the software I've been working on yet because they lack polish in my opinion. They may have nobel goals, but no point unleashing more slop on the world. Often when I ask for a correction something new breaks, or it reveals the next corner the model and I didn't think about. I've seen the models come a long way in a short time.
I'm tinkering and paying by the token for deepseek flash picked for its economy and using it to teach myself and form opinions on languages and frameworks that are new to me. It's hard to describe the worth of these opinions, but I think they're important, kinda like why I read a lot of HN looking for morsels of sentiment around the tech industry as represented here.
hangrybear666 · · focus · HN ↗
I've definitely always enjoyed the end-result but only for the fact that it proved I have overcome challenges and slowly but steadily inched one step closer towards mastery. Both are now gone, since mastery is not required and challenges are absent except the soul draining exhaustion of reading markdown all day. Now I'm just producing outcomes for my boss, rather than my own fulfillment. The journey has become a farce, I will ride this out and make my money but I don't care about it much anymore.
That being said in my free time, as in Hobby I am doing pentesting manually for fun. Because productivity is irrelevant for my hobbies, so I can still keep inching towards mastery and overcome challenges, at least on days where my job leaves any trace of surplus energy at the end of the day.
ipsod · · focus · HN ↗
It does feel a bit like building on quicksand, but coding has always been that way for me. Well, less so with embedded than webdev, but still.
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
Pardon my lack of creativity but I'm not even sure what mastery with the new tools (LLMs) would look like. When you are so abstracted from the details and don't have to know anything, what _is_ mastery? (I am not asking rhetorically and if people have overcome this thought I would be interested in hearing from them.)
Knowing how to ask a machine questions in the right way? Playing as a manager in control of non-human developers? It all sounds really silly and something that is difficult to aspire to (and I can't imagine explaining my job to others with a straight face). I think I find it even more egregious because it's all built on paying rent to the LLM operators.
It's not that I don't enjoy results in their own right sometimes but I think I am definitely in the 'this is giving me an identity crisis' camp.
sellmesoap · · focus · HN ↗
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
I think one thing that troubles me is that I so far have gotten quite far by 'caring about the little things'.
Now we live in a world where this feels, for the most part, unsustainable to keep up with. When directing LLMs to code something up, it's still occasional useful to have the knowledge and experience of those little things earned over years, but at the same time 1) it seems like I run into fewer opportunities to add to that experience and 2) it seems like you can often just prompt LLMs to 'grill' a design a few times, it will probably surface some of the most important tradeoffs
sellmesoap · · focus · HN ↗