> 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.
Well, I'm somewhat minded to agree with you, but they are fast enough, cheap enough and don't get bored of tedious work, which makes them passable at many things. Maybe.
I feel caught between two worlds, I know people both very 'for' and very 'against'.
The business is very keen for people to use them to go faster.
For non-trivial changes, output so far does not meet my quality standard and I tend to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, probably more than I would have spent doing the work myself. This being much more boring, I hasten to add.
Their comments suck so I feel like I have to go in and rewrite them all.
Maybe I should just let go of the quality standard and accept that in exchange for steaming ahead at full speed, but I'm reluctant (and not just for me, there are also coworkers who I feel like I would be letting down).
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.
Rumple22Stilk · · focus · HN ↗
They can build things, but it's all terrible really. Their "ideas" are terrible.
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
I feel caught between two worlds, I know people both very 'for' and very 'against'. The business is very keen for people to use them to go faster.
For non-trivial changes, output so far does not meet my quality standard and I tend to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, probably more than I would have spent doing the work myself. This being much more boring, I hasten to add.
Their comments suck so I feel like I have to go in and rewrite them all.
Maybe I should just let go of the quality standard and accept that in exchange for steaming ahead at full speed, but I'm reluctant (and not just for me, there are also coworkers who I feel like I would be letting down).