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Comment by big_paps | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s been programming for 20 years, I have to say that programming itself often causes a kind of brain rot. I’m very glad that I can now focus on other aspects of software development. It was only with Claude Code that I realized I never actually enjoyed programming—I enjoyed building things. You can live a perfectly mentally healthy life without programming.

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Fully agree that programming for me brings along "a kind of brain rot". Hard to describe, but working deep in code just shifts the mind to a state that's ... less open, more focused, more obsessive ... and seeps into daily life.

Vernor Vinge's concept of "focus" in "A deepness in the sky" really clicked with me and put into words what I'd always had at the back of my mind. A highly recommended read.

I read it because Elon Musk mentioned it as a favorite. It’s a good book and you can see how the concept of controlling ubiquitous tech is a thing he tries to do

How do you mean building things? To be honest, I don't get excited about most products that I'm working on - that is what the money is for. The enjoyment comes mostly from technological problem solving.

I get excited for the things I built. I built them for my clients and I love that clients are genuinely happy with what I built for them. And then I send an invoice which is followed by a payment. I love that too, I love both.

I dont't love doing some obscure integration of an API that should have been dead years ago but somehow still lives. I don't like squishing bugs because something doesn't work when the Sun is in the third house of Uranus on February 31st. Those are technical problems I don't like solving.

My point is that you and I both love something else and that is totally fine. But I'm not sure if you can keep making money with only solving technical problems.

Programming, as in manually typing the code, is a means to an end.

While I do enjoy coding, building things is what was rewarding, not actually laying down brick after brick after brick after brick.

I've done that for 10+ years. The fact that I don't have to do that anymore is a relief that cannot be overstated. I only have to check on the code that The Ideal Intern produces while I focus on what actually matters, and that is: Building The Thing.

It's all about how you use it and how careful you are with it, and the fact that today there are people IN THE FIELD that still question this baffles me.

I would say any programmer has found themselves so deep in the metaphorical woods that they forgot what they were actually trying to achieve in the first place. For example, you start because your boss told you to implement a new feature, but you realized there was no module you could place the feature in, then by looking at the existing module structure you realized it had become completely unsuitable in general, then you started trying to split some and rename others, then you noticed a circular dependency would appear if you didn’t add a third module between two you just split, and now all you can remember is that you’re fixing the circular dependency. The feature you were supposed to work on is a vague memory now.

I think this is a sort of brainrot which explains why a lot of times things take unjustifiably long to implement. LLMs can help so much with stuff like this if you know how to yield one. But it can also let you more quickly hang yourself if you don’t even care about “which modules even exist” ( to continue with my example).

That's called yak shaving.

No, it's called not throwing more shit at an already shitty wall just to add feature x_2.

> It was only with Claude Code that I realized I never actually enjoyed programming

This is so real!

20 or 30 years ago, programming was reserved for people who were truly devoted to it, even when the work was a nightmare of difficulty.

Now, when I talk to programmers in their 20s and 30s and ask which program they first fell in love with, there's usually no answer.

I'm glad they've stopped pretending otherwise.

They fell in love with the money.

Nothing really wrong with that though. The amount of tech used by the average person has also increased dramatically in the same time period.

You could argue the same has happened for computer use in general or for many things.

Good for you! Personally I'm not so much interested in building things. On the other hand, my ideal life would be to make a computer do new cool tricks all day.

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