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Comment by aldousd666 | Hacker News Reader

I've been programming for 30 years professionally, and I did it for a hobby as a kid. I love it still, but I am having more fun than I ever did before because none of the drudgery that goes along with it is required anymore. I love the AI and I wouldn't be sad if I never had to write another line by hand. But it's been my job, and the thing I've always hated about the job is that I didn't just get to leave it at work. My mind is always on it even when other people have shut down for a weekend or a weeklong vacation. I always have to worry about that next project that still isn't done, or isn't making an much progress while I'm away. Not as much now, because I just have to check in on Claude when I think of something I missed or need to do for some upcoming thing. It really takes away a lot of my stress because I can use it to extract action items from meetings, it help sketch designs, and write all the damned unit tests for me. Life is better now.

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same here. Laptop came with me on all vacations. Major issues had to be worked out while I was in the shower, having dinner, with family, always. How am I going to fix that bug. How am I going to write that app. I can't even fit this issue into my head. I have to stare at the code for two hours just to understand this again, and find a fix. This went on for decades.

AI takes away 90% of the anxiety about new issues coming in, and half the profession thinks we've lost our minds. Systems that always take me hours to get my head around, figure out a fix, LLMs understand the whole thing. I'm no longer the only person that knows how all this ORM code in SQLAlchemy works. Something else knows too. I can bounce ideas off it. It can bounce ideas off me. The relief is immense.

oh well, losing one's mind sure leaves me a lot more time to do other things and not stress about bugs which are now all entirely fixable, including ones that have evaded explanation for years. Features that used to be "OK, that would be a lot of effort and im not sure it's really worth it", that's over. We can do anything now.

AI seems to always reveal more about people than about machines. Like "how do we actually think? how does consciousness work?" and all that. It's also showing me, "other devs see a really different world than you do".

Regardless of all the concerns that others and I have, 'leaving it at work' is one positive I noticed as well. That is a good expression for that feeling.

When the models got good enough, and I accepted some projects can be managed without writing any code... Some weight lifted from my shoulders. If I wrote code in the past, it felt like I had to carry it in production and help with its maintenance. I would think about all the edge cases that could go wrong. Now, it is not that personal. I'm not a critical piece and that is okay, relieving even.

I'm happy I'm not valuable for technical questions (incomplete, ambiguous questions that would fill up the context of my brain just to understand the question). Writing code now is like writing an email, I can write a good enough email and close the day, others can pick it up. It has freed up a lot of mental capacity. Nobody had a good understanding of that kind of personal burden anyway. Now it is everyone's problem.

We forget how sometimes some coding tasks can be detrimental to some human's psychology. World is full of texture, different situations and experiences.

>none of the drudgery that goes along with it

The durdgery is what pushes languages forward to be more powerful and expressive. Thousands of programmers all facing the same drudgework, they came up with new languages. They weren't content to just accept Java, they made Clojure, and Scala, and lots of other languages. That in turn pushed Java to keep up or be left behind. Take away the drudgery and guess what? All that goes away. Just let claude crank out 30K LoC a day, who cares now?

I still remember back to when I was first learning to write code. I dreamed of code that wrote code for me. But it wasn't because I didn't want to code. It was because I wanted to code in something more elegant. Claude is for someone who says "I don't want to code, I just want to get paid" and it really shows. Slop is slop, even before Claude came along. The programmers who just want to get paid always produced slop. They just have a machine doing it for them now. Who needs them anymore really?

That's another thing, I make programming languages for fun. And implementing the AST nodes is absolute drudgery. Now I just have to construct the grammar and play. I do still make games and play with making apps (Air guitar that detects my hands and stuff) I have even taught coding as an adjunct professor, and done weekend long code competitions, so I've been all over it. I still enjoy the hobby, BECAUSE it's no strings. I don't feel "special" and I'm ok with it.

I notices this too.

The agebt is very eager to prosuce observable results and doesn't seem to care about mental load or how difficult certain choices will make future maintenance.

Before some idiot comes up and says humans do the same. LLMs tends to go to extreme lengths way beyond human capabilities when it comes to writing brittle and unmaintanable code.

One habit I've really noticed I have to break myself of with Claude is the temptation to say "maybe later" when I have an idea. There's never a reason to do that: if something might work, I can leave Claude in a tmux window to check the details I think should exist and then just...go do something else.

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