How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

nonasking_

Thanks for sharing. It might also come down to whether we see programming as an end in itself or as a tool.

sparrowidle

Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.

superjose

One thing I've been doing is to use it for: 1. Compare the code against production data with MCP. We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers. 2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing 3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood. And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.

Philpax

Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!

tosh

Pick something you always wanted to learn more about and use LLMs to help you

intrasight

After programming for 40 years, my brain has many language parsers. But languages and interfaces and classes evolve and it been a huge productivity boost the use LLMs for coding. I use AI like StackOverflow on steroids. And like using stackoverflow, I do it in a browser and I don't let the LLM touch my code. I, personally, love programming more than ever!

geraldwhen

It's over. LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours. Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.

nly

I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification. An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files. Sometimes they'll do it unprompted For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend. Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc. For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend

plastic-enjoyer

I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.

veexx103

For tasks you don't want to do (such as work-related ones), use an LLM. For tasks you enjoy, write them yourself.

matsemann

I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it. What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem . It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.

jdw64

Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.

nlnn

This is great for personal projects, but at work chances are someone will have completely rewritten/refactored/rearchitected everything I'd built up a good mental model of next time I blinked.

humlex

I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me. Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code

AyanamiKaine

While reading "The Nemesis of Creativity" It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines: "I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them." It resonates with me similarly as the post.

momocowcow

This sums up well the current zeitgeist, wow Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account?

poisonborz

I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight. Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests. And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting. LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).

pavlov

I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months. The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987. I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now. The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.

jonator

It’s very clear AI writes great code and will even review it for bugs much better and faster than a human can. With cloud agents like Devin, you can spawn an army of these agents at a moments notice. Teams who figure out how to do this will simply out compete any teams who don’t. Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.

senfiaj

I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.