I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more.

Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later.

I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.

I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities).

I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it.

Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.

I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.

I think you might have to get more granular than:

  > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions.

But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something.

I enjoy making things.

I don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata.

I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of.

Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1].

[0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that.

[1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.

Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code!

But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!

I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.

I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions.

I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain.

Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.

I love programming but I don't really enjoy figuring out how to consume other people's APIs.

The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained.

When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.

I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it.

I use Claude Code for two primary reasons:

1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind.

2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea.

Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.

I first got paid to code 25 years ago. I have been programming since I was a kid, and always will. I love making computers do things.

I definitely don't love the process: design docs, meetings, code review, CI, e2e tests working around infrastructure that acts too good to spin up in my test (postgres what are you doing, I used to init databases on machines less powerful than my watch, you can init in a millisecond in CI).

It is pretty clear to me agents are a key part of getting work done. Some 80% of my code changes are done by an agent. They are super frustrating, just like CI and E2E tests! Sometimes they work miracles, sometimes they turn into a game of wackamole. Like the flaky E2E test that keeps turning your CI red, but keeps finding critical bugs in your software, you cannot get rid of them.

But agents help me make computers do things, more. So I'm going to use them.

I'm in the ~25 years group and my only AI pleasure is the f**ing boilerplate that some libs and frameworks insist on still pushing onto the developer that is almost always the same but not quite.

I actually get to do the job I love which is problem solving.

> To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:

> 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)

> 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

> I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

I’ve been programming for almost 30 years. Started when I was 9 years old and I’ve been looking at code pretty much every day since then.

I love AI coding and leading teams. Because I love solving big problems. Bigger than I can do on my own. For me htat’s the fun part. The code itself is just a tool.

There are multiple vocal groups on the Internet about vibe coding. I don’t think any of them really capture the average use case.

Most of the people I know use use AI coding tools do so selectively. They pick the right tool for the job and they aren’t hesitant to switch or try different modes.

Whenever I see someone declare that the other side is dead or useless (manual programming or AI coding) it feels like they’re just picking sides in a personal preference or ideology war.

To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.

I am both 1) and 2) and totally in love with AI dev… I am just one soul of course, your general observation might be right.

With 3 decades under my belt in the industry I can tell you on trait that THE BEST SWEs ALL have - laziness… if I had to manually do something 3 times, that shit is getting automated… AI dev took automation of mundane parts of our work to another level and I don’t think I could ever code without it anymore

I'd agree with this assessment overall. It's got flavors of an age-old debate that comes up any time a new efficiency arises between the people who value the efficiency and those who value the process (eat a nutrition bar vs. cook a meal, drive instead of walk, etc.)

People quickly divide into camps, but I think the healthiest (albeit boring) view is that the tech is good for certain efficiencies, and you have to choose if you prefer the speed you gain over joy of the activity, which probably varies day-to-day. I love the walk to my local grocery store in the mornings because I enjoy the sunshine and exercise. I'm getting in my car the second I'm in a rush though. In the same way I love programming and software engineering, so if I've got the time I'm going to dig into coding. Under deadline to do an annoying legacy migration from an obscure language? Hello Claude Code :)

I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai.

Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts?

Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine?

I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.

I genuinely enjoy programming, but I don't enjoy doing maintenance programming on other people's horrible code.

This is the sort of thing no one wants to do and leads to burnout.

The AI won't get burnt out going through a static analysis output and simplifying code, running tests, then rerunning the analysis for hours and hours at a time.

I would say somewhat correct but your own bias might be coming through a tiny bit here :-)

I think it more comes down to one of your last points. It's not necessarily a difference specifically in who likes to use "AI" or not - in my experience there's just a different class of tech workers between new and old.

On one extreme you have the old greybeard maintaining mainframe systems with obscure COBOL niches that LLMs won't ever have insight into. On the other end you have people working on the latest shiny thing.

I don't think it comes down to money or love for the actual work - I know plenty of people invested in the math behind AI and how it might help them be more efficient coders. The divide (if we should even call it that) already existed in the way these two groups approach tech - AI and LLMs has just made it more obvious.

I didn't understand which group was supposed to be which until the very last point, so I don't think you're correct. In my personal network, the most senior people with lots of programming experience have the most positive attitude and seem to be more pragmatic about it in general.

I got into this industry as a side gig from science, I love solving problems. I am pretty ok at code, but code is a problem in the way of another problem. Sometimes it is easy to get distracted by a cute puzzle or a new game, but my purpose is to solve larger problems not play games (I didn't intend for this to be HN rhetorical combat).

The people most against AI assistance are those that define themselves by what they do, have invested a lot into honing their craft and enjoy the execution of that craft.

I have been getting paid to program for over 35 years, agentic coding is a fresh breeze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTARSM-Fjc&list=PLBEB75B6A1...

like any attempt to categorize humans, it falls shorts on many exceptions.

I've been at what I do for 32+ years now, I love programming and I havent stopped since I started.

I love claude code. Why? It increases discoverability in ways far and beyond what a search engine would normally do for me. It gets rid of the need to learn a new documentation format and API for every single project that has different requirements. It makes it less painful to write and deal with languages that represent minor common current trends that will be gone by next year. I no longer have to think about what a waste of time onboarding for ReactCoreElectronChromium is when it'll be gone next year when Googlesoftzon Co folds and throws the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm squarely in the latter group and I just don't think of it in like/dislike terms: I think of it as a rapidly changing (though beginning to converge) set of new tools in a toolbox that only ever grows. In particular its in the code generation / code validation subtoolbox that already included IDL compilers, emacs macros, type systems / proof assistants, code review, and others.

It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier.

This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.

OP is not a programmer and the comment is the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811

There's nothing wrong with not being a programmer, but it is still kind of funny that "hackers" and their backers approve the script kiddie way by voting.

I don't think the 2) category is universal. There are many people in that category who know that following corporate hype will be rewarded, but I'm not sure they all like vibe coding.

I am finding that I really like AI for tasks I don't want to do, and am annoyed by it for tasks I enjoy.

A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork.

(I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)

If you have a process and pattern you like to follow, I imagine that your experience with AI agents will be frustrating. I have had to be willing to change how I structure code to get AI dev to work really well for me.

It's not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.

I think you're wrong with those groups.

I'll use myself as counterexample, but I know a sufficiently large number of people like me who also love AI to suggest the pattern's wrong.

Programming for 4 decades, happy to language lawyer with my C++ compiler, and love puzzle solving.

And yet, I see AI as a tremendous gift. It's brought back the early exploratory feeling and joy. It's also taken care of a lot of tedium (no, migrating to a new library/api never was fun)

And, best of all, how to use AI well/correctly to produce prod quality code is one of the biggest puzzles out there. It's a great time!

But I don't think your characterization is entirely wrong, because the 'Ugh! AI!" continent is indeed strong in your second group. Specifically, people who have that long seniority and enjoyed being "the expert" - i.e more knowledgeable about a topic than many. AI is compressing that gap.

Not development related but I have plenty of colleagues that take pleasure in the mundane. Small easy dopamine hits I guess.

It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.)

So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have.

As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.

To the first list also add the typical mediocre developer who has struggled for their entire career, never investing in acquiring deep understanding of how things work, and who is making guesses when attempting to fix things, later blaming the magic behind them. For those people the magic of LLMs is just the same, they are comfortable with it, and will be giving the same excuses that they are used to, even more so now.

Exactly this for me as well. And I'm really good at writing code! It's so weird to realize I never liked it, that I just liked making things.

Now I don't write code unless Claude does it, I just review.

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up.

This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.

Just food for thought.

Even if you're working on a large complex system like that, I believe coding agents are still useful at at least taking highly specific prompts/instructions you write and doing the writing for you. Then doing other tedious tangential work like generating unit tests over a pure function, adding comments, generating documentation, etc that all increase the quality of the codebase without requiring toil on your part.

With especially novel or complex projects, you'd probably not expect to use the agent to do much of the scaffolding or architecting, and more of the tedium.

I've been experimenting lately with just interfacing with Claude Code through the GitHub action and issues.

I sit on the beach and talk to it through the GitHub iOS app. I set the timeout to 4 hours and let it just work. It comes back to me later with something and I take a look. By the time I get home, I might tweak a few things here or there manually (particularly if it's about aesthetics), and merge.

I agree and do experience that. Perhaps to clarify, I mean that it (unlike humans), is always down to code alongside you. It will never complain, get sick, have a life event. etc.

> "producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level"

Absolutely agreed, but I think the idea is that coding tools (or languages, or libraries, or frameworks) frees us to do the actually hard, skill-intensive bits of this, because the thing that's intellectually demanding isn't marshaling and unmarshaling JSON.

I'm not the OP, but from what he said I can tell you two things:

1. He is using computers to solve other peoples problems, and they are similar problems so all the code looks the same, and

2. He is NOT using computers to solve his own problems. Every top notch software engineer I've met does not write the same code more than a few times, because doing repetitive stuff is something a computer should be doing.

If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language.

Instead, it's the opposite.

Holy shit, I completely forget he was in that. What a get.

If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code.

I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.

I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.

With mathematical things you can always write comprehensive and complete unit tests to check the AIs work.

TDD (and exhaustive unit tests in general) are a good idea with LLMs anyway. Just either tell it not to touch test, or in Claude's case you can use Hooks to _actually_ prevent it from editing any test file.

Then shove it at the problem and it'll iterate a solution until the tests pass. It's like the Excel formula solver, but for code :D

I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.

Except... Completely different

A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”.

When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.

I think we're starting to have a conversation about what healthy social media usage looks like and its place in life. Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation and a shift back towards being genuine. I fully understand the irony here btw.

Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.

I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code.

It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.

For instance this one is a great, valuable read about AI and developers productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 Post that are just opinions doesn't really fuel discussions as they don't bring enough raw material to build on. Some opinions are still worthy because they are original, but here I see nothing new.

There are several topics like this on the front page every day, since many months back now, and the comments are all the same. It’s enough.