Similar to the differences between an art collector and a painter. One wants the ends, the other desires the means.
I enjoy writing code. I just don't enjoy writing code that I've written a thousand times before. It's like saying that Picasso should have enjoyed painting houses for a living. They're both painting, right?
(to be painfully clear, I'm not comparing myself to Picasso; I'm extending on your metaphor.)
Well. Maybe we have to agree to disagree but I think it makes mistakes far more frequently than I do
Even if it makes mistakes exactly as often as I do, making 100x as many mistakes in the same amount as time seems like it would be absolutely impossible to keep up with
I know a lot of folks would say that's what search & replace is for, but it's far easier to ask the bot to do it, and then check the work.
Forgive me for being dense, but isn't it just clicking the "rename" button on your IDE, and letting it propagate the change to all definitions and uses? This already existed and worked fine well before LLMs were invented.
The far more common situation is that I'm refactoring something, and I realize that I want to make some change to the semantics or signature of a method (say, the return value), and now I can't just use search w/o also validating the context of every change. That's annoying, and today's bots do a great job of just handling it.
Another one, I just did a second ago: "I think this method X is now redundant, but there's a minor difference between it, and method Y. Can I remove it?"
Bot went out, did the obvious scan for all references to X, but then evaluated each call context to see if I could use Y instead.
(But even in the case of search & replace, I've had my butt saved a few times by agent when it caught something I wasn't considering....)
Regardless of what your definition of horrible and boring happens to be, just being able to tell the bot to do a horrible boring thing and having it done with like a junior level intelligence is so experience enhancing that it makes coding more fun.
People should try this kind of coding a couple times just because it's an interesting exercise in figuring out what parts of coding are important to you.
I also love programming behaviours and interactions, just not creating endless C# classes and looking at how to implement 3D math
After a long day at the CRUD factory, being able to vibe code as a hobby is fun. Not super productive, but it's better than the alternative (scrolling reels or playing games)
Yeah this is for sure true, but it's probably true in degrees.
I think there was even a study or something (from GitHub maybe) about the frequency of languages and how there were far more commits in say Rust on weekends than weekdays (don't quote me on this).
Plenty of people like programming but really don't find yet-another-enterprise-CRUD-with-React-front-end thing to be thrilling, so they will LLM-pasta it to completion but otherwise would have fun hacking away in langs/stuff they like.
I identify with that (hypothetical) crowd.