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Comment by frizlab | Hacker News Reader

> I love to write code. I very much do not love to read, review, and generate feedback on other people's code. I understand it's a good skill to develop and can be instrumental in helping to shape less experienced colleagues into more productive collaborators, but I still hate it.

Same. Writing code is easy. Reading code is very very hard.

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What an odd thing for them to put in the article. This is an example of AI generated code making someone a better programmer (by improving their ability to read code and give feedback). So it contradicts the title.

They could rename it "Using AI Generated Code Makes Programming Less Fun, for Me", that would be more honest.

The problem for programmers is (as a group) they tend to dislike the parts of their job that are hardest to replace with AI and love the stuff that is easiest for machines to copy. It turns out meetings, customer support, documentation, tests, and QA are core parts of being a good engineer.

I don’t know about other people, but I tend to love architecting and code. Coding time, after architecting, is the “reward” for the brain. Just write what you’ve painstakingly engineered, let your brain rest.

This is how I work. Honestly the writing time (the one I’m promised I'll gain on by using AI), is something like 10% of my coding time. And it’s the only time I’m “resting” so yeah. I don’t want to get rid of it. Nor do I need it. And I especially do not want to check on the “intern” to verify it did what I imagined. Nor do I want to spend time explaining what I imagined. I just do it.

I find a that actually a disturbing assumption. I've learned a lot from reading other peoples code, seeing how they were thinking and spotting errors, so the good and the bad. I believe that in order to actually write good code its important to actually understand what is the context of the task which basically requires a lot of code reading, which is also sometimes quite enjoyable when you have competent authors. Reading code is an essential part of the game. If you cannot do that you'll just create huge balls of mud with or without ai usage. Though using ai will speedrun the mud so yeah, there is an argument for not using it.

To each his own, I guess. I learn by doing.

To be clear, I’m not saying there is nothing interesting in the code of others, obviously. However, reading code is, in my opinion, twice as hard as writing it. Especially understanding the structure is very hard.

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