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Comment by krisgenre | Hacker News Reader

18 years here (more if I can count my non professional years). Agreed, coding isn't as much fun as it used to be but AI has only increased my enthusiasm for tech. Its a lot more easier to learn and understand new stuff, build things (especially personal tools) and tinker in any programming language.

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For me, it was the craft that was fun, less the building. It was nice to have a really good result that customers were happy about, that other engineers were happy about, but it was also nice to have such intimate knowledge of a codebase because I and my team built it.

I miss that level of mastery. I feel that in the LLM-assisted coding age, that's now gone. You can read every section of code that an LLM generates, but there's no comparison to writing it by hand to me in terms of really internalizing and mastering a codebase.

What's stopping you from writing code by hand even today? I mainly use LLMs for researching and trying possible paths forward, but usually implement the suggested solution myself specifically so that I fully understand the code (unless it's a one-liner or so, then I let the LLM paste it in).

Because I can't justify it. While I do love the craft, and I can do this, I work with other people and I can't convince other people to not use LLMs to do their daily work. So, while I'll be writing things by hand and using the LLM to suggest which way to go, they'll be submitting PR after PR of AI-generated code, which takes much more of my time to review.

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