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Comment by bradleykingz | Hacker News Reader

But it's so BORING. AI gets to do the fun part (writing code) and I'm stuck with the lame bits.

It's like watching someone else solve a puzzle, or watching someone else play a game vs playing it yourself (at least that's half as interesting as playing it through)

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LLMs are still not good at structurally hard problems, and it is doubtful they ever will be absent some drastic extension. (Including continuous learning). In the mean time the trick is creating a framework where you can walk them through the exact stages you would to do it, only it goes way faster. The problem is many people stop at the first iteration that looks like it works and then move on, but you have to keep pushing in the same way you do with humans.

Bluntly though, if what you were doing was CRUD boilerplate then yeah it is going to just be a review fest now, but that kind of work always was just begging to be automated out one way or another.

Your workplace has chosen to deprive you of the enjoyment that you got from the work. You have a few options: (1) ask for a raise proportional to the percentage of enjoyment that you lost, (2) find a workplace that does not do this, or (3) phone it in (they see you and your craft as something be milked for cash, so maybe stop letting yourself get milked, and milk them right back, by doing _exactly_ what is asked of you and _not_ more -- let these strategic geniuses strategize using their own brains).

I am really enjoying making requirements docs in an iterative process. I have a continuous improvement loop where I use the implementation to test out the docs. If I find a problem with the docs, I throw away the implementation, improve the docs, then re-implement. The kind of docs I'm getting are of amazing quality.

For me the most fun part is getting something that works. Design the goal, but not micromanage and get lost in the details. I love AI for that, but it is hard really owning code this way. (At least I manually approve every or most changes, but still, verifying is hard).

AI has really sharpened the line between the Master Builders of the world and the Lord Businesses along this question: What, exactly, is the "fun part" of programming? Is it simply having something that works? Or is it the process of going from not having it to having it through your own efforts and the sum total of decisions you made along the way?

> For me the most fun part is getting something that works. Design the goal, but not micromanage and get lost in the details.

That’s management, which is not necessarily bad by itself.

What is bad if you have to be both a manager giving the requirements and the IC responsible for the output. That’s the worst of both worlds.

If it was possible to truly vibe code in the same way a product manager asks a team to build something then we wouldn’t need to have this discussion.

In reality you can never truly trust the output. Ultimately you’re on the hook if production breaks apart, not the LLM.

I can solve a problem in 10% of the time. Dealing with an issue TODAY, instead of having to put it in the backlog.

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