amidst this whole AI craze it's illuminating to learn how many programmers secretly hated programming all along
I don't mean that it's unsetting that people enjoy different parts of the job, I enjoy many of those same aspects, but it's sad to me how few people around me care about the aspect that I originally fell in love with, which was the bedrock of our profession. Specifically, the work of solving problems with the machine/human shared language of code, instead of just writing out plain-english specs of what you want to have happen.
> The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.
So what? Their "just get it done" POV is far more common in this industry than mine (apparently), and the enjoyment they get from their job isn't being actively optimized away.
And it isn't so much that one approach may be better than another. That is going to depend on context and available resources and more. What we are seeing is the short term being served to the absolute exclusion of thought about the longer term. Maybe if that goes fast and well enough then it will be sufficient, but churning out code bases that endure is a challenge that is only starting to be tested.
Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.
Whereas I always liked to design and build a useful result. If it isn't useful I have no motivation to code it. Looking up APIs, designing abstractions, fixing compiler errors is just busywork that gets in the way.
I loved programming when I was 8 years old. 30+ years later the novelty is gone.