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Comment by lolakutty | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, programming is still fun. LLMs can't change that.

I'm curious - how do you explain the fact that as you look all around you, lesser number of devs are having fun?

Because their job stopped, to a large degree, involving programming.

Because for a lot of millenials and older developers coding/making thing by hand was the fun part. The endless meetings, scrum rituals, code reviews etc were the annoying parts of the job.

Now they took away coding by hand, so what's there to enjoy? In a field that was already sensitive to burn out and churn taking the joy from the daily routine doesn't help with that.

Only thing you can do is get in build something for 2 years hope you got bought by big tech before the pile of slop code collapses on itself.

> The endless meetings, scrum rituals, code reviews etc were the annoying parts of the job.

Those are all self inflicted and not a necessary part of the job.

It has less to do with the devs having fun at their job and more to do with if they'll even wake up to go to their job tomorrow. Layoffs are never fun.

Maybe you are thinking of programming at work. If so it might be legitimate but that's not what they addressed, they didn't say programming at work is fun.

I agree. Possibly more fun than ever. Bugs are being caught earlier through AI review, higher quality and quantity of tests, features are going out faster, bad decisions can be easily course corrected and bike shedding is dropping dramatically.

I miss the romanticism of trad coding but shipping better solutions to my customers was the goal. Hard to argue things aren’t better when AI is used intelligently by experienced people.

> I miss the romanticism of trad coding but shipping better solutions to my customers was the goal.

True, every child grows up with the dream of maximizing shareholder value, I’m so glad they can achieve that now. /s

Ok. Replace “customer” with “end user”

Fully agree. With LLM being able to solve every problem, getting deep into a problem all by yourself becomes a passion side project. Now might be a real test of how much you love programming.

Your enterprise wants the work done, done fast and reliably. Your productivity goals have increased, just like invention of motors would increased goals of carriers who were earlier doing their job via more manual efforts like pedaling. But still people love cycling, but they largely "don't have to" rely on it to do their job.

Similarly, now you simply don't have a dependency to love programming to increase your productivity.

I certainly hope so.

But LLMs do not need to change that. Sufficient marketing can change the perception of decision takers and middle managers to: Oooh, they can do that.

That is all that it takes.

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