AI is making us face the reality of non-physical goods and services. If a product exists solely as data (writing, music, code, drawings, movies, etc.) then the value is in the idea and its distribution, and less on its production.
I'll give some examples:
Novel algorithms: PageRank, BitTorrent, Like buttons, disappearing pictures, etc.
Artistic styles: Cubism, impressionism, Wes Anderson, etc.
The above algorithms are (relatively) straightforward to implement and could be implemented by Claude Code in a matter of hours if not minutes. But, you'd still need a means to distribute them.
Similarly, you can have AI generate an image in any of the above styles (or a combination thereof), but the image won't have intrinsic value unless you can finds a means of (profitable) distribution.
I feel similarly. Sounds a bit like other crafts that were later industrialized and (partially) mechanized, like woodworking and carpentry.
One can certainly enjoy the laborious handcrafted process of building your own table, and yet go back to a shop that churns out cheap furniture that’s nonetheless useful for many others, and see the value in both.
Obviously there’s more degrees of freedom in software, but I’m trying to see it that way to rationalize how I’m feeling with the current state of things.
I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me, joy. I spent a little more than an afternoon writing a parser to parse a new ad-hoc file format I created to represent the IDs (class name and ID names) I will use in my CSS, and it was just fun. Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what? So I can dig directly back into complicated actual engineering issues? Where would my breaks be?
Ironically I have a somewhat of a different view - I love rubber ducking and tinkering with LLMs. Sometimes they come up with a use case that I would not have thought of, but I would have liked to have maybe 2 weeks later. Other times it is nitpicking each others' code etc.
I think we are presented with a false dichotomy here, as you can use llm tools for menial tasks and code whatever scratches your itch at the same time. For me, I really do not enjoy writing any frontend, html, javascript, whatever; I just want to bring some website I need to light. I focus on other code and that is what brings me joy.
> Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what?
One reason would be to raise the ceiling of what your project can do within the budget of time and motivation you have. Or, as it often happens, to be able to finish the project at all.
Interesting, I suppose I'm still doing debugging and finding solutions to problems even with AI coding. I think my dopamine was from problem solving, not necessarily doing the math/logic. It helps I get paid for solving problems, so more problems solved = more money. And I'd like to emphasize, I still debug.
> He’s not wrong, but it does make me wonder: even if the code was not the point, what do you do if it was the thing that brought you joy?
You still write the code! We do lots of things that could be done more efficiently. People build their own furniture and make their own clothes and brew their own beer. If you love doing something for its own sake, keep doing it.
> It’s not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times).
This sounds very strange.
I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's very good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.
We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.
To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.
Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task from my backlog.
There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.
> It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
Oh yes, it's like slow-motion train wreck.
Once it gets off the rails, the best thing is to nuke the context, reset the state (git reset --hard or equivalent) and retry, this time with foresight.
I write for fun, to organize and articulate my thoughts, and I love doing that in vim. The same is true for note taking (I just write .md files and sync them with syncthing). I also like working neomutt. It's just fun working with (relatively) simple, stable tools that seem to grow on you over time for every day tasks. Writing code is just one of those things.
If it truly brings you joy we have hat covered: it's a simple enough hobby!
The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't see demand for those decreasing.
AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100% bringing me joy in this way.
I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.
>Good enough that choosing to focus on the fundamentals seems rather foolish.[...]but most of the time it sticks the landing. At this point, learning Awk seems about as sane as mastering the loom
The joy aspect aside, if you're writing code professionally obviously that is no substitute for knowing how Awk works because you still need to make sure that what it produced is correct, because I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into production, in particular not a piece of code some tool got wrong for 20 minutes, without understanding what it does.
If that were an intern rather than a machine and you as the programmer don't know how the code works you're not doing your job. AI systems have not freed people from acquiring "arcane knowledge" it makes that knowledge more important than ever, the only thing it does is type faster than you do.
I'll give some examples:
Novel algorithms: PageRank, BitTorrent, Like buttons, disappearing pictures, etc.
Artistic styles: Cubism, impressionism, Wes Anderson, etc.
The above algorithms are (relatively) straightforward to implement and could be implemented by Claude Code in a matter of hours if not minutes. But, you'd still need a means to distribute them.
Similarly, you can have AI generate an image in any of the above styles (or a combination thereof), but the image won't have intrinsic value unless you can finds a means of (profitable) distribution.
One can certainly enjoy the laborious handcrafted process of building your own table, and yet go back to a shop that churns out cheap furniture that’s nonetheless useful for many others, and see the value in both.
Obviously there’s more degrees of freedom in software, but I’m trying to see it that way to rationalize how I’m feeling with the current state of things.
One reason would be to raise the ceiling of what your project can do within the budget of time and motivation you have. Or, as it often happens, to be able to finish the project at all.
You still write the code! We do lots of things that could be done more efficiently. People build their own furniture and make their own clothes and brew their own beer. If you love doing something for its own sake, keep doing it.
This sounds very strange.
I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's very good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.
We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.
To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.
Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task from my backlog.
There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.
[0] code using Claude
Author here. It was what I assumed would be a fairly simple task, fixing some duplicate closing frontmatter delimiters.
I think the LLM took a wrong turn early on, and then just spiralled. It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
Oh yes, it's like slow-motion train wreck.
Once it gets off the rails, the best thing is to nuke the context, reset the state (git reset --hard or equivalent) and retry, this time with foresight.
The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't see demand for those decreasing.
I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.
The joy aspect aside, if you're writing code professionally obviously that is no substitute for knowing how Awk works because you still need to make sure that what it produced is correct, because I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into production, in particular not a piece of code some tool got wrong for 20 minutes, without understanding what it does.
If that were an intern rather than a machine and you as the programmer don't know how the code works you're not doing your job. AI systems have not freed people from acquiring "arcane knowledge" it makes that knowledge more important than ever, the only thing it does is type faster than you do.
> I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into production... without understanding what it does.
I do not. That hasn't changed.
> ...the only thing it does is type faster than you do.
LLMs can do many, many things that I cannot. Their breadth of knowledge dwarfs mine.