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- Hacker News
- Fun is a weird thing to measure, it's often tied to things we don't instrument properly and/or account for poorly.
For me, personally, I have learned that fun is often more correlated with social connection and sharing than it is with subjective perception or gratification of the task at hand if removing the social element.
The most fun I had in life was when I had great teams, great people, and great challenges to share both the growth and struggles with. The rest, like what tooling we used, was optional and easy to misjudge as important at the time. Looking back I rarely recall the experience of using certain tooling over another, and often remember the people and the stories.
by hmokiguess - Incorrect!
As a domain expert, I spent all my time learning my scientific niche, and only a small bit on practical coding. Now I can manifest the ideas I formerly needed to hire developers for. WAY more fun.
by thirtygeo - Agentic engineering feels like DevOps to me rather than coding.
I dislike DevOps because the feedback loop is quite long with DevOps and it's very declarative rather than imperative. Proper agentic engineering is like that; you don't actually build the thing with the agent, you build the things around the agent that's building the thing.
The skills, the MCP connections, the auth flows and handling, the CI, the deployment strategy, the code review, etc.
I think that's why it doesn't feel as "fun" if you are used to actual coding: long feedback loop from you creating/modifying the scaffolding to actually seeing it connect to an output. I liken it to waiting for CloudFormation to deploy your infra -- like watching paint dry.
- I've been programming for fun for decades, at work and at home. I have no desire to have someone or something else write my code for me. However, I've managed to convince ChatGPT that I like to be mentored in a way that allows me to build intuition instead of just having the answer given to me (or worse) the code to build it. I'm building something like AlphaZero in C in my own way without any third party libraries, going my own way, building it as I go along and discussing how it all works with the AI. I find this even more fun than just trying it on my own.by godshatter
- I don't know if "fun" is the right word for me, but since AI coding has taken over nearly all of my individual hand coding (or augmented IDE suggestion coding), I find it much less satisfying to solve difficult problems with creative solutions. That always tickled a part of my programming brain, and I didn't realize how much I enjoyed that until I didn't do it anymore. Now, sure, I've broadened out to more systems-level thinking, but now the hard problems that I have generally aren't engineering problems, they're personnel problems, integration problems, planning/priority problems, and solving those usually means taking a deep breath and having a "conversation" with a senior manager, making an annoying business case, whatever else. There's much less satisfaction in that for me.by Yapping7880
- My current take: at the moment, vibecoding is much fun as being IT manager.
YMMV, not so fun for me being human/robot proxy constantly, there is "review dilemma" with AI tools:
review everything AI does - getting burned out quickly
skip review what AI does - getting wake up call in a weekends' nights and getting burned out quickly as well
by mglvsky - Boy look at all these six month old accounts that have been programming for decades and just love vibe coding!by nearlyepic
- It would probably have been safer for the author to explicitly point out that this is true for them specifically, rather than a general rule, because this way they run the risk of never hearing the end of it.by tom_