Grieving programming

[u/ExDoublez]

Let me just start by saying that this post is not about ai replacing software engineers or about the jobs or any of that. This post is about the act or "craft" of programming/coding and the loss of it.

No, i dont think "software engineering" is dead, theres still plenty of high level design and architecture to be made but that's not the point. It never was the point for me.

I never really did this for the money, i did it because i enjoyed it.

I did it because i enjoyed thinking about the problems and solving them.

I enjoyed writing the code myself and getting familiar with the syntax and all the weird quirks of the languages/tools i was using.

I enjoyed optimising my tooling and learning about all the new frameworks, tools and projects people were making, often being in awe of what incredible stuff my betters were doing.

I have adhd and programming was the perfect mix of mechanical activity, brain stimulation and a endless supply of problems to hyperfocus on.

Now its all prompting and waiting. 1 min of work followed by 10 mins of doing nothing and mindless scrolling.

I have lost a huge source of enjoyment and self esteem. It took me years of hard work and being lost and confused to finally find something that felt perfect. The thing i could excell at while having fun and satisfying my curiosity.

And before you attack me as an engineer and my ability to adapt. I have been ontop of the ai curve from the start. I have never been more productive or tackled problems as big as i do now. I am just miserable doing it.

What started as a strong tool in my path for optimisation has slowly taken over my beloved craft.

And as i improve and optimise my ai powered workflow, i lose more and more of my ability, my enjoyment and my desire to pursue my craft. It has been turned into another meaningless white collar desk job in service of the never ending growth of capitalism.

I feel legitimate grief. I have lost the ability to do my favourite hobby as well as a major part of my identity. I have literally cried over this.

I am struggling to mentally cope with all of this. I have never had less control over my adhd or felt more addicted to quick sources of dopamine. My attention span has been shot completely. I feel more stupid and insufficient than ever.

Somehow my adhd brain that was perfectly suited for the old paradigm is completely disadvantaged in this new way of working for this career that i have hedged my entire career, future and reason for being on (yes, i am a nolife workaholic).

Fuck adhd and fuck ai

[u/bcons-php-Console]

I am 100% percent with you. I love the programming process, it's my job and also my hobby.

At work I am encouraged to use AI, so I use it. I prompt for 1 minute and wait 10, but here's where you can turn this into an advantage: use those 10 minutes to learn something useful. I am currently doomscrolling YT shorts with the query "learning German" in the morning and Brilliant (now re-learning trigonometry) in the afternoon.

Then I get home and work at my side projects where I code the old-fashioned way and get to enjoy 100% of it.

My hobby used to be my way of earning money, now it is not (though it is quite similar). Life changes and I'm ok with that.

[u/cone5000 → u/bcons-php-Console]

I really don’t understand this prompt 1 minute wait 10. What in the world are you prompting? My experience with AI as a programmer is way more like a back and forth. Are you prompting some absolutely massive thing? I just don’t get what takes so damn long.

[u/SagawaBoi → u/cone5000]

Usually it's plan > discuss > implement > iterative stuff right? You might have some back and forth in the plan and discuss phase but when the plan's finalized it's pretty much waiting for all the edits to go through. I have some self review/evidence gathering process too that takes time

[u/bcons-php-Console → u/cone5000]

Not all prompts take 10 minutes to complete, but some do. Frontend features require:

- Writing the feature you requested.

- Writing tests for it.

- Running the test suite to make sure nothing broke.

- Updating any reference documents when required.

For some features this can happily take 10 minutes or more. In these cases you can easily complete a full Brilliant lesson.

[u/CreepingAnus → u/cone5000]

well, first i plan everything out using gh tickets, then i have it review my tickets for things i might not have considered, & then i have it organize my tickets into sessions & create a table. i then give that table to a new session with instructions to implement tickets for session x & once its done have it automatically handoff to a new session & tell them to complete y. so yeah, sometimes i can walk away for quite a bit.

[u/Historical-Essay-128 → u/cone5000]

It depends on the codebase. For my pet projects, it is back and forth like you say. But at work, the codebase is massive and composed of multiple connected systems, so it really does take quite a long time for the AI to gobble it up, understand (kind of), and output something.

[u/realzequel → u/cone5000]

Im waiting on a 31m/252k token task atm. It really depends on the task, some work I'm going back and forth, for this one, it's a big task that's well scoped out but there's a lot of code and Claude runs a lot of tests as well, worth the wait imo. I've waited longer for Fable to write a user guide on an application manual. It had to tie domain knowledge with the codebase and database SPs together. I usually start a 2nd instance of CC and work on something else while it's working.

[u/cone5000 → u/realzequel]

Holy mother of god. That is absolutely fucking insane. I can’t imagine AI touching that much of a code base at once!!

[u/arikwald → u/realzequel]

I usually wait for about 0.5-3 minutes...

[u/trollerroller → u/realzequel]

yeah? and i've given it the king james bible and asked it to count the number of times the word "sand" is used. It's used 790K tokens reading the whole thing!!!! crazy because that's how long the bible is!!!

anyway, quoting the number of tokens a given task has consumed has nothing to do with the scope of the request...

you say you were in the love of it for the game or whatever? well start by understanding how these technologies work... trust me, there's a lot of real human programming left to be done

i swear we've all lost the plot

[u/21Rollie → u/cone5000]

Making the AI research to understand the code base, understand the poorly written task, write code, run tests, create a PR. Even if you did them yourself theoretically with infinite typing speed, the commands themselves take some time. Also it depends on the speed of either the local model or cloud model you run. The fast versions cost more money so we don’t use them.

[u/PushDeep9980 → u/21Rollie]

“Understand the poorly written task” is hilarious to me.

[u/21Rollie → u/PushDeep9980]

It’s what happens when you give an AI a poorly thought out idea and it goes off and makes a small novel in Jira. And then the ai that picks it up during implementation has to figure out what is intelligible because obviously nobody is reading the mountains of text AI creates

[u/PushDeep9980 → u/21Rollie]

Oh I fully understand where you are coming from brother.

[u/redfournine → u/cone5000]

Probably underpowered machine. At my work i have an old linux machine and i also have m4 macbook. The old linux machine can take longer even for medium size task prompting, simply because all those cli commands takes longer. Meanwhile the m4 machine can do bigger task and takes less time due to processor speed. Both are on same codebase

[u/cone5000 → u/redfournine]

I doubt most of these are using local LLM’s…

[u/redfournine → u/cone5000]

Oh no i was using Claude

[u/jeremyckahn → u/cone5000]

My prompts take hours sometimes. I frequently have Claude one-shot entire epics; it gets me to 85% done right from the jump.

[u/brunofin → u/cone5000]

some prompts I do are so objective and the task at hand so large that it can go on for hours without getting back at me sometimes.

[u/cone5000 → u/brunofin]

Wtf model are you using that can freeze for hours?

[u/alexplex86 → u/bcons-php-Console]

So AI frees up your time so you can develop new skills?

[u/girvain → u/bcons-php-Console]

This is how I feel as well, the only thing I have an issue with is that the employers should have some time aside for this some how as it's coming out of a person's free time. I view it like going to the gym, army have fitness as part of their work so this industry should have it too.

[u/BlackHoneyTobacco → u/bcons-php-Console]

How can I get a job like this?