HN Reader

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI.

I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt

My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cannot replicate it no matter what I do

I'm either just not "getting it", or I'm too much of a control freak, or everyone else is just better than I am, or something. It's been miserable. I feel like I'm either extremely unskilled or everyone else is gaslighting me, basically nowhere in between

I have not once had an LLM generate code that I could accept. Not one time! Every single time I try to use the LLM to speed me up, I get code I have to heavily modify to correct. Sometimes it won't even run!

The advice is to iterate, but that makes no sense to me! I would easily spend more time iterating with the LLM than just writing the code myself!

It's been extremely demoralizing. I've never been unhappier in my career. I don't know what to do, I feel I'm falling behind and being singled out

I probably need to change employers to get away from AI usage metrics at this point, but it feels like it's everyone everywhere guzzling the AI hype. It feels hopeless

I agree. Using AI for development is addictive, once you start you cannot stop. It has harmed me, stunting my skills; just like the lack of exercise leads to physical decline, my coding muscles atrophied due to the lack of practice this dependency caused. And since tech is my only real strength, and I'm not what you'd call "successful", feeling stuck at the one thing I'm supposed to be good at makes me feel useless, makes me feel like a burden. And the worst thing? I'm unable to get back on track. I've tried getting back to coding manually, but I simply can't do it anymore. Last time I programmed anything without using AI was in 2023, on a Scratch project, simply because AI could not write Scratch blocks.

But at least I can now ship (shitty) code a lot faster.

When you get better than junior level you see the limitations of current coding assistants.

But to get there it might be a good move to code for yourself (and read books).

Then on the other hand coding will not be a fun job anymore...

Letting AI generate code instead of writing it yourself as a software developer is basically the same as if a painter would generate a painting instead of doing the art himself.

> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it.

Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...

> I wonder if some “actual" artists (as in, those people who create the kind of art most people would recognize) have gone through a similar arc of realizing the emptiness of creating with AI tools.

My impression is that artists are even more hostile than the most AI-skeptic of software engineers. In large part, this is likely because the economic argument doesn't hold much sway. For the large majority of artists, it's hard for them to make money with art as is, the bottleneck is not the volume of art they can produce. There's a much clearer path to turning "more code" into "more money", even if it's still not direct.

> As I have kept up conversation with my developer friends, it has become essentially the norm, and everyone is being pressed to find greater productivity using AI coding tools.

What a weird alternate universe it is that I live in. My managers are somewhat skeptical of AI workflows and keep throwing up roadblocks to deeper and more coordinated use among my colleagues. Probably because there is so much churn, and it’s difficult to replicate the practice from one engineer to another. Some of my colleagues are very resistant to using AI. I use it quite extensively, but rate limits mean that there are occasions when I must pick up where the machine leaves off.