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0 pointshonr7d ago0 comments

I do get pleasure from typing out the code in some languages (and not in others; hello javascript, java!). Similarly, I love writing text with a calligraphy or fountain pen. However, I can't dedicate too of the much work / business time to whatever is more pleasurable.

So, I "doodle" some text / ideas / planning with a calligraphy pen, and type in some code, occasionally, both mainly for the fun aspects. There are side benefits to both, too. Writing some plans slowly and "beautifully" drags them out and I get to think longer on them, so the sporadic "nice looking plans" are often more well thought. And doing the coding all by myself stops my brain from losing the ability. I was initially in the 100% AI-writes-all-code camp for a while and noticed I am getting notably slow in some personal coding skills. It is too early to treat specs as the new code and old languages as assembly (but I admit we might get there some day).

In other words, I think AI doing 90-99% of the coding, depending on the language verbosity and AI accuracy for the code at hand, is quite reasonable.

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Stehfyn7d ago

Personally, this is an experience I thought about first before writing my comment. I think in the days pre-AI coding assists, I believe you describe the intrinsically human experience that's requisite to write code by hand. The wonder, the joy, the frustration, the confusion, the elation--the discovery. These days, the things I wonder about lie deeper and deeper behind more and more lines of code, through journey's that provide less and less joy, and thusly becoming more and more unreachable as I'm human, bound by an excess of things in addition to time. AI has helped me rediscover some of this sporadic creativity demonstrably due its ability to prototype recreational ideas on a whim

Professionally, I'm employed writing safety-critical avionics software. Superfluous amounts of cogent tooling putting guardrails on agents has enabled me to spend heaps more time to think deeply about how the software should work at a systemic level. The code by definition must be heavily criticized and battle-tested before it can go out the door to begin with. Albeit a beautiful part of coding, those sporadic bursts of creativity drive the code leaving my desk less and less, and I feel strongly that has made its quality paradoxically better since I'd spent much more time on broader implications and interactions.

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Stehfyn7d ago

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