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.
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Anyone that assumes an author is speaking for everyone will find something else to gripe about, IMO.
Why does anyone ever have to say “this is, like, just my opinion, man.” Are readers so ignorant to think articles are statements of definitive fact applying to all of humanity unless told otherwise?
Why would you think that the author was speaking for anyone but themselves?
When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.
Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.
In particular, writing code by hand is fun for people who are good at writing code by hand. It's not at all fun for people who aren't. For those people, vibecoding means that they can produce something without the pain, something that compiles without all the time fighting the compiler, something that works (or at least mostly works) without all the debugging time.
Who gives a shit? HN holds itself in too high a regard; some peanut gallery on an AI-pilled tech forum will have no effect on the author's life one way or the other.
My account is seventeen years old, and I've been coding more than forty years; is that enough to meet your standards?
I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
It's heavily biased by the circles I hang out in, but I'm seeing a loose correlation between how much people enjoy working with coding agents and their depth of experience. I've even seen people come out of retirement because this stuff is so much fun for them.
AI tools amplify existing coding experience, and reward management experience too. Engineers with a decade+ of experience are more likely to have been engineering leads or spent time in engineering management.
Related observation: Anthropic are developing a reputation for hiring former CTO/CEO/founders and putting them back to work as individual contributors.
I think it all comes down to whether or not they enjoyed coding in the first place.
For me it's mixed. There's aspects of coding I do enjoy but also there's tedium that I don't. What I don't like about vibe coding is it has turned me into just a code reviewer in a lot of cases.
I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.
I've been programming for decades, and I do love vibe coding side-projects. I have a little pixel art / animation tool, a music composition tool, and a little video game builder that agents made for my kids. I haven't looked at a line of code. Instead, I've just focused on getting the UX and features that I want. I did guide it along the tech stack and general philosophy I wanted it to follow, though. I'm sure it's hot garbage, but for projects like this, it doesn't really matter, and it's been a lot of fun.
Would I want to build a business around products that are built this way? Not yet. I'm definitely not comfortable supporting a vibe coded heap of code in a production setting.
I've been programming since I got a Commodore VIC-20 when I was seven years old.
I love AI coding because I can use it to automate all the parts that are not fun or that would take far, far too much time to implement by hand. It puts things within reach that would formerly be unthinkable without millions of dollars and a gigantic software development team.
I still also enjoy coding things by hand... interesting, original things.
The technology itself is also absolutely fascinating. I've followed AI research for a long time and played around with it a lot, but the incredible breakthroughs of the last 5-10 years have blown me away. I've been working through the math on attention layers and feel like I've almost got it, and it's genius. Very cool stuff.
(The companies behind marketing and scaling it are, to varying degrees, not cool, but the tech and science and math is.)
I grew up in the 1980s. My HackerNews account is 7 years old.
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where a quick output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again after so many decades. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
i found being an IT manager quite a bit more fun. at least i was working with people
the few years i was an IT manager i came to like the repeat offenders and those with chronic learned helplessness. they seemed like "regulars" and were all big personalities. often i wondered if they intentionally disabled bluetooth just to hang out for a few minutes
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.
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.
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.
Not really, I think this is an ADHD-adjacent thing. Say you have a hobby that could benefit from a 3D printer, and suddenly 3D printing becomes your hobby. Or you want to do some home improvement, and suddenly you’re focused on your workbench and tool rack instead of the home improvements.
When Amazon released Q, I too started building things around it, first rules, then MCP servers, then skills, then Claude Code workflows. Eventually, I was able to break this feedback loop: I have very few extras on top of Claude Code/Codex because there’s no point in competing with them on features.
The slowest part of my current feedback loop is CI.
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.
Yep. Now you get to focus on actually solving the problems at hand rather than messing around typing thousands of loc of irrelevant boilerplate to get something to work.
If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
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.
For me, a big part of it is there is something about the formal structure of a programming language that is very satisfying to me. Same thing with math. There is something about the precision, and the constraints. Writing natural language prompts just isn't the same.
I think there’s a difference in vibe coding and what I call accelerated software construction.
Vibe coding is like a last second weekend trip to Paris.
Accelerated software construction is like planning a four week backpacking trip through Western Europe.
I’m a grey beard so I’m on the far side of “writing code is fun” but I get it. I used to love those ah-ha moments when solving coding problems.
But now I love delivering solutions to the business or creating software that works as I envisioned it and those two things are fun in very different ways.
I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink?
I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes.
When it comes to backend it's more of the same.
When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project.
If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages.
And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
I think that's half true because there is a lot of great technology that exists today where you can get anything done without any of the boilerplate. A very brief example is the .NET ecosystem where I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way.
Double edged sword. I started programming in the 90s as a teenager, it was always fun for me to code. Several toy projects on GitHub, later studied CS and became a professional dev of course.
I started a small one-man SaaS in 2022 that I coded by hand, and have gradually adopted AI usage. I don't write a single line of code anymore today, and my speed/performance has supercharged in the last 6-12months. The fun of coding is completely gone, but replaced with me being able to deliver what I need to grow the product (from dev, to design and marketing work).
Not even close. But I can say that for grunt work, it's a dream come true. I was just telling my wife the "high" or "flow state" I used to get in is more or less MIA with letting the AI loose. I've started to just do the stuff I enjoy by hand—front-end design, challenging/interesting back-end stuff—and let the AI do the other stuff that I'm either too lazy or too disinterested in doing.
Honestly, it's quite nice. I wish more people would take a less-binary approach to this stuff. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's just a tool. Like any tool, you can apply it selectively. It sounds like a lot of companies have hand-waved this away as being an anachronism, but I'd argue that's the most foolish way to deploy AI. Trying to augment juniors into seniors with it, too, is just showing how many people haven't the slightest clue what they're doing with it.
It feels to me like what I imagine it world be to transition from developer to a development manager. I like getting the product but the enjoyment of solving the challenges is missing
It's being able to produce the output that formerly took a team of people, without needing to deal with the drama and politics of mananging a team of people.
Personal Context: For our personal ClockStack[0] project, I have decided that I will NOT read code at all. Though at high level, I do decide the architecture, dependency libraries etc. Sometimes even telling database schema. That's it. No code reading. Even ask AI how you implemented is enough. And going for prod/live just by chatting with AI is totally fun. Background: I wanted to do this ~5 years back and read almost 500 pages of H.264/RTMP spec/documentation. Even got valid non-compressing video encoding working in Golang. Then priorities changed. Now with the power of AI: Live within a week. I will absolutely call it vibe coding. It is totally fun.
To me, coding is very similar to modern agriculture. Some people enjoy growing their own fruits and vegetables even though it takes significantly more time than buying stuff from the store. Personally I care more about the end result than the process so I do a lot of vibe coding.
I had fun writing code when I felt I'm growing from it or that it facilitates my knowledge and unique experience. The parts that I felt could as well be written by a robot were so hard I would miss deadlines unable to force myself to do them. For a brief period in 2025 we were in the happy spot when robots were good enough to do the robot thing and I could focus on the interesting parts. But now they are good enough for everything and it's depressing. I can still contribute meaningfully to the overall system and product design, but it seems we are couple of major modle releases away from that being no longer possible either.
For me it really depends whether I'm happy with the result. The code base I work on is such a complex mess, AI often gets lost and I am not able to sufficiently scope the problem and foresee all the subtleties I don't actively remember. That often leads to agents loosing the plot and writing horrendous code. Trying to debug that and steering the agent back is not fun.
But if I can avoid that, keep things small and isolated, so it just allows me to get things done more quickly, it can be a lot more fun. I miss the flow state though, with ai i'm way more distracted and feel a lot less productive after a days work.
I was vibe coding algorithms for research for months, enjoying it. Had to move it into production, doing normal cs work. Disliked it. Began to understand the point of this article. Reviewing, testing, arguing with other dev's is painful.
I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.
That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.
Paradoxically, AI enables workers to feel more connected to the fruits of their labor by reducing their need to specialize; they are now able to field adjacent tasks.
It's fun when you find an actual new boundary and capability that you wanted to build, and the abstraction is clean, and then you materialize it into existence.
It's awful when the boundary breaks down. It might just be inherit to the loop (no mind readers) but I will walk away from an AI task for 30 minutes and all too frequently there will be insane code smells.
I've been doing a thing where I will have "integration" projects between many different subsystems to demonstrate some capability, test it, then destroy the integration folder, folding back what we learned into the subsystems themselves. So far this has been OK for learning and it incentivizes the AI to not throw garbage everywhere. Of course, this assumes you get subsystems right but it prevents direct reaching into them and modifying excessively - try to do the most you can with fixed interfaces, etc.
riding horses is many ways way more fun than driving a car (earliest form of self driving!!!); but I'd never consider riding as a real form of transportation
it's fine to keep riding though as long as you're having fun!! but it will definitely get worse and worse as a form of transportation
The entire process of the ups and downs is such a human experience for all sorts of work. The ups and downs are kinda removed when a ton of that friction is removed.
Can think of almost any task, and there is that likelihood for some small issue to arise, and the person has to adjust to it. Ai for coding, now you just kinda say "i hit this issue", and its usually resolved, this removes the friction that feeds the feeling of accomplishment once you complete something.
But i do think, there is of course a separation of work and play, many modern video games are amazing at the dopamine style rollercoaster it seems like this article is hinting at missing. So i totally get it for personal projects, if its no longer fun because the dopamine roller coaster is dead, it kinda kills it for a lot of people. For work I don't know if it NEEDS to be there at all, ideally less friction makes for more work getting done, even if its less pleasant for the human involved.
I couldn't see myself continuing playing a game if all the happy dopamine was front loaded into the first 10 minutes.
Can't relate. The whole point is to build products and drive value for the customer. It was never to enjoy writing the code. Writing the code was actually the easy part.
There's one thing I struggle to understand when I read posts like this: who is forcing these people to vibe code their side projects? If you want to hand-code because you enjoy it, what is stopping you?
I understand that the work we get paid to do exists in an entirely different context. Capitalism will always push for doing more with less. When you're on the clock, the rules are different.
But if you love coding. By all means, code. What's stopping you?
Also, I think we need to update our terminology. "Vibe coding" served its purpose and still defines a subset of how people are creating software. But I feel that working with coding agents, carefully orchestrated by skilled developers, deserves a term less dismissive than "vibe coding".
To me, vibe coding is pulling the arm of the slot machine until something good comes out. Yeah, that can honestly be a lot of fun. But working with these tools to create code that is as good as, if not better than what you'd write yourself, that's something else entirely. I think we flatten the nuance of this whole crazy situation we find ourselves in when we conflate the two.
Vibe coding means you have no idea how the code looks or works or the architecture. Agentic coding is the same as regular coding, just you had an agent do most of the typing.
I personally really really don’t like working on a code base where I have no idea what the code is actually doing or looks like and I find even the best models eventually start tripping up on messy bloated code bases, though that takes months now vs days like a year ago. I think we’re still early days in the vibe coding experiment and as vibe coded products push into 50k LOC, you start to see the parasitic drag caused by a messy code base on the agents.
I absolutely love the speed that agents give me!
So what I’ve been doing is working myself in a main branch where I’m just tending to the code and writing high level types and architecture, then spinning up agents into work trees and having them work on specific, focused tasks. Then I get and agent to do a merge into the main branch, fix up conflicts, help me go over design decisions etc.
So it’s trying to get the best of both worlds, I’m getting the speed and also my head is in the code and working on the most challenging / important aspects of the code base so my actual technical skills are always improving.
It isn't as fun for those projects that can be written by hand ;)
There are tons of projects that were economically infeasible to write, and now become feasible. Something that needed lots of human time but almost no one wanted to sacrifice anything, including money, to get them. But now we have LLM subscription in which per token cost is almost free.
I'm really enjoying dusting off old projects that I lost interest in and handing them over to Claude to modernize their code and resurrect the ideas. But I'm also starting to miss the grind and feeling of accomplishment when you build stuff yourself, or finally sort out that nagging bug. I think there is a balance to be found, for me anyway, and I'm not sure I've found it yet.
I think you should split the difference and use vibe coding for the parts you don't care about.
Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.
that's strange, for me it is the coolest thing in the world. but I always had a love-hate relationship with with programming which always felt dirty compared to math.
AI just feels so incredibly empowering (and removed the slow drag). You still get the joy of designing systems, trying out new ideas and potentially conquering the world.
I've been a developer for 40 years now. Over that time period - I've had a lot of ideas that were great but were simply too difficult for me to execute on my own.
Today I am executing all of them and it feels amazing to see all these beautiful things come to life.
I understand that some people really really really liked coding by hand. More power to them. I just don't understand why they're so angry at me because I prefer the final product.
EDIT: And I get an anonymous downvote within 30 seconds. I don't get it.
Wrong. What you call "vibecoding" is in fact metaprogramming, or essentially the art of writing programs that write programs. Yes, the medium of exchange is common text (or ideas in their purest forms) which may seem different from traditional programming but is no different from typing in Rust or C++ syntax. The reason a large chunk of HN purists _detest_ it is due to them not being able to gatekeep development anymore behind obscure syntax rules or forcing developers to memorize irrelevant programming constructs. And before I get called out, I've effectively memorized the entire C++ standard going back however many revisions, and yes, I can confirm that it's a complete waste of time. LLMs (today, in their current forms) can understand and emit code far better than _any_ human developer. Amortized for time? It's not even close. With half of the tools I've built I've stopped counting my code generation in locs and switched over to KB of code per day. Far more informative at this point.
There are two camps in this industry and I have the chance to meet both.
- There are those for whom coding is a hobby, an art project, an identity. These are the people who debate tabs vs spaces or use Vim.
- There are those for whom coding is a way to build things. Their dopamine comes from the end product and seeing people use it. They couldn't care less about tabs vs spaces.
I'm in the second camp. Vibe coding has removed all the shitty parts of coding. Like I hate figuring out how to do this esoteric thing in this library. Wading through docs and hitting the CI constantly - its a pain. Not fun.
idk man it really looks like an opinion i disagree with. had more fun vibecoding 10 projects last month than writing html tables manually 3 years ago on the same projects
It feels like pulling and building someone else's code. It just happens to be *exactly* what you're looking for.
This is the best way I can describe how I feel about it.
When the software output is the _goal_, it's a lot less rewarding. When it's not, it's fine I guess. I'd still feel better if I had it done it myself but it's fine.
Writing code is fun for me in a mechanical way - it is very satisfying to edit my lisp expressions in Vim (gasp not emacs)
I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)
But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...
I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...
It depends on the goal. Right now, one thing I definitely wouldn't want to do is write js bullshit by hand - absolutely not.
But if we are talking about personal projects where the aim is to learn complex interesting things, then of course writing code by hand is the only way to actually learn.
I miss hitting states of flow that lasted all day where I would just drop into a mental black hole and emerge on the other side with work I usually felt a large amount of personal pride from, where I was primarily the creator rather than a babysitter.
People talk about how LLMs take away the tedium of writing boilerplate code and it just makes me wonder how/why they were writing enough boilerplate code into the mid-2020s for that to be a significant help.
I do use LLMs because they are undeniably productivity-enhancing for producing most code and I'm ultimately a laborer selling my time for money, but I feel like a lot of the fun and accomplishment has been stripped from the job I've been doing for decades.
If I were comfortably financially independent I'd probably just code for fun without LLMs and be much happier, but It Is What It Is.
I think this is cope. I'm sorry to be so harsh, and the author is entitled to their opinions on what is fun, but I think a lot of the "LLMs are not fun" discourse is motivated reasoning.
We can no longer deny that LLMs are useful for coding, so we now move on to the only remaining and defensible goalpost: I don't use LLMs because I don't want to. To be clear, this is a perfectly fine position and I hold no ill will against anybody holding it, but I don't think one gets to this conclusion naturally. It comes first from a lifetime of writing software, like I and many others have experienced.
And for what it's worth, I always had more fun planning what I was going to build rather than handling the brass tax of implementation. The specifics of problem and solution are always what interested me more than writing each character, and LLMs allow for me to do just this, and nothing else. Not a bad deal!
Again, my apologies for being such an insufferable asshole that I came here and told you what you ought to like. This is my opinion, based solely on my experience, and I might be wrong.
I don't think "cope" is the right word for it. I totally agree with the author that it's not as much fun now. But that isn't an argument against using AI tools to write code. I'm a professional. It's certainly nice if my professional work is fun, but it just ... might not be.
I have definitely been finding more joy in other parts of the job though, which is also good. But I definitely used to have a lot more fun writing and editing a lot of lines of code than what I do now, which is mostly reading and reviewing them.
Laughed loud at the “you are absolutely right!” While diving in!
But in my opinion it depends, if you are just generally vibe coding you will get that, but if you know what you are doing and precisely direct it to what you want, you get amazing results. I feel a lot of developers hate it because it requires leadership skills and shuffling multiple task at the same time with a strong long term vision, which none of that is needed when you are doing the code manually, simply because time is in your favor, say in 2 years you reached the point that you would get in 2 weeks by LLM, you have had enough time to revise your goals (hence the whole agile approach was a thing back then), with LLM tho, you need all that thoughts compacted and very well planned before you even write a single code (it’s why agile is dead, and waterfall with specs planning is back again), having the specs and blueprint and all the little details even the library to be used is also documented and planned, then you fire up the LLM, that’s what I do and it works perfectly.
vibe coding for personal projects is a power tool. If I'm creating a 4x game for fun, id like to write core logic myself, but figuring out why drop-down lists stopped opening after a unity upgrade or why the animation is glitching sometimes is something ai can do.
For work projects, if fun was the goal you wouldn't be paid to do it :)
I predict we are less than 12 months away from the pendulum swinging back to hand coding but dragging ai pair programming into the workflow. This is why I don’t worry too much about this.
I can predict this because I’m building such a thing for myself as are many others. It seems to be where the tao of slop is going.
I actually agree with what you said! the subscriptions we are paying today is only a tiny fraction of what it actually cost AI companies like Claude and Codex. either it will shift into running those agents in your own setup or pay an absurred number. anyways as you said the pendulum will swing back for sure!
I really love my horse and carriage over that really fast car that gets someone from point A to point B with 100x speed, said the Amish with a heart full of honesty, and he was subjectively right.
“Most likely better” is carrying a lot here. Risk matters to my customers and having a 1% chance of erasing a production DB or inserting a typo squatting malicious dependency that exfiltrates and enables ransomware is not acceptable for those customers. They don’t care how you built it, but they do care that you know how it’s really built which is antithetical to vibe coding. Vibe coders can be very smart, but they are in “trust, don’t verify” mode.
this is completely unrelated to the article, which is about not _enjoying_ vibecoding. even if I agreed with you, I would still think commenting this on this article is a real dick move
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.
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Anyone that assumes an author is speaking for everyone will find something else to gripe about, IMO.
Why does anyone ever have to say “this is, like, just my opinion, man.” Are readers so ignorant to think articles are statements of definitive fact applying to all of humanity unless told otherwise?
Why would you think that the author was speaking for anyone but themselves?
When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.
Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.
Never hearing the end of it from people who don't understand that other people write from their own perspective by default?
Yeah. The only way to be wrong in this discussion is to assume a position of deciding how others feel about something.
he's right though
That is just your opinion, not a general rule. In my opinion.
This. Like cooking is more fun than take-away... if you can cook.
In particular, writing code by hand is fun for people who are good at writing code by hand. It's not at all fun for people who aren't. For those people, vibecoding means that they can produce something without the pain, something that compiles without all the time fighting the compiler, something that works (or at least mostly works) without all the debugging time.
this is a personal blog and it uses the first person
unless you want to water down the title with an "i think"
Who gives a shit? HN holds itself in too high a regard; some peanut gallery on an AI-pilled tech forum will have no effect on the author's life one way or the other.
i mean, fun is a pretty subjective concept, seems obvious that it's personal preference right?
Boy look at all these six month old accounts that have been programming for decades and just love vibe coding!
My account is seventeen years old, and I've been coding more than forty years; is that enough to meet your standards?
I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
It's heavily biased by the circles I hang out in, but I'm seeing a loose correlation between how much people enjoy working with coding agents and their depth of experience. I've even seen people come out of retirement because this stuff is so much fun for them.
AI tools amplify existing coding experience, and reward management experience too. Engineers with a decade+ of experience are more likely to have been engineering leads or spent time in engineering management.
Related observation: Anthropic are developing a reputation for hiring former CTO/CEO/founders and putting them back to work as individual contributors.
I think it all comes down to whether or not they enjoyed coding in the first place.
For me it's mixed. There's aspects of coding I do enjoy but also there's tedium that I don't. What I don't like about vibe coding is it has turned me into just a code reviewer in a lot of cases.
I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.
I've been coding since the 1990s and I love vibe coding with sensible guardrails and code/design reviews.
Should dig up my slashdot 5 digit uid to placate your concerns, or just decide your opinion in regards to me is irrelevant? (Because it is.)
My uid was < 32768.
I've been programming for decades, and I do love vibe coding side-projects. I have a little pixel art / animation tool, a music composition tool, and a little video game builder that agents made for my kids. I haven't looked at a line of code. Instead, I've just focused on getting the UX and features that I want. I did guide it along the tech stack and general philosophy I wanted it to follow, though. I'm sure it's hot garbage, but for projects like this, it doesn't really matter, and it's been a lot of fun.
Would I want to build a business around products that are built this way? Not yet. I'm definitely not comfortable supporting a vibe coded heap of code in a production setting.
That's a valid assessment, and a reminder why I keep using 4chan despite how awful it is.
I've been programming since I got a Commodore VIC-20 when I was seven years old.
I love AI coding because I can use it to automate all the parts that are not fun or that would take far, far too much time to implement by hand. It puts things within reach that would formerly be unthinkable without millions of dollars and a gigantic software development team.
I still also enjoy coding things by hand... interesting, original things.
The technology itself is also absolutely fascinating. I've followed AI research for a long time and played around with it a lot, but the incredible breakthroughs of the last 5-10 years have blown me away. I've been working through the math on attention layers and feel like I've almost got it, and it's genius. Very cool stuff.
(The companies behind marketing and scaling it are, to varying degrees, not cool, but the tech and science and math is.)
I've been coding since the 90s and I stopped coding by hand pretty much as soon as I could get away with it.
I grew up in the 1980s. My HackerNews account is 7 years old.
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where a quick output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again after so many decades. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
> Boy look at all these six month old accounts
Bro with <500 karma in 10 years thinking he knows something
You're the middle of the bell curve meme :)
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
i found being an IT manager quite a bit more fun. at least i was working with people
the few years i was an IT manager i came to like the repeat offenders and those with chronic learned helplessness. they seemed like "regulars" and were all big personalities. often i wondered if they intentionally disabled bluetooth just to hang out for a few minutes
> vibecoding is much fun as being IT manager
I think part of the popularity is that it appeals to people who want to be managers but lack people skills.
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.
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.
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.
Not really, I think this is an ADHD-adjacent thing. Say you have a hobby that could benefit from a 3D printer, and suddenly 3D printing becomes your hobby. Or you want to do some home improvement, and suddenly you’re focused on your workbench and tool rack instead of the home improvements.
When Amazon released Q, I too started building things around it, first rules, then MCP servers, then skills, then Claude Code workflows. Eventually, I was able to break this feedback loop: I have very few extras on top of Claude Code/Codex because there’s no point in competing with them on features.
The slowest part of my current feedback loop is CI.
Fantastic analogy. Bullseye.
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.
Yep. Now you get to focus on actually solving the problems at hand rather than messing around typing thousands of loc of irrelevant boilerplate to get something to work.
It sounds like you never enjoyed coding.
If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
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.
For me, a big part of it is there is something about the formal structure of a programming language that is very satisfying to me. Same thing with math. There is something about the precision, and the constraints. Writing natural language prompts just isn't the same.
I think there’s a difference in vibe coding and what I call accelerated software construction.
Vibe coding is like a last second weekend trip to Paris.
Accelerated software construction is like planning a four week backpacking trip through Western Europe.
I’m a grey beard so I’m on the far side of “writing code is fun” but I get it. I used to love those ah-ha moments when solving coding problems.
But now I love delivering solutions to the business or creating software that works as I envisioned it and those two things are fun in very different ways.
I've programmed for decades. Vibe coding is more fun than writing boilerplate just to kick off a small project these days.
The days of:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"; 20 GOTO 10
Are long gone.
I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink? I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes. When it comes to backend it's more of the same. When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project. If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages. And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
I think that's half true because there is a lot of great technology that exists today where you can get anything done without any of the boilerplate. A very brief example is the .NET ecosystem where I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way.
Bad example. Even the prompt for that would be longer than the code itself.
Double edged sword. I started programming in the 90s as a teenager, it was always fun for me to code. Several toy projects on GitHub, later studied CS and became a professional dev of course.
I started a small one-man SaaS in 2022 that I coded by hand, and have gradually adopted AI usage. I don't write a single line of code anymore today, and my speed/performance has supercharged in the last 6-12months. The fun of coding is completely gone, but replaced with me being able to deliver what I need to grow the product (from dev, to design and marketing work).
Not even close. But I can say that for grunt work, it's a dream come true. I was just telling my wife the "high" or "flow state" I used to get in is more or less MIA with letting the AI loose. I've started to just do the stuff I enjoy by hand—front-end design, challenging/interesting back-end stuff—and let the AI do the other stuff that I'm either too lazy or too disinterested in doing.
Honestly, it's quite nice. I wish more people would take a less-binary approach to this stuff. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's just a tool. Like any tool, you can apply it selectively. It sounds like a lot of companies have hand-waved this away as being an anachronism, but I'd argue that's the most foolish way to deploy AI. Trying to augment juniors into seniors with it, too, is just showing how many people haven't the slightest clue what they're doing with it.
It feels to me like what I imagine it world be to transition from developer to a development manager. I like getting the product but the enjoyment of solving the challenges is missing
It's being able to produce the output that formerly took a team of people, without needing to deal with the drama and politics of mananging a team of people.
Personal Context: For our personal ClockStack[0] project, I have decided that I will NOT read code at all. Though at high level, I do decide the architecture, dependency libraries etc. Sometimes even telling database schema. That's it. No code reading. Even ask AI how you implemented is enough. And going for prod/live just by chatting with AI is totally fun. Background: I wanted to do this ~5 years back and read almost 500 pages of H.264/RTMP spec/documentation. Even got valid non-compressing video encoding working in Golang. Then priorities changed. Now with the power of AI: Live within a week. I will absolutely call it vibe coding. It is totally fun.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams
To me, coding is very similar to modern agriculture. Some people enjoy growing their own fruits and vegetables even though it takes significantly more time than buying stuff from the store. Personally I care more about the end result than the process so I do a lot of vibe coding.
I had fun writing code when I felt I'm growing from it or that it facilitates my knowledge and unique experience. The parts that I felt could as well be written by a robot were so hard I would miss deadlines unable to force myself to do them. For a brief period in 2025 we were in the happy spot when robots were good enough to do the robot thing and I could focus on the interesting parts. But now they are good enough for everything and it's depressing. I can still contribute meaningfully to the overall system and product design, but it seems we are couple of major modle releases away from that being no longer possible either.
For me it really depends whether I'm happy with the result. The code base I work on is such a complex mess, AI often gets lost and I am not able to sufficiently scope the problem and foresee all the subtleties I don't actively remember. That often leads to agents loosing the plot and writing horrendous code. Trying to debug that and steering the agent back is not fun. But if I can avoid that, keep things small and isolated, so it just allows me to get things done more quickly, it can be a lot more fun. I miss the flow state though, with ai i'm way more distracted and feel a lot less productive after a days work.
I was vibe coding algorithms for research for months, enjoying it. Had to move it into production, doing normal cs work. Disliked it. Began to understand the point of this article. Reviewing, testing, arguing with other dev's is painful.
Oops, that’s the only way to make software that’s reliable and usable by others.
I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.
That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.
It's not a strict binary. I can write the parts of the code that I find interesting and shove the parts I don't want to write onto the model.
True and only when you own the entire project, you can do whatever you want. Most codebases are shared and it sucks to be forced to look at slop.
Excellent write-up. This reminds me of a quote from "Dialektik der Aufklärung." (My English translation below)
"Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer macht, mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben."
"People pay for the multiplying of their power with the alienation from that which they exercise their power over."
Paradoxically, AI enables workers to feel more connected to the fruits of their labor by reducing their need to specialize; they are now able to field adjacent tasks.
It's fun when you find an actual new boundary and capability that you wanted to build, and the abstraction is clean, and then you materialize it into existence.
It's awful when the boundary breaks down. It might just be inherit to the loop (no mind readers) but I will walk away from an AI task for 30 minutes and all too frequently there will be insane code smells.
I've been doing a thing where I will have "integration" projects between many different subsystems to demonstrate some capability, test it, then destroy the integration folder, folding back what we learned into the subsystems themselves. So far this has been OK for learning and it incentivizes the AI to not throw garbage everywhere. Of course, this assumes you get subsystems right but it prevents direct reaching into them and modifying excessively - try to do the most you can with fixed interfaces, etc.
riding horses is many ways way more fun than driving a car (earliest form of self driving!!!); but I'd never consider riding as a real form of transportation
it's fine to keep riding though as long as you're having fun!! but it will definitely get worse and worse as a form of transportation
(this is true for hand coding too)
I completely agree. I am still writing code by hand because I find it enjoyable and almost therapeutic.
Writing code by hand, for your employer, isn’t what most people consider “fun”, anyways
The entire process of the ups and downs is such a human experience for all sorts of work. The ups and downs are kinda removed when a ton of that friction is removed.
Can think of almost any task, and there is that likelihood for some small issue to arise, and the person has to adjust to it. Ai for coding, now you just kinda say "i hit this issue", and its usually resolved, this removes the friction that feeds the feeling of accomplishment once you complete something.
But i do think, there is of course a separation of work and play, many modern video games are amazing at the dopamine style rollercoaster it seems like this article is hinting at missing. So i totally get it for personal projects, if its no longer fun because the dopamine roller coaster is dead, it kinda kills it for a lot of people. For work I don't know if it NEEDS to be there at all, ideally less friction makes for more work getting done, even if its less pleasant for the human involved.
I couldn't see myself continuing playing a game if all the happy dopamine was front loaded into the first 10 minutes.
Can't relate. The whole point is to build products and drive value for the customer. It was never to enjoy writing the code. Writing the code was actually the easy part.
There's one thing I struggle to understand when I read posts like this: who is forcing these people to vibe code their side projects? If you want to hand-code because you enjoy it, what is stopping you?
I understand that the work we get paid to do exists in an entirely different context. Capitalism will always push for doing more with less. When you're on the clock, the rules are different.
But if you love coding. By all means, code. What's stopping you?
Also, I think we need to update our terminology. "Vibe coding" served its purpose and still defines a subset of how people are creating software. But I feel that working with coding agents, carefully orchestrated by skilled developers, deserves a term less dismissive than "vibe coding".
To me, vibe coding is pulling the arm of the slot machine until something good comes out. Yeah, that can honestly be a lot of fun. But working with these tools to create code that is as good as, if not better than what you'd write yourself, that's something else entirely. I think we flatten the nuance of this whole crazy situation we find ourselves in when we conflate the two.
Agentic coding is the term I’ve been using.
Vibe coding means you have no idea how the code looks or works or the architecture. Agentic coding is the same as regular coding, just you had an agent do most of the typing.
I personally really really don’t like working on a code base where I have no idea what the code is actually doing or looks like and I find even the best models eventually start tripping up on messy bloated code bases, though that takes months now vs days like a year ago. I think we’re still early days in the vibe coding experiment and as vibe coded products push into 50k LOC, you start to see the parasitic drag caused by a messy code base on the agents.
I absolutely love the speed that agents give me!
So what I’ve been doing is working myself in a main branch where I’m just tending to the code and writing high level types and architecture, then spinning up agents into work trees and having them work on specific, focused tasks. Then I get and agent to do a merge into the main branch, fix up conflicts, help me go over design decisions etc.
So it’s trying to get the best of both worlds, I’m getting the speed and also my head is in the code and working on the most challenging / important aspects of the code base so my actual technical skills are always improving.
It isn't as fun for those projects that can be written by hand ;)
There are tons of projects that were economically infeasible to write, and now become feasible. Something that needed lots of human time but almost no one wanted to sacrifice anything, including money, to get them. But now we have LLM subscription in which per token cost is almost free.
They are fun to create and use.
can you name such a project that requires LLM only?
also would you fly on a plane with vibecoded software?
I'm really enjoying dusting off old projects that I lost interest in and handing them over to Claude to modernize their code and resurrect the ideas. But I'm also starting to miss the grind and feeling of accomplishment when you build stuff yourself, or finally sort out that nagging bug. I think there is a balance to be found, for me anyway, and I'm not sure I've found it yet.
Personally I also liked writing assembly code for hot loops. It just doesn’t make sense anymore except in some rare 1% case.
I think you should split the difference and use vibe coding for the parts you don't care about.
Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.
Making food in the microwave isn’t as fun as cooking by hand.
The comparison misses the utilitarian aspect.
that's strange, for me it is the coolest thing in the world. but I always had a love-hate relationship with with programming which always felt dirty compared to math. AI just feels so incredibly empowering (and removed the slow drag). You still get the joy of designing systems, trying out new ideas and potentially conquering the world.
Vibecoding is intellectual Viagra for the feeble-minded.
I don't get it.
I've been a developer for 40 years now. Over that time period - I've had a lot of ideas that were great but were simply too difficult for me to execute on my own.
Today I am executing all of them and it feels amazing to see all these beautiful things come to life.
I understand that some people really really really liked coding by hand. More power to them. I just don't understand why they're so angry at me because I prefer the final product.
EDIT: And I get an anonymous downvote within 30 seconds. I don't get it.
It isn’t about valuing the final product. If you really cared about it, the code would not have stopped you doing it by hand.
In my experience, people like programming with agents because they are lazy or bad programmers (or both).
Wrong. What you call "vibecoding" is in fact metaprogramming, or essentially the art of writing programs that write programs. Yes, the medium of exchange is common text (or ideas in their purest forms) which may seem different from traditional programming but is no different from typing in Rust or C++ syntax. The reason a large chunk of HN purists _detest_ it is due to them not being able to gatekeep development anymore behind obscure syntax rules or forcing developers to memorize irrelevant programming constructs. And before I get called out, I've effectively memorized the entire C++ standard going back however many revisions, and yes, I can confirm that it's a complete waste of time. LLMs (today, in their current forms) can understand and emit code far better than _any_ human developer. Amortized for time? It's not even close. With half of the tools I've built I've stopped counting my code generation in locs and switched over to KB of code per day. Far more informative at this point.
Watching someone play videogames is not as fun as playing the said game yourself.
Then why do esports, speedrunning, and Twitch exist?
There are two camps in this industry and I have the chance to meet both.
- There are those for whom coding is a hobby, an art project, an identity. These are the people who debate tabs vs spaces or use Vim.
- There are those for whom coding is a way to build things. Their dopamine comes from the end product and seeing people use it. They couldn't care less about tabs vs spaces.
I'm in the second camp. Vibe coding has removed all the shitty parts of coding. Like I hate figuring out how to do this esoteric thing in this library. Wading through docs and hitting the CI constantly - its a pain. Not fun.
Agree ! Writing code by hand becoming a thing of the past unfortunately !
Vibe coding is fun when you catch a good vibe and the AI seems to magically one shot things you’re thinking about almost perfectly.
Unfortunately it also means that whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel.
> "Whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel."
This.
idk man it really looks like an opinion i disagree with. had more fun vibecoding 10 projects last month than writing html tables manually 3 years ago on the same projects
It feels like pulling and building someone else's code. It just happens to be *exactly* what you're looking for.
This is the best way I can describe how I feel about it.
When the software output is the _goal_, it's a lot less rewarding. When it's not, it's fine I guess. I'd still feel better if I had it done it myself but it's fine.
You want to have fun at work? What is that?
Writing code is fun for me in a mechanical way - it is very satisfying to edit my lisp expressions in Vim (gasp not emacs)
I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)
But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...
I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...
Well, irrespective, this is the work now. Your choices are:
1. find the fun in it
2. tolerate the boredom
3. find something else to do with your life
It depends on the goal. Right now, one thing I definitely wouldn't want to do is write js bullshit by hand - absolutely not.
But if we are talking about personal projects where the aim is to learn complex interesting things, then of course writing code by hand is the only way to actually learn.
I guess antirez agrees with this as well[0].
[0]: https://x.com/antirez/status/2105569301944238403
> Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
I agree.
I miss hitting states of flow that lasted all day where I would just drop into a mental black hole and emerge on the other side with work I usually felt a large amount of personal pride from, where I was primarily the creator rather than a babysitter.
People talk about how LLMs take away the tedium of writing boilerplate code and it just makes me wonder how/why they were writing enough boilerplate code into the mid-2020s for that to be a significant help.
I do use LLMs because they are undeniably productivity-enhancing for producing most code and I'm ultimately a laborer selling my time for money, but I feel like a lot of the fun and accomplishment has been stripped from the job I've been doing for decades.
If I were comfortably financially independent I'd probably just code for fun without LLMs and be much happier, but It Is What It Is.
If you can’t code it is
Creators vs. Coders.
Counterpoint: Writing code by hand isn't as fun as vibecoding
I think this is cope. I'm sorry to be so harsh, and the author is entitled to their opinions on what is fun, but I think a lot of the "LLMs are not fun" discourse is motivated reasoning.
We can no longer deny that LLMs are useful for coding, so we now move on to the only remaining and defensible goalpost: I don't use LLMs because I don't want to. To be clear, this is a perfectly fine position and I hold no ill will against anybody holding it, but I don't think one gets to this conclusion naturally. It comes first from a lifetime of writing software, like I and many others have experienced.
And for what it's worth, I always had more fun planning what I was going to build rather than handling the brass tax of implementation. The specifics of problem and solution are always what interested me more than writing each character, and LLMs allow for me to do just this, and nothing else. Not a bad deal!
Again, my apologies for being such an insufferable asshole that I came here and told you what you ought to like. This is my opinion, based solely on my experience, and I might be wrong.
Don't think this is an offensive position and don't think you're telling people what they ought to like; like author you're expressing your opinion
I don't think "cope" is the right word for it. I totally agree with the author that it's not as much fun now. But that isn't an argument against using AI tools to write code. I'm a professional. It's certainly nice if my professional work is fun, but it just ... might not be.
I have definitely been finding more joy in other parts of the job though, which is also good. But I definitely used to have a lot more fun writing and editing a lot of lines of code than what I do now, which is mostly reading and reviewing them.
I mean, if you're just going to come in and say that the person is lying (or, charitably, deluded), there's really no point in having a conversation.
Not just not as fun, it isn't as effective either. The AI proponents who claim LLMs can write code better than a human are only kidding themselves.
Laughed loud at the “you are absolutely right!” While diving in!
But in my opinion it depends, if you are just generally vibe coding you will get that, but if you know what you are doing and precisely direct it to what you want, you get amazing results. I feel a lot of developers hate it because it requires leadership skills and shuffling multiple task at the same time with a strong long term vision, which none of that is needed when you are doing the code manually, simply because time is in your favor, say in 2 years you reached the point that you would get in 2 weeks by LLM, you have had enough time to revise your goals (hence the whole agile approach was a thing back then), with LLM tho, you need all that thoughts compacted and very well planned before you even write a single code (it’s why agile is dead, and waterfall with specs planning is back again), having the specs and blueprint and all the little details even the library to be used is also documented and planned, then you fire up the LLM, that’s what I do and it works perfectly.
One of my projects is creating a direct manipulation user interface. It's been a blast.
For most other (maintenance work) projects, not so much.
Meh. I'd much rather AI write the boring boilerplate bits so that I can focus on the fun stuff
Edit: Or the bits I don't want to learn about because I'll literally use it once and never again
vibe coding for personal projects is a power tool. If I'm creating a 4x game for fun, id like to write core logic myself, but figuring out why drop-down lists stopped opening after a unity upgrade or why the animation is glitching sometimes is something ai can do.
For work projects, if fun was the goal you wouldn't be paid to do it :)
I predict we are less than 12 months away from the pendulum swinging back to hand coding but dragging ai pair programming into the workflow. This is why I don’t worry too much about this.
I can predict this because I’m building such a thing for myself as are many others. It seems to be where the tao of slop is going.
Not a chance.
For your personal projects or as a hobby, absolutely. But in a professional setting, coding by hand gone forever.
I’m doubtful. I’ve seen increasing hands-off work where bots are now replying on PRs, tickets, and even DMs!
I actually agree with what you said! the subscriptions we are paying today is only a tiny fraction of what it actually cost AI companies like Claude and Codex. either it will shift into running those agents in your own setup or pay an absurred number. anyways as you said the pendulum will swing back for sure!
I’ll take that bet up to all the money in the known universe.
Yeah I could see this...folding claude code cli into the copilot-style experience could be good.
I really love my horse and carriage over that really fast car that gets someone from point A to point B with 100x speed, said the Amish with a heart full of honesty, and he was subjectively right.
Your analogy and sarcasm reminded me of Ezekiel in Sex Drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKGpZyWj3M
Nobody is going to pay you to write code by hand when an agent can do the job faster and most likely better.
“Most likely better” is carrying a lot here. Risk matters to my customers and having a 1% chance of erasing a production DB or inserting a typo squatting malicious dependency that exfiltrates and enables ransomware is not acceptable for those customers. They don’t care how you built it, but they do care that you know how it’s really built which is antithetical to vibe coding. Vibe coders can be very smart, but they are in “trust, don’t verify” mode.
this is completely unrelated to the article, which is about not _enjoying_ vibecoding. even if I agreed with you, I would still think commenting this on this article is a real dick move