Summarizer

This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally. Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems. The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.

I’ve got kids and so seldom find myself with the time or energy to work on something. Cursor has really helped in that regard. I have an extensive media collection of very large VR video files with very unhelpful names. I needed to figure out a good way to review which ones I wanted to keep and discard (over 30TB, almost 2000 files). It was fun sitting using Cursor with Claude to work on setting up a quick web UI, with calls out to ffmpeg to generate snapshots. It handled the “boring parts” with aplomb, getting me a html page with a little JavaScript to serve as my front end, and making a super simple API. All this was still like 1000 lines and would have taken me days, or I would have copied some boilerplate then modified it a little. The problems Claude couldn’t figure out were also similarly interesting, like its syntax to the ffmpeg calls were wrong and not skipping all the frames we didn’t want to generate, so it was taking 100x longer to generate than was necessary seeking through every file, then I made some optimizations in how I had it configured, then realizing I’d generated thumbnails for 3 hours only for them to not display well on the page as it was an 8x1 tile. At that point Claude wanted to regenerate all the thumbnails and I said “just display the image twice, with the first half displayed the first time and the second half displayed the second time, saving myself a few hours. Hacky, but for a personal project, the right solution. I still felt like I was tinkering in a way I haven’t in awhile, and a project that I’d never have gotten around to and instead have just probably bought another new hard drive, took me a couple hours, most of which was actually marking the files as keep or delete. I ended up deleting 12TB of stuff I didn’t want, which it felt cool to write myself a bespoke tool rather than search around on the off chance that such a thing already exists. It also gave me a mental framework of how to approach little products like this in the future, that often a web ui and a simple API backend like Node making external process calls is going to be easier than making a full fat windows UI. I have a similarly sized STL library from 3D printing and think I could apply mostly the same idea to that, in fact it’s 99% the same except for swapping out the ffmpeg call to something to generate a snapshot of the stl at a few different angles.

If you only get one or two half-hours a week it's probably more fun to use those to build working software than it is to inch forward on a project that won't do anything interesting for several more months.

I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying "you" instead of "I". This is how I read your post: > I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. I don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where I'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If I have a half an hour, I tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then I continue when I have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because I can't make myself stop.) Reading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy.

I too have found this. However, I absolutely love being able to mock up a larger idea in 30 minutes to assess feasibility as a proof of concept before I sink a few hours into it.

The problem with modern web development is that if you're not already doing it everyday, climbing the tree of dependencies just to get to the point where you have something show up on screen can be exhausting, and can take several of those half hour sessions.

I do have productivity goals! I want to spend the half hour I have on the part I think is fun. Not on machine configuration, boilerplate, dependency resolution, 100 random errors with new frameworks that are maybe resolved with web searches.

> You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. Yes. That used to require difficult decision making: “Can I do this and how long will it take?” was a significant cognitive load and source of stress. This was especially true when it became clear something was going to take days not hours, having expended a lot of effort already. Even more frustrating was having to implement hacks due to time constraints when I knew a couple more hours would obviate that need. Now I know within a couple of minutes if something is feasible or not and decision fatigue is much lower.

You just described my experience exactly. Especially the personal side project time as a parent. Now after bed I can tinker and have fun again because I can move so much more quickly and see real progress even with only an hour or two to spend every few days.

Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family. I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week. There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition.

> AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. That fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour.

I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour. It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise. A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it. It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".

For personal projects, 10x is a lower bound. This year alone I got several projects done that had been on my mind for years . The baseline isn't what it would have taken had I set aside time to do it.[1] The baseline is reality . I'm easily getting 10x more projects done than in the past. For work, I totally agree with you. [1] Although it's often true even in this case. My first such project was done in 15 minutes. Conceptually it was an easy project. Had I known all the libraries, etc out would have taken about an hour. But I didn't, and the research alone would have taken hours. And most of the knowledge acquired from that research would likely be useless.

As someone that only has sporadic pockets of deep time in my free time the thing that has been immensely helpful from an LLM coding point of view is mental model building. I can now much more easily get "into the flow" after being away from a codebase for a period of time by asking questions. For example, remind me where all the integration points for that API route is located. Or give me a rundown on this file. Etc.. It gets me back up to speed so much more quickly and makes me productive with limited amounts of time. It also means I don't have to try to carry this context around with me or I'll forget it.

I kinda feel the same way, don't get me wrong, I'm a developer at soul level, I absolutely love programming, but I love more getting shit done, automating things, taking the human out of the equation and putting the computer to do it, AI lets me do that. I work in cybersecurity as a WAF admin, my job is 100% that, but I'm also the only developer so anything that needs to be scripted or developed I get to do it. One week I created 4 different scripts with Gemini Canvas to automate some tedious work, it took my I don't know, 3 hours? Instead of 1 or 2 weeks? Yeah sign me in.

I spent probably 150-200 hours coding a money management tool in 2022. This evening, I worked with Claude to make an AI-assisted money manager that is better than the 2022 version I so carefully crafted. I had nothing at all this morning and now I have a full database with all my transactions and really strong reporting. The word “developer” is about to get a lot more expansive and I think that’s cool.

I work at most 3-4 hours a day, and my work is prompting Cursor. Certainly an improvement over suffering 8 hours a day, but still not quite what I'm looking for.

More related to the title, i've found the same. I was always an aggressive pixel-pusher, so web dev took me AGES. But with shadcn + llms I'm flying through stuff, no lie, 5-20x faster than I was before. And i dont hate it anymore

I'm using it to build things. Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it. I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout. It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim... - here's the shared transcript: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6958a2f131a081918ed810832f7437a2 I read the code it produced and ran it on my computer to see it work. What did I learn? - Codex can write, compile and test C extensions for Python now - The sqlite3_progress_handler mechanism I've been hooking into for SQLite time limits in my Python code works in C too, and appears to be the recommended way to solve this - How to use PyTuple_New(size) in C and then populate that tuple - What the SQLite C API for running a query and then iterating though the results looks like, including the various SQLITE_INTEGER style constants for column types - The "goto cleanup;" pattern for cleaning up on errors, including releasing resources and calling DECREF for the Python reference counter - That a simple Python extension can be done with ~150 lines of readable and surprisingly non-threatening C - How to use a setup.py and pyproject.toml function together to configure a Python package that compiles an extension Would I have learned more if I had spent realistically a couple of days figuring out enough C and CPython and SQLite and setup.py trivia to do this without LLM help? Yes. But I don't have two days to spend on this flight of curiosity, so actually I would have learned nothing. The LLM project took me ~1 minutes to prompt and then 15 minutes to consume the lessons at the end. And I can do dozens of this kind of thing a day, in between my other work!

Laziness, or job search, or parenting, or health issues, or caregiving, or something else. It's not a binary stay-current-or-you're-lazy situation, it's that the entire industry is moving to shorter timelines, smaller teams, and more technical complexity for web projects simultaneously. LLMs are a huge dopamine hit for short term gains when you're spinning plates day after day. The question is what the ecosystem will look like when everybody's been using LLMs as a stopgap for an extended period of time.