Summarizer

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. 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. If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things extremely effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents (communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context.)

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.

This 1000x! I had a bit of an identity crisis with AI first landed and started producing good code. “If I’m not the man who can type quickly, accurately, and build working programs… WHO AM I?” But as you pointed out, I quickly realized I was never that guy. I was the guy who made problems go away, usually with code. Now I can make so many problems go away, it feels like cheating. As it turns out, writing code isn’t super useful. It’s the application of the code, the judgement of which problems to solve and how to solve them, that truly mattered. And that sparks a LOT of joy.

Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it.

Something happened to me a few years ago. I used to write code professionally and contribute to open source a lot. I was freelancing on other people's projects and contributing to mature projects so I was doing hard work, mostly at a low level (I mean algorithms, performance fixes, small new features, rather than high level project architecture). I was working on an open source contribution for a few days. Something that I struggled with, but I enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot from it. As it happened someone else submitted a PR fixing the same issue around the same time. I wasn't bothered if mine got picked or not, it happens. But I remember looking at how similar both of our contributions were and feeling like we were using our brains as computers, just crunching algorithms and pumping in knowledge to create some technical code that was (at the time) impossible for a computer to create. This stayed with me for a while and I decided that doing this technical algorithm crunching wasn't the best use of my human brain. I was making myself interchangeable with all the other human (and now AI) code crunchers. I should move on to a higher level, either architectural or management. This was a big deal for me because I did love (and still do) deeply understanding algorithms and mathematics. I was extremely fortunate with timing as it was just around one year before AI coding became mainstream but early enough that it wasn't a factor in this shift. Now an AI could probably churn out a decent version of that algorithm in a few minutes. I did move on to open my own business with my partner and haven't written much code in a few years. And when I do now I appreciate that I can focus on the high level stuff and create something that my business needs in a few hours without exhausting myself on low level algorithm crunching. This isn't meant to put down the enjoyment of writing code for code's sake. I still do appreciate well written code and the craft that goes into it. I'm just documenting my personal shift and noting that enjoyment can be found on both sides.

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.

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.

This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them. I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...

Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months. As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.

> 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.

> lost their personal side project time Yes ! > moved into management roles Please stop. Except if "coding" is making PoCs. If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management. PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic.

> 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".

Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades.

They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine. So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work". The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.

What do LLM's have to do returning to coding? Just... ...write the code. Stop being lazy.

I’m better at it in the spaces where I deliver value. For me that’s the backend, and I’m building complex backends with simple frontends. Sounds like your expertise is the front end, so you’re gonna be doing stuff that’s beyond me, and beyond what the AI was trained on. I found ways to make the AI solve backend pain points (documentation, tests, boiler plate like integrations). There’s probably spaces where the AI can make your work more productive, or, like my move into the front end, do work that you didn’t do before.

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.

Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try: What is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev. I am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter.

Agree, I developed a 150K line stock analytics Saas that started with the will to provide my son with some tools to analyse stocks. I enjoyed this experience of CLI coding so much that I developed Market Sentiment parsing 300,000 business articles and news daily, a dividend based strategy with calendar of payouts and AI optimised strategies to extract every drop of interest, an alert system for a strategy you backtested in the playground and its key triggers are tracked automatically so you can react, an ETF risk analysis model with external factors, all quant graphs and then some, time models with Markov, candlestick patterns, Monte Carlo simulation, walk forward and other approaches I had learned over the years. There is much more. I know you don't measure a project in terms of lines of code, but these are optimised, verified, tested, debugged and deployed. There are so much features, because I was having fun and got carried away. I'm semi-retired and this is like having my web agency back again. I used to program in GRASP... I have a data scientist certification, did a lot of Python, Machine Learning, NLP, etc. I really enjoy the prompt based development process as it seems like you are reaching the right resource for your question from a staff of experienced dev. Of course you need to check everything as a junior dev always creeps in when you least expect it. Especially for security. Discuss best practices often and do your research on touchy subjects. Compare various AI on the same topic. GROK has really caught up. OpenAI has slowed down. CLAUDE is simply amazing. This AI thing is work in progress and constantly changing. I have a noticed an amazing progression over the past year. I have a feeling their models are retrained, tweaked on our interactions even if you asked for them not to use the data. The temptation is too high and the payoffs abound in this market for the best AI tools. I'm building a code factory now with agents and key checkpoints for every step. I want to remove human intervention from multiple sub steps that are time consuming so I can be even more productive in 2026...

so is it fun because you had fallen behind and now you think you can fit with the people with more experience? well, I have news for you, the people with experience are also using AI too and they can still produce better and more than you do.

God created men, ~~Colt~~ LLMs made them equal...

You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks. I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness.

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.

For other people you may have a good point - I chose laziness for this person specifically because they mentioned not having to do it for so long that they didn’t know where to start. I do think of laziness a lot less negatively than other people do, though - indolence is not a sin, just a part of life. I do share your interest in the answer to that question, though.