llm/c92d54db-e3c8-419f-931f-0c3a686c0e4d/batch-0-9305fc13-824f-4262-891f-b15d927503d3-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. AI productivity claims skepticism
2. Joy of coding vs results
3. Parent/manager time constraints
4. Vibe coding criticism
5. Web development complexity
6. Learning with AI assistance
7. Code review burden
8. Frontend framework criticism
9. Solo developer challenges
10. AI as skill crutch
11. Hobby project completion
12. Cost of AI tools
13. Pattern recognition experience
14. Management skills transfer
15. Identity crisis for developers
16. Local vs cloud AI models
17. Unnecessary toolchain complexity
18. Code quality concerns
19. Generalist vs specialist debate
20. Mental model building
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46488894",
"text": "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.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46491236",
"text": "I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make yourself stop.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46491935",
"text": "What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you."
}
,
{
"id": "46494273",
"text": "The difference is whether or not you find computers interesting and enjoy understanding how they work. For the people who just want to solve some problem unrelated to computers but require a computer for some part of the task, yes AI would be more “fun”."
}
,
{
"id": "46494358",
"text": "I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc. Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot. I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the result I desire. Maybe that’s creating a service for friends to use, maybe it’s a personal IT project, maybe it’s having commercial quality WiFi at home everyone is amazed at when they visit, etc. Sometimes - even often - it’s the understanding that leads to pride in craftsmanship. But programming itself is just a chore for me to get done in service of whatever final outcome I’m attempting to achieve. Could be delivering bits on the internet for work, or automating OS installs to look at the 50 racks of servers humming away with cable porn level work done in the cabinets. "
}
,
{
"id": "46493495",
"text": "For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46491787",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46491910",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46494011",
"text": "> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?” Oh, that's a very easy one: Anyone who cannot by themselves build working programs through coding is by defintion a non-coder, i. e. coding illiterate. That means you. So people like you need slop generators, or other forms of outsourcing, to pretend that the very solution to the problem (!), i. e. \"writing code\", \"isn't super useful\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46494324",
"text": "You definitely completely misconstrued what was said and meant. It appears you have yet to grapple with the question asked. And I suspect you would be helped by doing so. Let me restate the question for you: If actually writing code can be done without you or any coworker now, by AI, what is your purpose?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494304",
"text": "It’s possible to be someone who’s very good at writing quality programs but still enjoy delegating as much of that as possible to AI to focus on other things."
}
,
{
"id": "46491909",
"text": "Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried!"
}
,
{
"id": "46494306",
"text": "Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that."
}
,
{
"id": "46494336",
"text": "Fair enough. But that particular could be anything that has been bothering you but you didn’t have the time or expertise to fix yourself. I wanted that fixed, and I had given up on ever seeing it fixed. Suddenly, in only two hours, I had it fixed. And I learned a lot in the process, too!"
}
,
{
"id": "46494331",
"text": "> Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that. To each their own! I think the market for folks who understand their own problems is exploding! It’s free money."
}
,
{
"id": "46493263",
"text": "This. Busy-beavering is why the desktop Linux is where it is - rewriting stuff, making it \"elegant\" while breaking backwards compatibility - instead of focusing on the outcome."
}
,
{
"id": "46493911",
"text": "macOS breaks backwards compatibility all the time, and yet..."
}
,
{
"id": "46491301",
"text": "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"
}
,
{
"id": "46491665",
"text": "I think, for a lot of people, solving the problem was always the fun part. There is immense pleasure in a nice piece of code - something that is elegant, clever and simple at the same time. Grinding out code to get something finished - less fun…"
}
,
{
"id": "46493276",
"text": "It depends. Sometimes they joy is in discovering what problem you are solving, by exploring the space of possibilities on features and workflows on a domain. For that, having elegant and simple software is not needed; getting features fast to try out how they work is the basis of the pleasure, so having to write every detail by hand reduces the fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46494323",
"text": "Sounds like someone who enjoys listening to music but not composing or performing music."
}
,
{
"id": "46494458",
"text": "Or maybe someone DJing instead of creating music from scratch."
}
,
{
"id": "46493260",
"text": "I use LLMs for code at work, but I've been a bit hesitant to dive in for side projects because I'm worried about the cost. Is it necessary to pay $200/mo to actually ship things or will $20/mo do it? Obviously I could just try it myself and see how far I get bit I'm curious to hear from someone a bit further down the path."
}
,
{
"id": "46494505",
"text": "I have a feeling you are using SOTA models at work and aren't used to just how cheap the non-Anthropic/Google/OAI options are these days. GLM's coding subscription is like $6/month if you buy a full year."
}
,
{
"id": "46494367",
"text": "Depending on how much you use, you can pay API prices and get pretty far for 20 bucks a month or less. If you exhaust that, surprisingly, I recommend getting Gemini with the Google AI pro subscription. You can use a lot of the Gemini CLi for that"
}
,
{
"id": "46493358",
"text": "The $20/mo subscription (Claude Code) that I've been using for my side projects has been more than enough for me 90% of the time. I mostly use the cheaper models lately (Haiku) and accept that it'll need a bit more intervention, but it's for personal stuff and fun so that's ok. If you use VSCode, Antigravity or another IDE that's trying to market their LLM integration, then you'll also get a tiny allowance of additional tokens through them. I'll use it for a few hours at a time, a couple days a week, often while watching TV or whatever. I do side projects more on long rainy weekends, and maybe not even every week during the summer. I'll hit the limit if I'm stuck inside on a boring Sunday and have an idea in my head I really wanted to try out and not stop until I'm done, but usually I never hit the limit. I don't think I've hit the limit since I switched my default to Haiku FWIW. The stat's say I've generated 182,661 output tokens in the last month (across 16 days), and total usage if "
}
,
{
"id": "46493386",
"text": "You can use AI code editor that allows you to use your own API key, so you pay per-token, not a fixed monthly fee. For example Cline or Roo Code."
}
,
{
"id": "46493926",
"text": "They all let you do that now, including Claude Code itself. You can choose between pay per token and subscription. Which means that a sensible way to go about those things is to start with a $20 subscription to get access to the best models, and then look at your extra per-token expenses and whether they justify that $200 monthly."
}
,
{
"id": "46494388",
"text": "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 "
}
,
{
"id": "46491377",
"text": "I think this is showing the difference between people who like to /make/ things and those that like to make /things/. People that write software because they see a solution for a problem that can be fixed with software seem to benefit the most of LLM technology. It's almost the inverse for the people that write software because they like the process of writing software."
}
,
{
"id": "46491475",
"text": "Surely there has to be some level of \"getting stuff done\"/\"achieving a goal\" when /making/ things, otherwise you'd be foregoing for-loops because writing each iteration manually is more fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46492008",
"text": "I think you misunderstand the perspective of someone who likes writing code. It's not the pressing of keys on the keyboard. It's figuring out which keys to press. Setting aside for the moment that most loops have a dynamic iteration count, typing out the second loop body is not fun if it's the same as the first. I do code golf for fun. My favorite kind of code to write is code I'll never have to support. LLMs are not sparking joy. I wish I was old enough to retire."
}
,
{
"id": "46492398",
"text": "I have a 10-year-old side project that I've dumped tens of thousands of hours into. \"Ship the game\" was an explicit non -goal of the project for the vast majority of that time. Sometimes, the journey is the destination."
}
,
{
"id": "46493093",
"text": "And sometimes the destination is the destination and the journey is a slog."
}
,
{
"id": "46493138",
"text": "I mean, sure. I was just pointing out to the commentor that sometimes \"getting stuff done\" isn't the point."
}
,
{
"id": "46491585",
"text": "Sure, but, in the real world, for the software to deliver a solution, it doesn't really matter if something is modelled in beautiful objects and concise packages, or if it's written in one big method. So for those that are more on the making /things/ side of the spectrum, I guess they wouldn't care if the LLM outputs code that has each iteration written separately. It's just that if you really like to work on your craftsmanship, you spend most of the time rewriting/remodelling because that's where the fun is if you're more on the /making/ things side of the spectrum, and LLMs don't really assist in that part (yet?). Maybe LLMs could be used to discuss ways to model a problem space?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491856",
"text": "I like both the process and the product, and I like using LLMs. You can use LLMs in whatever way works for you. Objections like the ones in this thread seem to assume that the LLM determines the process, but that’s not true at present. Perhaps they’re worrying about what might happen in future, but more likely they’re just resisting change in the usual way of inventing objections against something they haven’t seriously tried. These objections serve more as emotional justifications to avoid changing, than rational positions."
}
,
{
"id": "46493716",
"text": "As I've gotten more experience I've tended to find more fun in tinkering with architectures than tinkering with code. I'm currently working on making a secure zero-trust bare metal kubernetes deployment that relies on an immutable UKI and TPM remote attestation. I'm making heavy use of LLMs for the different implementation details as I experiment with the architecture. As far as I know, to the extent I'm doing anything novel, it's because it's not a reasonable approach for engineering reasons even if it technically works, but I'm learning a lot about how TPMs work and the boot process and the kernel. I still enjoy writing code as well, but I see them as separate hobbies. LLMs can take my hand-optimized assembly drag racing or the joy of writing a well-crafted library from my cold dead hands, but that's not always what I'm trying to do and I'll gladly have an LLM write my OCI layout directory to CPIO helper or my Bazel rule for putting together a configuration file and building the kern"
}
,
{
"id": "46493763",
"text": "So much this. The act of having the agent create a research report first, a detailed plan second, then maybe implement it is itself fun and enjoyable. The implementation is the tedious part these days, the pie in the sky research and planning is the fun part and the agent is a font of knowledge especially when it comes to integrating 3 or 4 languages together."
}
,
{
"id": "46493920",
"text": "On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology. LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy. The upwards transfer of wealth will continue."
}
,
{
"id": "46493383",
"text": "There are many people who enjoy spending an afternoon working on a classic car. There are also many people who enjoy spending an afternoon driving a classic car. Sometimes there are people who enjoy both. Sometimes there are people that really like driving but not the tinkering and some who are the opposite."
}
,
{
"id": "46493586",
"text": "Neat summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding!"
}
,
{
"id": "46491382",
"text": "I yearn for the mindset where I actively choose to accomplish comparatively little in the brief spells I have to myself, and remain motivated. Part of what makes programming fun for me is actually achieving something. Which is not to say you have to use AI to be productive, or that you aren't achieving anything, but this is not the antithesis of what makes programming fun, only what makes it fun for you."
}
,
{
"id": "46491493",
"text": "Ultimately it's up to the user to decide what to do with his time ; it's still a good bargain that leaves a lot of sovereignty to the user. I like to code a little too much ; got into deep tech to capacities I couldn't imagine before - but at some point you hit rock bottom and you gotta ship something that makes sense. I'm like a really technical \"predator\" - in a sense where to be honest with myself - it has almost become some way of consumption rather than pure problem solving. For very passionate people it can be difficult to be draw the line between pleasure and work - especially given that we just do what we like in the first place - so all that time feel robbed from us - and from the standpoint of \"shipper\" who didn't care about it in the first place it feels like freedom. But I'd argue that if anyone wants to jump into technical stuff ; it has never been so openly accessible - you could join some niche slack where some competent programmers were doing great stuff. Today a solo j"
}
,
{
"id": "46491512",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46492469",
"text": "I enjoy coding for the ability to turn ideas into software. Seeing more rapid feature development, and also more rapid code cleanup and project architecture cleanup is what makes AI assisted coding enjoyable to me"
}
,
{
"id": "46493709",
"text": "I think it just depends on the person or the type of project. If I'm learning something or building a hobby project, I'll usually just use an autocomplete agent and leave Claude Code at work. On the other hand, if I want to build something that I actually need, I may lean on AI assistants more because I'm more interested in the end product. There are certain tasks as well that I just don't need to do by hand, like typing an existing SQL schema into an ORM's DSL."
}
,
{
"id": "46492345",
"text": "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 throug"
}
,
{
"id": "46492806",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46491292",
"text": "> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself. Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917"
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50