Has coding with artificial intelligence made the pleasure that accompanied manual programming disappear? The question divides the profession. For some developers, AI assistants have transformed their job into a supervisory activity, to the detriment of solving logical puzzles. Others, on the contrary, believe they have freed up time for creation.
For old-school developers, manual programming was a digital craft involving logical puzzles and the feeling that the code ‘flowed naturally’. Time seemed to fade in favor of the task at hand, and one emerged with a sense of having solved problems. With the arrival of AI, programming now consists more of supervising AI’s output, which, according to the article, introduces a form of mechanics that loses the original pleasures.
An eroded pleasure
For developers attached to craftsmanship and the beauty of syntax, AI has indeed stifled part of the pleasure. Solving a complex bug or designing an elegant algorithm after hours of effort provided immense satisfaction, whereas delegating this friction to an AI transforms the work into a managerial task.
A professional in the field, who taught himself to program at age 12 in the 90s, describes his experience on an online forum. After returning to programming and launching a project last year, he was initially impressed by the quality and speed offered by ChatGPT or Copilot. Over the months, he noticed that the pleasure of gradually improving his code, checking the results in the runtime environment, and succeeding had disappeared. He now describes typing English sentences in increasingly desperate attempts, a process he finds frustrating: ‘either it works, or it doesn’t’. He disabled Copilot, feeling ‘a bit helpless’ without it, but regaining the ability to step back.
‘I was wondering if any of you felt the same way, or if I’m just old,’ he writes. According to the article, constantly switching between formulating instructions (prompts) and checking the consistency of AI’s responses breaks deep concentration. Some professionals say they then seek satisfaction in manual or physical activities, like cycling or gardening, on platforms like Medium or DEV Community.
A tool that freed creation
Conversely, another part of developers and creators believes that artificial intelligence has precisely liberated the joy of creating. It removes the chore of writing boilerplate code, configuring complex environments, or writing documentation. As pioneers in the field point out, it allows one to look up from the syntax to focus on the overall architecture, user experience, and creative concepts.
Experienced developers can thus build tools in languages they don’t master, recapturing the feeling of their beginnings. The case of Ren Turcios, a 29-year-old American, illustrates this. He participated in over 200 hackathons (programming competitions) in two years, without traditional coding skills, and built a reputation in the local tech community. His method, ‘vibe coding’ (generating code via AI from instructions given in plain language), would now allow him to deliver in a few hours what teams of engineers take weeks to code. His journey has fueled the debate on AI’s ability to replace programmers, as well as the quality of the generated code.
The source also points to a study on the impact of AI coding assistants on software engineering, the results of which are not detailed in the article.
Computer-assisted coding has not killed joy, but it has shifted the focus. The old-school coder found pleasure in craftsmanship and the beauty of syntax, while the modern coder draws satisfaction from the speed at which they can bring a complex system to life.
