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.
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.
Always a hazard when you use objective language to describe the subjective.
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.
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.
If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app while all you did was give it a high level picture of what you wanted, did you build it or did you merely commission it?
So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
>So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
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'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.
This is my approach now. I'm done with programming professionally, but all those ridiculous ideas for my own use I've had over the years? I've built most of them in the past year. I have no time or patience for doing it by hand any more. I used to love programming but I have other things I want to do now and I'm pretty burnt out on putting effort into my code after doing it for my job for nearly two decades.
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 guess the real question then is why were you programming since the 90s instead of getting yourself into a managerial position. After all, that's basically what you have to do with vibe coding; you tell the agents what they should do and specify requirements etc.
Managing humans is hard work. Team dynamics are complicated. Communication is uncertain. Relationships which have power imbalances can be fraught. People's lives get messy and that leaks into their work. Performance is sometimes uneven and you have to deal with it.
Yeah except agents don't get their feelings hurt when you tell them it's not right and to do it all over again. And the iteration loop is light years faster.
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 the 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. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it's 2026. people can't understand when things aren't for them. they will see a french onion soup recipe and comment "any dairy and onion free version?"
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
>To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline at a local meetup, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended use case.
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'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?
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
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.
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World
^C
Break in 10
Ready.
Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction:
create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
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.
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.
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.
Tell me about the end result you enjoy instead of growing your own food because I somehow suspect it’s premade slop from TJ’s microwaved and eating out. I would not be bragging about that!
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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, so I'll just deal with it.
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.
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...
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!
The ship has sailed. For personal use, maybe, but supply and demand are going to dictate that there is going to be a massive ramp in memory and compute production, and when the prices inevitably normalize due to the increase of availability, there will be a push to use local inference. It goes back and forth, and unless there is a strong roadblock put in place, the current generation of models are already powerful enough that incremental improvements in the run up to increased hardware availability will mean that these tools are here to stay. Even if draconian laws were put into place, the prevalence and availability of open models and the tools to train them means you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Large enterprises are paying unsubsidized metered rates. I work at a firm with around 700 employees. The p90 engineer is spending $2k/wk.
Our business-side employees have only begun using agents, and their spending accelerating. They're claiming their ROI is massively positive and have an enormous willing to spend.
Prices will probably go down because of the emerging price war between Anthropic and OpenAI, but there are many firms willing to spend.
Definitely not. Look at what Deepseek costs. AI companies spend a fraction on inference, it is not expensive for them to run these models like it is to train them. Coding by hand is not coming back.
I'm not trying to be rude. Is this new to you? I've had all of this plugged in myself for all of 2026 (at least). The LLMs use of APIs shouldn't be surprising once you see decent ones in action in general. I'm not sure how this would impact my thoughts on whether the pendulum will swing one way or not.
Yeah, reality is this fall/winter is when we start seeing the shift from "engineer guides claude on their laptop" to "PMs write tickets and everything else is hands off until pressing the merge button".
At work I've spent the last few weeks building a big feature that involves streaming the output of a 3D engine to a web client and wiring in HID from the client back to the engine. Basically, it's a simplified version of Google Stadia.
“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
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.
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.
> It's not fun to always have to couch your language
It depends, some think it's fun :)
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.
Always a hazard when you use objective language to describe the subjective.
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?
don't be harsh on him, he's a vibe coder
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.
For whatever reason, I've found that people who use AI to code tend to be quite defensive about it.
Yeah. The only way to be wrong in this discussion is to assume a position of deciding how others feel about something.
Never hearing the end of it from people who don't understand that other people write from their own perspective by default?
Exactly!
he's right though
That is just your opinion, not a general rule. In my opinion.
i mean, fun is a pretty subjective concept, seems obvious that it's personal preference right?
this is a personal blog and it uses the first person
unless you want to water down the title with an "i think"
If it's so fun for you, why don't you come over and be my coding slave then?
The funny thing is that for a long time I probably would have programmed for fun, without getting paid.
It was the hobby I was really happy to turn into a full time, paying job.
I know I'm not alone in that either. I used to joke with colleagues about not letting the boss know how much we enjoyed the work.
If doing everything manually is so fun for you, why don't you go farm your own food and shit?
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
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.
This is my sense as well; I've been coding since the 90s and on HN since 2010.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app while all you did was give it a high level picture of what you wanted, did you build it or did you merely commission it?
So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
Not if the architect said "make a cool design for a house" to some team and went out for the day.
An architect does far more work than your typical vibeprompter.
Maybe, but I've got no interest in being a vibeprompter, either.
>So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
I don't really care, personally. What I care about is that something now exists which didn't exist before. A Ouija board would be equally as good.
> If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app…
Good news: It doesn't.
I just don't have to do the typing, pre-acceptance testing, fuzzing, etc.
>Good news: It doesn't.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
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 dare say review is often way more important than the act of laying down code.
I've been coding since the 1990s and I love vibe coding with sensible guardrails and code/design reviews.
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.
This is my approach now. I'm done with programming professionally, but all those ridiculous ideas for my own use I've had over the years? I've built most of them in the past year. I have no time or patience for doing it by hand any more. I used to love programming but I have other things I want to do now and I'm pretty burnt out on putting effort into my code after doing it for my job for nearly two decades.
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 guess the real question then is why were you programming since the 90s instead of getting yourself into a managerial position. After all, that's basically what you have to do with vibe coding; you tell the agents what they should do and specify requirements etc.
Managing humans is hard work. Team dynamics are complicated. Communication is uncertain. Relationships which have power imbalances can be fraught. People's lives get messy and that leaks into their work. Performance is sometimes uneven and you have to deal with it.
Robots are much easier.
Yeah except agents don't get their feelings hurt when you tell them it's not right and to do it all over again. And the iteration loop is light years faster.
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 the 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. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it's 2026. people can't understand when things aren't for them. they will see a french onion soup recipe and comment "any dairy and onion free version?"
>It sounds like you never enjoyed coding.
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
> Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding?
Nobody. But if you never enjoyed coding then the post about enjoying coding clearly isn't for you?
> Who says people must enjoy coding?
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
Nobody can ever stop you from creating "works of art" in code. But they might stop paying you for it.
But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
>But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right?
How does being sad help anyone?
What?
>Nobody.
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
>> >But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
> Nobody here is saying that.
To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
>To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline at a local meetup, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended use case.
people actually are saying if you keep coding by hand you will be left behind
my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
he still pays me for my handwritten code tho. luckily it's easy to pretend you like AI and know by lying since it has basically no skill curve.
and then just carry on doing a good job the old way.
>people actually are saying if you keep coding by hand you will be left behind
"People" say a lot of things, I can only reply to comments said here, not to vague words by anonymous people from the ether.
>my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
Good think your CEO speaks for everyone in the industry.
I think what he means is that he's afraid for his company being beaten by competitors who will overtake you if they use AI but you don't.
also, the submarine is a little scary to pressure test, created using the dive fast and break things model. :)
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'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?
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
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.
That is terribly reductionist.
giving that code as a prompt to Claude yields:
Worked for 5s · done 8:30 AM
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World ^C Break in 10 Ready.Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction: create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
"Hello World BASIC" ?
"H. W. BASIC" seems to work too if you want to golf it ;)
Tried it in a incognito tab with ChatGPT and "H. W. BASIC" did not work while "BASIC" had it explain the history and show an example of Hello World
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.
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.
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.
Tell me about the end result you enjoy instead of growing your own food because I somehow suspect it’s premade slop from TJ’s microwaved and eating out. I would not be bragging about that!
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Writing code by hand, for your employer, isn’t what most people consider “fun”, anyways
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.
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 completely agree. I am still writing code by hand because I find it enjoyable and almost therapeutic.
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.
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.
Vibecoding is intellectual Viagra for the feeble-minded.
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 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 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.
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.
I think we should be able to disagree without going there.
I don't think that this person is lying, and your interpreting of my comment that way is taking the worst version of the argument.
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)
Agree ! Writing code by hand becoming a thing of the past unfortunately !
Watching someone play videogames is not as fun as playing the said game yourself.
> 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, so I'll just deal with it.
Creators vs. Coders.
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
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.
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...
If you can’t code it is
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
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!
The ship has sailed. For personal use, maybe, but supply and demand are going to dictate that there is going to be a massive ramp in memory and compute production, and when the prices inevitably normalize due to the increase of availability, there will be a push to use local inference. It goes back and forth, and unless there is a strong roadblock put in place, the current generation of models are already powerful enough that incremental improvements in the run up to increased hardware availability will mean that these tools are here to stay. Even if draconian laws were put into place, the prevalence and availability of open models and the tools to train them means you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Large enterprises are paying unsubsidized metered rates. I work at a firm with around 700 employees. The p90 engineer is spending $2k/wk.
Our business-side employees have only begun using agents, and their spending accelerating. They're claiming their ROI is massively positive and have an enormous willing to spend.
Prices will probably go down because of the emerging price war between Anthropic and OpenAI, but there are many firms willing to spend.
Definitely not. Look at what Deepseek costs. AI companies spend a fraction on inference, it is not expensive for them to run these models like it is to train them. Coding by hand is not coming back.
I’m doubtful. I’ve seen increasing hands-off work where bots are now replying on PRs, tickets, and even DMs!
I'm not trying to be rude. Is this new to you? I've had all of this plugged in myself for all of 2026 (at least). The LLMs use of APIs shouldn't be surprising once you see decent ones in action in general. I'm not sure how this would impact my thoughts on whether the pendulum will swing one way or not.
Yeah, reality is this fall/winter is when we start seeing the shift from "engineer guides claude on their laptop" to "PMs write tickets and everything else is hands off until pressing the merge button".
Not a chance.
For your personal projects or as a hobby, absolutely. But in a professional setting, coding by hand gone forever.
Please tell me about the companies that are seeing productivity gains from LLM usage, seriously, who’s software is getting better?
At work I've spent the last few weeks building a big feature that involves streaming the output of a 3D engine to a web client and wiring in HID from the client back to the engine. Basically, it's a simplified version of Google Stadia.
I've written >90% this code by hand.
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.
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
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