[HN Gopher] The thing that brought me joy
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The thing that brought me joy
Author : monooso
Score : 37 points
Date : 2026-01-17 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stephenlewis.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stephenlewis.me)
| frizlab wrote:
| I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me,
| joy. I spent a little more than an afternoon writing a parser to
| parse a new ad-hoc file format I created to represent the IDs
| (class name and ID names) I will use in my CSS, and it was just
| _fun_. Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but
| for what? So I can dig directly back into complicated actual
| engineering issues? Where would my breaks be?
| ainiriand wrote:
| I think we are presented with a false dichotomy here, as you
| can use llm tools for menial tasks and code whatever scratches
| your itch at the same time. For me, I really do not enjoy
| writing any frontend, html, javascript, whatever; I just want
| to bring some website I need to light. I focus on other code
| and that is what brings me joy.
| exitb wrote:
| > Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for
| what?
|
| One reason would be to raise the ceiling of what your project
| can do within the budget of time and motivation you have. Or,
| as it often happens, to be able to finish the project at all.
| abeindoria wrote:
| Ironically I have a somewhat of a different view - I love
| rubber ducking and tinkering with LLMs. Sometimes they come up
| with a use case that I would not have thought of, but I would
| have liked to have maybe 2 weeks later. Other times it is
| nitpicking each others' code etc.
| jrm4 wrote:
| AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100%
| bringing me joy in this way.
|
| I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for
| years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g.
| music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in
| the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right
| etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter,
| man this stuff is FUN for me again.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If it truly brings you joy we have hat covered: it's a simple
| enough hobby!
|
| The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes
| money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic
| too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need
| direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on
| their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure
| requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't
| see demand for those decreasing.
| senko wrote:
| > _It's not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I
| spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in
| knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and
| finally in Python (six times)._
|
| This sounds very strange.
|
| I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's _very_
| good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.
|
| We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells
| like the problem started at least several messages before that.
|
| To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning
| Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge
| and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little
| programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.
|
| Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task
| from my backlog.
|
| There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some
| code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.
|
| [0] code using Claude
| monooso wrote:
| > We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells
| like the problem started at least several messages before that.
|
| Author here. It was what I assumed would be a fairly simple
| task, fixing some duplicate closing frontmatter delimiters.
|
| I think the LLM took a wrong turn early on, and then just
| spiralled. It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
| senko wrote:
| > It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
|
| Oh yes, it's like slow-motion train wreck.
|
| Once it gets off the rails, the best thing is to nuke the
| context, reset the state (git reset --hard or equivalent) and
| retry, this time with foresight.
| nehal3m wrote:
| I write for fun, to organize and articulate my thoughts, and I
| love doing that in vim. The same is true for note taking (I just
| write .md files and sync them with syncthing). I also like
| working neomutt. It's just fun working with (relatively) simple,
| stable tools that seem to grow on you over time for every day
| tasks. Writing code is just one of those things.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Good enough that choosing to focus on the fundamentals seems
| rather foolish.[...]but most of the time it sticks the landing.
| At this point, learning Awk seems about as sane as mastering the
| loom
|
| The joy aspect aside, if you're writing code professionally
| obviously that is no substitute for knowing how Awk works because
| you still need to make sure that what it produced is correct,
| because I sincerely hope that you're not pushing code into
| production, in particular not a piece of code some tool got wrong
| for 20 minutes, without understanding what it does.
|
| If that were an intern rather than a machine and you as the
| programmer don't know how the code works you're not doing your
| job. AI systems have not freed people from acquiring "arcane
| knowledge" it makes that knowledge more important than ever, the
| only thing it does is type faster than you do.
| weiliddat wrote:
| I feel similarly. Sounds a bit like other crafts that were later
| industrialized and (partially) mechanized, like woodworking and
| carpentry.
|
| One can certainly enjoy the laborious handcrafted process of
| building your own table, and yet go back to a shop that churns
| out cheap furniture that's nonetheless useful for many others,
| and see the value in both.
|
| Obviously there's more degrees of freedom in software, but I'm
| trying to see it that way to rationalize how I'm feeling with the
| current state of things.
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