> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap.
Say what you will about the Claudisms in this piece, this bit certainly rings true for me. With old school coding, there was always a reward at the end, the harder it was, the more satisfying it felt.
With agentic coding, I really doesn’t feel like that, at least not in the same way. It feels more like continually riding a wave of productivity, where small features or huge features have similar levels of interaction required. And that’s exciting in the beginning but quickly becomes very tiring.
Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature
While I appreciate and agree with the key points of the post, Claude's writing style fingerprints are all over it and I guess it's even more exhausting to read someone's AI written article.
The writing style, if not AI, is at least a bit tryhard.
Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
If you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things:
- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.
- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.
- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article.
I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
This very well may be AI written. Then again, the stuff our PMs output, all pre-AI, now would all qualify as "AI written".
There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo!
Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place.
A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
"It's not" only has two matches; the third is "It's noticable". The other two are a whole paragraph dedicated to "it's not X, it's Y" which is a little more than you'd normally expect.
Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those.
Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.
Do you think the sort of people who complain about articles being AI-written are incapable of writing articles or something? Why would not being willing to read articles produced that way result in not reading any articles?
No. I created an account for this. Hacker news used to be a place I could come read interesting content and peoples reactions and thoughts to it. now it's interesting articles with 100% of the comments whining that it's written by AI. Sad what hackernews has become
>It's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity.
> You and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing.
I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and C++ with Allegro.
I had nobody but tutorials and books. And the hky of building, compiling and seeing the result for myself was very enticing.
Edit: particularly this part:
---
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Maybe it's because I found peers my age uninteresting. I lived in a small Mexican town where 14 year olds where thinking in bullying someone, and unfortunately that someone was usually me.
I'd someone remembers The Hackers Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker) I feel that again after so many years, with AI.
unlike the op, I've been having a wonderful time using claude, both at work and for my own personal projects, so I will share what has worked for me, just in case it resonates with anyone else.
my anecdotal advice is to avoid the entire "agent" temptation, and treat the LLM as a code generator. have a single session running at a time. come up with a plan, iterate on it until you are satisfied, then tell it to execute the plan, and watch it. not necessarily to the extent of reading the scroll (though I sometimes do do that too!) but as it finishes each step look over what it has done, suggest improvements and course corrections, and then let it go on to the next step. at the end you will have a pretty good grasp of the state of the code, and the overall time it will take you isn't really any longer than trying to churn out reams of code and then go through it all at once.
the other option if you want something closer to a one shot workflow is to go into far more detail during the planning stage, have it describe not just architectural details but actual code (if you're a senior engineer especially you probably know what the key pieces of code that will drive a lot of other decisions mechanically are likely to be).
also refactoring is cheaper than it has ever been, if something feels hard to grasp to you stop and work with the LLM until you like the looks of it better.
and again, the key bit is to have one LLM doing one thing at a time, and to stay engaged in the process while it does so.
Unfortunately the incremental approach doesn't help when it comes to the review step by another user, they've still gotta take it as a lump and apply fresh eyes on it.
Agree with this. I have learned to interact with Claude the same way. Detailed hashing it out at the beginning, then finally execute, even maybe with your scaffolding at the beginning to guide the process. I tried writing this process down in a 'zen of Claude' as a reminder https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md I've started being able refactor legacy code into a new architecture with great success. Work I've been putting off due to the grind of the work.
Edit: I will say it's taken me some months of working with Claude to get to this working process. If you let claude operate with free reign, the inevitable mess and struggle it runs into burns and stresses you out. Also, keeping up with some manual coding when you feel like it and punting to Claude when you have had enough manual coding ensures you still feel in control of the codebase.
> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse.
Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time...
Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much as possible and by design--things that happen consistently for reasons, reasons that force you to engage you mind to discern them and then eliminate them (hopefully) forever. Experienced developers don't just try something random, hope it works, and if it works you just dismiss it as unknowable.
> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.
Unless, perhaps, you were already fatigued trying to deal with many stakeholders who can't agree what the system even is. :p
I think I will not heed the first sentence and bear with this. What motivates people to do this? What do they get out of prompting Claude for some vapid "thought piece" and spamming it on the internet?
The fact that this article was likely AI generated is the real load-bearing factor in this discussion. Or, as previous versions of Claude would say; it cuts through the heart of the issue.
Wait, meltano Douwe? Small world. Glad to see you're doing well. I always liked meltano.
> In an era when anyone can produce reasonable-looking UI
Identical looking slop? Every Claude-based vibe coded app looks identical.
> The fear of skill rot is legitimate. And the fear that if you don't go fast enough you'll be left behind is — while often overstated — not entirely unfounded.
You know what, that's OK. I just hit "OK" on LLM Scala code I _actually_ think is awful. It works. It's probably faster than the "pure" code I'd write by hand. The code I would write - as a FP and Scala/Elm/Haskell/... enjoyer - would actually be maintainable for humans, but LLMs struggle with it. But LLMs writing code for LLMs? Sure, have at it. Objectively lower barrier of entry.
> So if you're feeling overwhelmed, destabilized, simultaneously more productive and less happy, know that you're not alone.
But yes, I am indeed simultaneously more productive and less happy.
https://skaldmaps.com, my little side project, was only possible _because_ I was able to feed my real world knowledge about real estate, combined with GIS and SWE knowledge into various torment nexus... pardon me, LLM prompts.
Since I don't have the _time_ to write boilerplate react code (it's pepper and tomato season in Georgia, which _actually_ brings me joy), telling Claude/Codex/... how to write dbt models saves me time and I objectively get a lot more done, but it's not fun.
I guess that's also why I still enjoy blogging. You can't use LLMs for blogs without people noticing immediately. Shameless plug: https://chollinger.com/blog/
Enjoy my entirely human typos, since that's clearly rare these days.
Say what you will about the Claudisms in this piece, this bit certainly rings true for me. With old school coding, there was always a reward at the end, the harder it was, the more satisfying it felt.
With agentic coding, I really doesn’t feel like that, at least not in the same way. It feels more like continually riding a wave of productivity, where small features or huge features have similar levels of interaction required. And that’s exciting in the beginning but quickly becomes very tiring.
Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.
- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.
- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article.
I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
Dashline - present
Yes, it's AI-written
There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo!
Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place.
A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those.
Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.
Just say you don't mind AI writing - make that argument. Don't make this nonsensical, defeatist, "if it's common, stop criticizing it" argument.
I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and C++ with Allegro.
I had nobody but tutorials and books. And the hky of building, compiling and seeing the result for myself was very enticing.
Edit: particularly this part:
---
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Maybe it's because I found peers my age uninteresting. I lived in a small Mexican town where 14 year olds where thinking in bullying someone, and unfortunately that someone was usually me.
I'd someone remembers The Hackers Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker) I feel that again after so many years, with AI.
my anecdotal advice is to avoid the entire "agent" temptation, and treat the LLM as a code generator. have a single session running at a time. come up with a plan, iterate on it until you are satisfied, then tell it to execute the plan, and watch it. not necessarily to the extent of reading the scroll (though I sometimes do do that too!) but as it finishes each step look over what it has done, suggest improvements and course corrections, and then let it go on to the next step. at the end you will have a pretty good grasp of the state of the code, and the overall time it will take you isn't really any longer than trying to churn out reams of code and then go through it all at once.
the other option if you want something closer to a one shot workflow is to go into far more detail during the planning stage, have it describe not just architectural details but actual code (if you're a senior engineer especially you probably know what the key pieces of code that will drive a lot of other decisions mechanically are likely to be).
also refactoring is cheaper than it has ever been, if something feels hard to grasp to you stop and work with the LLM until you like the looks of it better.
and again, the key bit is to have one LLM doing one thing at a time, and to stay engaged in the process while it does so.
Edit: I will say it's taken me some months of working with Claude to get to this working process. If you let claude operate with free reign, the inevitable mess and struggle it runs into burns and stresses you out. Also, keeping up with some manual coding when you feel like it and punting to Claude when you have had enough manual coding ensures you still feel in control of the codebase.
Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time...
Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much as possible and by design--things that happen consistently for reasons, reasons that force you to engage you mind to discern them and then eliminate them (hopefully) forever. Experienced developers don't just try something random, hope it works, and if it works you just dismiss it as unknowable.
> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.
Unless, perhaps, you were already fatigued trying to deal with many stakeholders who can't agree what the system even is. :p
> That loss is real and it's worth naming
I think I will not heed the first sentence and bear with this. What motivates people to do this? What do they get out of prompting Claude for some vapid "thought piece" and spamming it on the internet?
Yep classic Claude-ism.
The fact that this article was likely AI generated is the real load-bearing factor in this discussion. Or, as previous versions of Claude would say; it cuts through the heart of the issue.
> with my colleague Douwe
Wait, meltano Douwe? Small world. Glad to see you're doing well. I always liked meltano.
> In an era when anyone can produce reasonable-looking UI
Identical looking slop? Every Claude-based vibe coded app looks identical.
> The fear of skill rot is legitimate. And the fear that if you don't go fast enough you'll be left behind is — while often overstated — not entirely unfounded.
You know what, that's OK. I just hit "OK" on LLM Scala code I _actually_ think is awful. It works. It's probably faster than the "pure" code I'd write by hand. The code I would write - as a FP and Scala/Elm/Haskell/... enjoyer - would actually be maintainable for humans, but LLMs struggle with it. But LLMs writing code for LLMs? Sure, have at it. Objectively lower barrier of entry.
> So if you're feeling overwhelmed, destabilized, simultaneously more productive and less happy, know that you're not alone.
But yes, I am indeed simultaneously more productive and less happy.
https://skaldmaps.com, my little side project, was only possible _because_ I was able to feed my real world knowledge about real estate, combined with GIS and SWE knowledge into various torment nexus... pardon me, LLM prompts.
Since I don't have the _time_ to write boilerplate react code (it's pepper and tomato season in Georgia, which _actually_ brings me joy), telling Claude/Codex/... how to write dbt models saves me time and I objectively get a lot more done, but it's not fun.
I guess that's also why I still enjoy blogging. You can't use LLMs for blogs without people noticing immediately. Shameless plug: https://chollinger.com/blog/
Enjoy my entirely human typos, since that's clearly rare these days.
Perhaps on the way to UBI and the end of labor, we could get a 32 and 24h work wweek with lots more vacation, my hope at least
If it weren't claudeslop, it would still have to be marketing corposlop.