## coding with AI is brutally effective, but boring af (extract from something else I was writing) An example is programming with AI. Programming for AI has become a massive thing where a lot of engineers who learned to enjoy the process of coding and manipulating syntax are now feeling alienated by the fact that programs are being written automatically. The syntactic process is no longer something to savor. I can see that coding continues to be a hobby such people pursue, but from an economic standpoint utility is the only thing that is valued. Hence utility becomes the center, or we need to learn to enjoy the process that leads to better utilities and ends and outcomes. This raises a question about how we teach people to code in the first place. If someone learns to code by hand first and finds joy in the craft of syntax, logic, and debugging, they may struggle to adapt when AI takes over that process. But if someone learns to code with AI from the start, treating it as a tool for building things rather than a craft to master, their joy comes from the outcomes they create, not the keystrokes they type. Neither is wrong, but they are fundamentally different relationships with the same activity. The person who learned to love hand-coding may feel like something was taken from them, while the person who learned with AI may never understand what was lost. One might think that some of these learnings are just a way for us to figure out how we can enjoy capitalism. Surfing doesn't pay, especially if you're a beginner surfer—you're not going to get a job or get paid to do that—but we do it because it's inherently fun. In the same way, we will probably continue to program by hand because it's inherently fun for a unique group of people. We find the demoscene today still, where people make embedded programs and codegames even though they don't have any commercial value. We can see how all of this is valuable still. However, as and when the market shifts towards end results, that becomes the only thing that pays us or helps us earn a living, and then we are faced with a dilemma: learning to love it, or learning to love the process of getting the outcome quickly. And that is often shifting. Maybe the answer is that we need both paths. Some people will learn to code with AI and find joy in rapidly building things they couldn't build before, and that's a valid source of motivation. Others will learn to code by hand first, and some of them will fall in love with the craft itself and continue doing it for its own sake—like the demoscene people or weekend surfers. The danger is when we assume everyone must find joy in the same place, or when economic forces pressure us to abandon process-joy entirely for outcome-joy before we've had a chance to discover which one actually sustains us.