Curiositry enjoys building small programs by hand, and has also used AI to make things that otherwise wouldn’t have been built. The essay’s question isn’t whether AI-assisted coding works. It’s whether getting a working result fast feels the same as making it yourself.

  • Asking AI to generate an app can make the idea real almost immediately. The author calls this front-loading the fun: the thrill arrives before the slower work of understanding, fixing, and maintaining it.
  • A useful result is still useful. The author describes projects made possible because AI reduced the effort enough to make them worth attempting.
  • But learning, hard-won accomplishment, and pride in careful work aren’t automatic side effects of generating code. Refactoring that code may be much less fun than seeing the first prototype appear.

That is a personal account, not a claim that everyone should stop using coding assistants. It draws a helpful line between getting a thing made and enjoying the act of making it—two goals worth choosing separately.

The 243-comment thread on Hacker News adds practical counterexamples and a way around the all-or-nothing choice.

What the thread adds

  • rglover — keeps the interesting coding for themselves and hands off grunt work to AI: “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It’s just a tool.”
  • godshatter — asks ChatGPT to mentor them toward intuition instead of giving them the code or the answer. For this commenter, that makes the learning process more fun.
  • mglvsky — describes a review dilemma: “review everything AI does - getting burned out quickly” versus skipping review and risking problems later. That’s a maintenance cost the initial thrill can conceal.
  • simonw — pushes back on the implied direction of the essay: in their circles, more experienced programmers often enjoy working with coding agents, though they explicitly note the bias of those circles.
  • boesboes — reports that keeping tasks small and isolated helps; on a tangled codebase, an agent can lose the plot and leave the human with unpleasant debugging.

HN handles are pseudonymous, there are no per-comment scores, and the order is HN’s ranking. This is a slice of the thread, not a consensus.