Ask HN: For Programmers, what would you do if programming was not challenging?
7 comments
I don't work in the very high end stuff, where the real money, and the real challenge is.
In fact, I've never actually worked as a pure programmer at all, and only very briefly worked on projects where the programming was the main challenge.
A lot of what I do is pretty much just prompting, but with the Google and IDE autocomplete instead of AI, using libraries, etc. Average boot camp coder level stuff.
Because I'm not here because of any particular interest or talent for abstract logic, I'm here to tell you all the ways that EMI is going to mess with your I2C bus, and to have lunch with the plumber and make sure he likes the pump control timings, and make sure the users like the UI.
When I have a project with some real programming, doing new algorithms and data structures and finding the logic in a system, it's a pretty fun novelty, but not an everyday thing, and I don't think I would enjoy something like writing a new compiler.
If I had the math skill for research science or high end hardware design (The simpler stuff is a lot of what I do, along with firmware, maintenance, and some very basic non-critical mechanical), I'm not sure how much I'd miss programming.
I really like the repeatability, the fact that you can run unit tests and deliver something you can be very confident will work.
I like the mutability, the fact that anything with a computer is automatically a multipurpose, general device.
I like the ability to replace real physical things with ones and zeros that can be perfectly copied with almost no cost, reducing the amount of items we need, and the space we need to store it, and the time to organize it all.
I think I'd be absolutely miserable in primitive society with no computers anywhere, but I would probably be just as happy as a journalist or researcher, or in industrial controls.
In fact, I've never actually worked as a pure programmer at all, and only very briefly worked on projects where the programming was the main challenge.
A lot of what I do is pretty much just prompting, but with the Google and IDE autocomplete instead of AI, using libraries, etc. Average boot camp coder level stuff.
Because I'm not here because of any particular interest or talent for abstract logic, I'm here to tell you all the ways that EMI is going to mess with your I2C bus, and to have lunch with the plumber and make sure he likes the pump control timings, and make sure the users like the UI.
When I have a project with some real programming, doing new algorithms and data structures and finding the logic in a system, it's a pretty fun novelty, but not an everyday thing, and I don't think I would enjoy something like writing a new compiler.
If I had the math skill for research science or high end hardware design (The simpler stuff is a lot of what I do, along with firmware, maintenance, and some very basic non-critical mechanical), I'm not sure how much I'd miss programming.
I really like the repeatability, the fact that you can run unit tests and deliver something you can be very confident will work.
I like the mutability, the fact that anything with a computer is automatically a multipurpose, general device.
I like the ability to replace real physical things with ones and zeros that can be perfectly copied with almost no cost, reducing the amount of items we need, and the space we need to store it, and the time to organize it all.
I think I'd be absolutely miserable in primitive society with no computers anywhere, but I would probably be just as happy as a journalist or researcher, or in industrial controls.
In what world is programming not challenging? Not in this world. As for AI, this is and will always be a moving target. Currently, the GPT style LLMs can spit out simple functions that will mostly work up to a point. So once you get used to the operational range, it can be handy to have some LLM spit out fragments of code to save time. All this means is that simple things that you are confident you can write and verify can be somewhat automated, and you will shift your efforts to the more difficult tasks that require more care. If you can't think of more difficult tasks, then you lack imagination. The better 'AI' gets, the bigger the portion of the codebase will become automated, and the top-level cutting edge stuff will just accelerate in complexity.
I came to programming early in my life because I wanted to understand how a computer works and probably how to make games. I was around 10 years old and started with Delphi.
During my teenage years I didn’t pursue it further because I didn’t have much guidance and no mentor or anything like that. My English wasn’t good enough to read a lot of the things.
In college I got back into coding, mostly to solve problems but also because coding is fun and I now had enough math/tech background to make more sense of many things.
If I wasn’t programming I would solve problems somewhere else. I am in coding for the coding (although it’s fun) but for the problem solving part. And nowadays more often than not problem means business problem.
During my teenage years I didn’t pursue it further because I didn’t have much guidance and no mentor or anything like that. My English wasn’t good enough to read a lot of the things.
In college I got back into coding, mostly to solve problems but also because coding is fun and I now had enough math/tech background to make more sense of many things.
If I wasn’t programming I would solve problems somewhere else. I am in coding for the coding (although it’s fun) but for the problem solving part. And nowadays more often than not problem means business problem.
I think that I would not use the AI and continue to do the programming as I already do, using programming in C, and in assembly language, etc. So, it would not make much of a difference to me, I think.
You might have this choice, but young people won't. IMHO. Assuming that we are talking about earning a living as a programmer.
I basically became a programmer so I could do products. If there was no challenge, I'd just do product and sell products.
Sadly programming is always the bottleneck, so here I am.
Sadly programming is always the bottleneck, so here I am.
I'd probably take up other mind-games, like Cryptic Crosswords.
With all this AI talk, I think more and more about what I'd do if there were no challenge left in programming. I imagine there will at least for a long time be challenge, even if most problems can be solved fairly trivially with obvious prompts.
However, what if there were no challenge left in programming? For those of you that love programming, is there anything else in your life that you think could replace programming that would also provide a reasonable living?
Do you think you would enjoy programming as much if it was really 99% prompting? Sometimes I think it's nice because I can build faster, but on the other hand I really like having to piece things together on my own and with other resources. Like Advent of Code for example, or figuring out how some piece of tech works.
Even if the prompting was difficult, I still find it hard to imagine I would enjoy programming as much.
The only other thing I can think of that I might enjoy would be hardware engineering. But that doesn't allow for fast iteration as in software. Maybe some kind of applied research science? But that can be slow moving and still doesn't sound as fun. I guess I'm kinda sad that the thing I enjoy most might get taken away from me.