I guess it's those two same groups arguing about vibe coding. How many of group 1 say LLMs are too low quality when they really mean that it's diminishing their love of coding? And how many of group 2 say LLMs are the best thing ever when they really mean that they are diminishing their pain of coding?

I'm a hard group 1, and I don't really mind if LLMs take my job, just please don't take my passion.

I’m in group 1 but I do find LLMs to be helpful. I just tend to comb through their output and fix a bunch of issues. Maybe it’s not that much faster that way but it gets over the activation energy of starting a new project/module/ticket.

I do find that they’re pretty much only useful when I already know how I’m going to complete a task. If I can describe the implementation at the stack trace level I’ll do fine with AI. If I’m even a little lost the AI is a total crapshoot.

I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then.

But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.

But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.

> I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.

I'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.

Same, same. It was my main hobby since I discovered a little terminal in my dad's 80s videogame that could run BASIC, used my rudimentary 9 years old reading skills to look hard enough to the manual and figure out something about that puzzling black screen.

Discovered I could make it do stuff.

I could make stuff, just by typing some white characters in the black screen.

Fell in love, was my main indoors hobby, bought books, learned enough C/C++ to try to mod games before I was 14.

The web started to be a thing. I asked for HTML books for Christmas. Then learnt about ASP, it had something to do with Visual BASIC, I knew BASIC.

Learnt the web, got a job, worked my ass off. 12 hours day and loving it, I was 18, and lucky. My hobby was my job.

20+ years later, it's a job, programming is a skill I have and I'm extremely grateful for being so lucky that it also made me a career, allowed me to live in other countries, and ultimately settle down in a very different place than what used to be my home.

But still, it's a job now, not my hobby. After working in many different places, seeing the transformation of this industry, me getting older, it's just all a bit jading, I don't aspire to do this for more than a job these days, the only figment left of the old hobby is the odd electronics project for artists.

I have other hobbies that fulfill me in a very different way, I think it's just life :)

As someone who does this because it's a decent paying job, I don't think this comment is fair. I think I'm quite skilled, and I've been told so consistently. I don't have passion; I have discipline and professionalism. I take my job seriously. It pays well, and I make sure that I deserve that paycheck.

Passion for me is a nasty world, in the mouth of bosses. It's almost always a way to ask people to work unhealthy hours, and it results in bad work being done, which I have to fix later. If people talk live their own passion, it's fine, but whenever I hear someone appeal to the passion of someone else, it's to sell them into doing something that's not in their best interest.

But do you think you wouldn't be more skilled if you had passion for it? Sounds implausible to me.

The amount of times I've seen passionate people make bad technical decisions in the name of trying something exciting is too many to count. I obviously agree that passion is valuable, but not without faults. I think I'm better in some ways and worse in others due to the way I approach the job.

Have you ever met certain singers at talent shows? Even if they'd be better at it than if they wouldn't have the passion, there's also a certain bar one should be able to reach.

I find it hard to believe that your discipline and professionalism doesn't come from, or go hand in hand with passion. Or maybe you are passionate about being disciplined on itself?

Sure. I'm passionate about turning off my computer at 18:00. And I'm passionate about not hurting our customers. These two go hand in hand: I work very hard to avoid prevent doing things that are likely to cause incidents, as those hurt customers who are not at fault, and they often mean I have to stay late.

I guess you could say I'm passionate about testing and observability, though that doesn't really describe how I feel. It just puts me in a sour mood when something breaks and we could have prevented it with better practices from the start.

Is it that hard to believe that certain people simply have the skill to apply themselves? That's what discipline kind of is.

I was person 1, then I spent 13 years as an engineer, experience severe burnout, and became person 2. I am /very/ skilled, but I no longer enjoy things in the same ways I once did when it comes to computing. I don't despise it, but it no longer fuels me. I prefer to spend my time away from work indulging in other hobbies, like hiking in nature with a camera or playing board games with friends. My experience has been that turning your hobby into a job can kill all the enjoyment of the hobby.

I want to challenge the statement that a sw dev is "sitting in front of a computer all day". It's like saying a professor is writing on the blackboard all day. If think about what I did today, several hours was spent talking to my manager and peers about work as well as personal stuff.