I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that.
The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it.
Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure.
There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore.
I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without
agents.
I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?
I get to spend more time working on the things I enjoy. For example, data modeling and workflow orchestration, and building product to solve customer problems. And really, that comes down to spending a lot of my time just thinking really hard - because once I have a clear plan, it's actually not that hard to build it. Not only that, but I can build something, react to it, rebuild it, react to it, and come up with something I think is much better than I would have been able to build myself. Not to mention much faster.
Can't disagree that Claude ships much much faster. It is also nice to be able to type up a plan of what I'd like to build and have it go after verifying the plan it generates.
I guess it's iterating in plain English instead of iterating in code that I'm having trouble latching onto. It's a "left brain vs right brain" kind of situation for me (not sure how valid that trope is, but it best expresses what I'm feeling).
I'm pretty good at outlining what I want to accomplish and how to get there, but cracking open vim and getting into it is super duper exciting for me, and I'm pretty good at communicating what is and isn't working with the agent when I use it. Claude (or any agent, I suppose) takes that away and doesn't fill that gap.
It's also been harder for me to stay focused with Claude since I'm basically printing code and reading the results. Claude's changesets err towards being pretty large (though I have rules [^1] to try and keep that at bay). When I use it, my mind shifts from "writing code that others might (probably won't) maintain someday)" to "writing code that builds the thing". Given those heavy diffs, I'm less inclined to pore through them than I would be if I were actively writing the code. I fear that this will lead to having less understanding of what my code is doing over time, which is sweeping the bugs and tech debt under the rug (especially since Claude, atm, likes to solve bugs with adding more code). This is probably one of those things that will just take some adjustment.
Then again, maybe part of this has to do with me being a long-time a Vim user and not having used a proper IDE for everyday development in a long time...
Okay, I think I finally came up with a good anecdote for how I'm feeling. I wear Mexican huarache sandals [^0] pretty much exclusively when the weather's warm (which is almost all year round in Houston). They are so unique, and getting them to work perfectly with my feet has been a Linux-like experience (i.e. lots and lots and LOTS of experimentation).
I used to buy them from Luna, Xero and others at, like, $150/pair. However, they are INSANELY EASY to make at home for a fraction of the price. I made four pairs at home. They didn't fit quite right, so I'll need to make them again, but I take MASSIVE satisfaction in wearing what I made.
The journey is as exciting as the destination for me; more so, even!
(Selfishly, I took a lot of pride in being able to show others how to do damn nearly everything they do in VSCode in Vim, but that's another victim of the Era of AI.)
I'm also a lifelong vim user. I guess what I'm getting at is that I find the journey even more engaging now. I think I'm a good programmer. I've worked at great companies. I was competitive in ACM contests and Top Coder. But I find the journey even more engaging now because I can focus on really, really deeply understanding something, and less time on glue. Writing code by hand is still fun, don't get me wrong, but I'm also enjoying the step change in scale.
I don't think IDEs as they exist today are necessarily the right abstraction anymore anyway, to the extent they ever were. At least any more than a C++ IDE that was centered on assembly language as the main thing would be. I want data models, API contracts, and data flows. I don't know what the right answer is, but I think there's something coming.
That has been my feeling too. I have completed soo many personal projects (or improvements) that were collecting dust on my 'mental shelf'.
Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.
Same reason I've passed along offers for management roles and continue to ignore "fiverr.com". It's less having done "The Thing" and more asking for it/a substitute. With an LLM/freelancers, the muscle memory, skills, or whatever I might develop (along with the thing) have been, well, outsourced.
What's more, I can already explore five ideas at once. There is no backlog formed by incapability, lol.
I don't understand the eagerness for "productivity as a service", celebrating quotas, and lot of other conjecture I could get twisted up with... but I'll skip it this time. Rarely pays off :)
Because some of us actually enjoy programming. For some people those side projects aren't about the destination, but the journey of learning how something works by making it with your bare hands.
but that is still possible, so what makes you sad? is it that others can build theirs without bare hands? or you are no longer rewarded for bare hand programming? if the latter was it really the "journey"?
You do know that there's many different personalities that people can have right? A lot of people love writing code and don't care about those things at all.
AstraZeneca is doing some really interesting research in this area - cell therapies that reset the immune system to eliminate the dysfunctional cells driving autoimmune disease, and then allow a healthy immune system to rebuild (for diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis).
There are already clinics where they basically remove your immune system and give you a new one. If you don’t die in the process, you are likely to be cured of MS.
(Any existing damage will remain.)
Currently this is reserved for the most quickly progressing cases but if we can make this safer and cheaper, it might in future be applied as an early stage cure, so people can go on to live healthy lives.
That being said, Astra Zenecas approach does seem much safer, if it’s proven to be effective!
Yeah AHSCT is no joke. I mentioned in another comment my wife has MS - diagnosed last year in her mid 40s with thankfully no severe impairment. They discussed AHSCT with us but didn’t recommend it unless another disease modifying treatment didn’t work. Thankfully, Tysabri seems to be working well for her.
My mom passed from leukemia years ago. Or rather, from an infection as she was starting HSCT. I’m sure it’s safer than it was 30 years ago, but being without an immune system for a period of time really is still a last resort.
It would be amazing if this type of treatment worked out. MS in particular seems to be a race between technology and your immune system. You hope the next cutting edge treatment is ready by the time the current state of the art stops working for you.
Anokion (now bankrupt) also seemed to have some progress along these lines (link below).
A close family member suffers from MS and is on the more effective but less safe drugs available. They haven’t suffered a relapse since starting them four years ago, but they have been hospitalised twice as a result of side effects.
As we learn more about the relationship between the immune system and various seemingly unrelated diseases the research and understanding has massively increased over the last few years. I’m cautiously optimistic that better treatments aren’t far away. An ancestor was lobotomised for hysteria in the 1960s, before being diagnosed with MS.
not my primary field, but I will say, though, from the folks we see in our clinic, nowadays w/ ocrevus/kesimpta/rituxan, patients are way more stable and dealing with way less side effects than 10-15 years ago.
I like your idea on the concrete examples and deep dives. We started out with the approach of including tools that we hear or are contributed by people explain how they use, so we had some validation. Perhaps if we can find a way to channel some community examples, that would be a good way to grow this weekly. It also makes me wonder if we need a way to prune things from here!
I feel so many of these. LOL @ GitHub endorse-ish, more -ish every day now. Overall though seems like a pretty good hit rate.
Surprised to see datadog as a regret - it is expensive but it's been enormously useful for us. Though we don't run kubernetes, so perhaps my baseline of expensive is wrong.
As I've been looking at this problem from a different angle, I wonder how much execution and planning should be coupled. Once we have specs in GitHub, for example, it feels like we can use whatever tool to execute on them.
Thanks!! Good question...and yea the way I have it set up right now (for my personal workflow) is that Mimir sends the specs to Github as an Issue, and then Claude Code picks it up and starts building. But any agent could do that, i think.
https://github.com/purplefish-ai/factory-factory - creating an IDE for managing a swarm of claude agents, and more importantly, increasingly baking workflows into them (e.g. design -> build -> review -> push -> address comments).
Purplefish | https://purplefish.com/careers | Member of Technical Staff | Full-Time | ONSITE | New York, NY, USA | NextJS, Typescript, Python | $150k-$225k + 0.5%+
Purplefish is transforming the trillion-dollar talent industry with powerful AI agents that will fully automate most hiring processes end-to-end.
We are funded by 8VC, and Adam and I previously worked closely together to launch 145 companies at the venture studio Fractal Software out of a $650 million fund. Before that I was a staff software engineer at Lyft, and Adam was CRO at Wunderkind ($100m+ ARR). We've built a powerful voice agent, and are expanding into other parts of the sourcing-to-onboarding flow. We have customers, revenue is growing, and so is our team.
We're currently a team of 3 engineers in NYC (9 people total). We're working on really cool problems with multimodal AI agents (and some really not cool problems like ATS and HRIS integrations). I'm trying to build the engineering team that I would want to join, which to me means a high emphasis on agency, purpose, technical excellence, collaboration, learning and velocity. Recently A16Z mentioned us in the state of voice AI report: https://a16z.com/ai-voice-agents-2025-update/
We're building on LiveKit's agents framework, Python, and NextJS. We're having a lot of fun and having real positive impact on our customers' businesses.
Purplefish | https://purplefish.com/careers | Member of Technical Staff | Full-Time | ONSITE | New York, NY, USA | NextJS, Typescript, Python | $150k-$225k + 0.5%-1%+
Purplefish is transforming the trillion-dollar talent industry with powerful AI agents that will fully automate most hiring processes end-to-end.
We are funded by 8VC, and Adam and I previously worked closely together to launch 145 companies at the venture studio Fractal Software out of a $650 million fund. Before that I was a staff software engineer at Lyft, and Adam was CRO at Wunderkind ($100m+ ARR). We've built a powerful voice agent, and are expanding into other parts of the sourcing-to-onboarding flow.
We're currently a team of 3 engineers in NYC (9 people total). We're working on really cool problems with multimodal AI agents (and some really not cool problems like ATS and HRIS integrations). I'm trying to build the engineering team that I would want to join, which to me means a high emphasis on agency, purpose, technical excellence, collaboration, learning and velocity. Recently A16Z mentioned us in the state of voice AI report: https://a16z.com/ai-voice-agents-2025-update/
We're building on LiveKit's agents framework and a host of other systems. We're looking for builders - people who are willing to learn and experiment and build fast.
Purplefish | https://purplefish.com/careers | Member of Technical Staff | Full-Time | ONSITE | New York, NY, USA | NextJS, Typescript, Python | $150k-$225k + 0.5%-1%+
Purplefish is transforming the trillion-dollar talent industry with powerful AI agents that will fully automate most hiring processes end-to-end.
We are funded by 8VC, and Adam and I previously worked closely together to launch 145 companies at the venture studio Fractal Software out of a $650 million fund. Before that I was a staff software engineer at Lyft, and Adam was CRO at Wunderkind ($100m+ ARR). We've built a powerful voice agent, and are expanding into other parts of the sourcing-to-onboarding flow.
We're currently a team of 3 engineers in NYC (7 people total). We're working on really cool problems with multimodal AI agents (and some really not cool problems like ATS and HRIS integrations). I'm trying to build the engineering team that I would want to join, which to me means a high emphasis on agency, purpose, technical excellence, collaboration, learning and velocity.
We're building on LiveKit's agents framework and a host of other systems.
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