It's still OK to enjoy programming
Short summary
Chris Kiehl pushes back on the gloom around Hacker News, arguing that while AI has changed the economics of paid programming, coding for its own sake is still worth doing. He describes his weekend projects, a buggy Breakout clone, Java type-safety experiments, and a frustrating dive into recursion schemes, to show that learning hard things is rewarding without any business payoff.
- Programming for work and programming for enjoyment are different things; AI changing the value of hand-written code at a job doesn't remove the reason to do it for fun.
- Kiehl admits his projects have no clear payoff: a bad Breakout clone, Agda-inspired Java experiments, and recursion schemes that left him unsure what they were even good for.
- The "there is no point" feeling comes from constant exposure to doom-heavy online discussion, and it fades once you log off.
Full summary
Chris Kiehl's piece pushes back against a mood he sees on Hacker News: that hand-written programming is pointless now that AI tools can produce working code. His concession is narrow. At work, where you're paid to deliver business value, the economics have shifted and hand-coding may not pay off the way it did. But he argues that work is not life, and that the loudest online voices make this feel like a universal verdict when it isn't. He admits he feels a strange social pressure, as if he's not supposed to enjoy programming anymore, and he notes that the doom-scrolling makes that feeling worse while he's online and fades once he logs off.
The examples carry the argument. On weekends he's learning game programming, and his current project is a buggy Breakout clone with poor collision detection. He writes it by hand on purpose, and he says it doesn't bother him that Claude could produce a working version in one shot, because the struggle is the point. He also wanders into side projects that have no clear payoff: pushing type safety in Java using ideas from dependently typed languages like Agda, and spending hours on recursion schemes. He says the recursion scheme effort was frankly not fun, and that he still doesn't know what's valuable about the ideas. But he argues that some concepts, such as why whole papers get written about monoids, only become clear after years of letting them settle. He's not claiming any of this will pay off. He did it because exploring and understanding hard things is rewarding in itself.
His closing point is simple: enjoying things requires no economic justification. The piece is short and personal rather than an argument with data behind it, so its force comes from the specific hobby projects and the admission of frustration. Readers looking for a broader analysis of AI's effect on programming careers won't find it here. Readers who've felt guilty for doing unproductive coding for its own sake will likely find it worth the few minutes.