It's still ok to enjoy programming
- ID
- 37087
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 18 Oct 2026, 3:53 AM
- Fetched
- 20 Oct 2026, 2:43 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://chriskiehl.com/article/it-is-still-ok-to-enjoy-programming
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 20 Oct 2026, 2:45 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Chris Kiehl argues it's still fine to enjoy programming for its own sake, even as paid work shifts toward AI-assisted output. His counter-example is concrete: he spends weekends hand-writing a buggy Breakout clone with bad collision detection, and recently detoured into pushing Java's type safety using ideas from dependently typed languages like Agda, plus a weekend on recursion schemes he describes as hours of head-banging with no clear payoff yet. He also says he happily vibe-codes a suite of apps he's never read a line of, and suspects reading the code would horrify him. The post drew 187 points and 179 comments on Hacker News.
Why it matters
The useful split here is the author's own: he keeps hand-written, understood code for things he wants to learn from, and lets agents own apps he'll never read. That's a real decision you can copy per project — pick which of your codebases you're willing to not understand, because the author explicitly says reviewing his vibe-coded apps would horrify him. If you're shipping a SaaS, that choice has a maintenance cost; if you're learning, hand-writing the buggy Breakout clone is the point, not a waste.
Discussion angle
Ask everyone to name one project they'd refuse to hand to an agent and one they've fully handed over — then compare what they'd do if the handed-over one broke in production and they'd never read the code.