Chris Kiehl pushes back on the doom about AI and programming: work economics may have changed, but programming for fun on weekends, from a buggy Breakout clone to Agda-style type tricks in Java and recursion schemes, needs no economic justification, and the pressure not to enjoy it fades once you disconnect.
It's still OK to enjoy programming
Published: 2026-10-17
Reading Hacker News makes me feel like I need to write this: it's still OK to enjoy programming.
Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed. But that's work. Work is not life. The loudest voices on the internet are the saddest and most infectious.
To throw a tiny counter example in the sea of despair: I still program on the weekends because it is fun. I'm currently learning game programming! My current level of sophistication is a buggy Breakout clone with terrible collision detection. I write it by hand because I enjoy it. I struggle with problems because solving them makes me happy. It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it, because that's not the point.
I also get side-tracked from working on this "game" to study random programming topics. Last weekend was exploring how far I could push type safety in Java using ideas from dependently typed languages like Agda. There is no point to this. It gets tucked away under "interesting ways of thinking about a particular problem." Maybe it will come up in work life. Maybe not. I did it because exploring is was fun[0].
A few weekends ago: recursion schemes. Technically, this was not fun. I spent hours of banging my head against a wall. In the end, I still don't even know what's valuable about the ideas[1]. But I do know that many of the most beautiful ideas in programming only become clear to me after years of baking in my mind. It's why entire papers get written about Monoids. Maybe one day I'll find a problem that this applies to. Maybe not. I did it because understanding hard things is rewarding.
I write this because I increasingly feel a strange social pressure. It's like I'm not "supposed" to enjoy this any more. As though there's no point or joy to be had in continuing to grow as a human. The more of this doom stream you consume, the more it starts to infect you. Maybe "there is no point," you find yourself thinking. But this disappears as soon as you disconnect.
It's OK to enjoy things[2]. Doing so requires no economic justification.
Footnotes:
[0] Take the time to understand Fin one day. It is beautiful.
[1] I'm not there yet, but the goal of studying this is to give myself another tool for reasoning about program correctness algebraically (a topic I cover in my book!)
[2] I also have a blast vibe-coding. I've got a suite of apps for which I've never looked at a line of code. I suspect doing so would horrify me. "Programming" this way is also fun. Often extremely so. But in its own unique way.
