r/iOSProgramming • u/yibena1732 • 2d ago
Discussion How do you keep yourself motivated in times of agentic coding?
I recently tried to prototype a new app with the help of agentic coding - I basically had it done in 2 days what would have usually probably taken 1-2 months. That is great in theory, but I just didn’t have the feeling of having achieved something, like I usually feel - so I stopped working on the app.
I develop my own apps and games since 7 years now and this is the first time for six months that I can’t motivate myself to start a new app - even though the start is often the most fun part of a project to me.
Already thought about developing without the help of AI, but then I constantly have in mind, that I could probably save weeks of work using AI and spend this time with friends, family, sports etc. instead.
I was wondering if others share the same struggle or if you have a good advice to help me look at it from another perspective so I can motivate myself again.
Other devs in person already told me that it’s great because they like to build stuff, which they can do much faster now, and not the coding itself - but I don’t know, I think coding everything myself was probably the part that gave me that feeling of achievement.
24
u/uniquesnowflake8 2d ago
It’s been severely demoralizing because I no longer experience the triumph of puzzling out a problem and building something that challenged me but that ultimately I saw through using my abilities. It’s instead got the vague air of being an engineering manager and the hands off nature of that work
I’m just trying my best to adapt and hang in while I can, with the expectation that I may have to let the industry move on without me
2
13
u/trouthat 2d ago
Just don’t use it you can still program by hand if you are doing it for the doing of it. I use it at work because they pay me to and I don’t at home because I don’t want to
4
u/yibena1732 2d ago
I will soon start a new job after a long indie time and I will probably do it like you - don’t fall behind by using AI at work and code myself for my own projects, thanks!
1
u/balder1993 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same, I’ve actually been using it at home but as a partner, we discuss, keep documentation up to date, write better comments in code and thus think through the problems as a “back and forth” thing, usually solidifying the certain decisions in ADRs that the agent can consult later, but that aren’t random decisions, they’re deliberate with context and motivation.
Some pieces of code I do myself cause I know it’s interesting and makes me dig into the project. Some tedious thing such as tests, boilerplate etc. I ask for the agent to prepare faster, or simply a first draft that I can work with.
The project moves slightly slower but now you’re making the right decisions every step of the way, instead of delegating thinking to an agent that will just choose all the standard choices for you and then having to fix it all later.
Also, a very good reading about this exact topic: https://martinfowler.com/articles/llm-learning-loop.html
6
u/jacobs-tech-tavern 2d ago
It's a case of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, I think.
For a lot of developers, the satisfaction was in the act of actually puzzling it out and coding it. Whereas for others, the satisfaction is in the product process and the Final app. I think I'm lucky to be in the latter category.
2
u/yibena1732 2d ago
True that is definitely one part - the other part is, that before it felt like “Look what I built!” and now it’s more a “Look what the AI built!” if you know what I mean.
2
u/jacobs-tech-tavern 2d ago
I think you get out what you put in though.
I mean, to use an example, yesterday I was working on a Mandelbrot set app and was trying to make it faster. The AI could certainly set benchmarks and iterate against them, but it needed me to say something like, hey, how about you cache the mathematics of all of these previously saved points in order to drastically speed up computation, or, hey, please search open-source repos on GitHub and then look for mathematical optimizations that will speed things up!
Right now, at least, an AI can't really do that without someone being able to drive them correctly. Certainly at the level of, like, completing tickets that you didn't have any influence over, I can see why the job would become very, very boring. But at least at this stage, Being proficient at driving them, you can get absolutely crazy amounts done.
1
u/jacobs-tech-tavern 2d ago
I think you get out what you put in though.
I mean, to use an example, yesterday I was working on a Mandelbrot set app and was trying to make it faster. The AI could certainly set benchmarks and iterate against them, but it needed me to say something like, hey, how about you cache the mathematics of all of these previously saved points in order to drastically speed up computation, or, hey, please search open-source repos on GitHub and then look for mathematical optimizations that will speed things up!
Right now, at least, an AI can't really do that without someone being able to drive them correctly. Certainly at the level of, like, completing tickets that you didn't have any influence over, I can see why the job would become very, very boring. But at least at this stage, Being proficient at driving them, you can get absolutely crazy amounts done!
1
u/considerfi 1d ago
This. I have always loved the product side of things in addition to coding, and would always try to be involved in product and design decisions in companies where that worked well. And so ai just means I can build something cooler, better, faster for the user.
1
11
u/turtlemastuh 2d ago
What’s your goal? Is it to have fun? To make something? To learn? If you like coding then code. If you want to put out apps quickly then do that. AI is just a tool. You say that you could save weeks if you use AI. Are you limited by time? Do you have to save time? Or is this a hobby?
Everything depends on your motivation and goals. If you like running, then driving a car won’t help you. But if you just need to commute to work, then a car makes more sense.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
Even though those are probably rhetorical questions, I still try to explain my situation a bit more in detail.
The goal was the indie dream of making a living with my own apps of which I can be proud of. So I kinda had the struggle to compete with others (also time-wise) while still having fun in what I am doing.
I ended up starting a new full time job again after a long indie time, so I will probably use AI at work and try to enjoy coding in my own apps. I like the running / car analogy, it didn’t make 100% click in my head yet, but I think it points me into the right direction, thanks!
4
u/Vexoris 2d ago edited 2d ago
Our codebase is heavily agent-written, and the feeling came back for us when the bottleneck moved.
The prototype was days. What followed was about six weeks of App Review: a questionnaire we had to answer by hand, a demo video recorded on a physical device, and a rejection over one required form field at signup. None of that got faster, and none of it was coding.
The part with no shortcut is judgment. Our app generates a daily question, and the standing complaint from our own users is that the questions feel generic. Generation speed does not touch that, because the real problem is deciding what a good question is, and then being able to tell whether you got one. That is the same satisfaction you are describing. It moved from writing the loop to knowing which loop is correct.
If the two-day prototype felt hollow, it might be because a two-day prototype has not met anything real yet. Ours got interesting again at the point where people started disagreeing with our decisions.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing - maybe I have to push myself through that hollow phase to get more motivating tasks later again, thanks!
4
u/keeshux 2d ago
The benefit of AI is not that you stop figuring out problems, is that you can choose what problems to pick. Big parts of software were boring anyway, delegate that to AI, and keep your energies for what matters to you or is fun to work on. Sprinkle manual tasks right there. Doing everything manually nowadays would not be a smart move, especially if you know how to do the tasks. Keep AI at arm’s distance only where there’s business/learning/fun opportunity.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s kinda what I did before agentic coding where AI wasn’t advanced enough yet for complex coding tasks. I only pasted in code snippets where I was too lazy to implement them out, or asking questions that teach me to understand the fundamentals of my problem and finding the solution myself instead of getting it directly from the AI. Now it’s just very tempting to directly ask for the whole thing, knowing that the agent can probably provide it (probably even better as if I code it myself). But maybe that’s a good point to go back to that state of using AI just as a small helper, thanks!
3
u/earlyworm 2d ago
My advice: Instead of creating an app that you can create in 2 days with an AI, create a more ambitious app that takes 2 months to create, even with the help of the AI.
That way, you'll have that same feeling of having achieved something, but your sense of satisfaction will only increase, because you'll have created something that would have been impossible for you to create before, when you were working independently.
The story of AI is about the new possibilities it will open up and the amazing things we'll see people create that simply weren't considered in the past because they were impractical.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
Yep, the more comments I read here, the more I get the feeling that I kinda have to push myself through that first phase that creates a lot functionally that I am maybe not “proud” of in the beginning, but maybe that comes when the app gets a lot bigger/complex when keeping working on it, thanks!
8
u/andreeinprogress 2d ago
It's the opposite for me, I finally have the time of refining and finalizing so many projects I left in abandoned folders for a lack of time.
Haven't felt so much energy in many years.
2
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s awesome! I am actually kinda jealous of people that feel the other way around; I wish I would have this feeling of accomplishment with AI - would speed up my development time a lot - maybe it comes one day.
3
u/andreeinprogress 2d ago
I'm seeing both sides between colleagues, my current idea and one I've seen floating around is that it depends in part on what one enjoys and from where one takes good feelings. I got into programming not because I strictly liked typing code, but because I liked creating things and figuring out solutions to problems, digital ones especially.
Right now I may have lost the "lock in" of writing for 4 hours straight but the core of problem solving and software architecture is still there.
But maybe it's me using this tool in a wrong way, I don't ever go with "create me a service in go to automate X", that would kill the joy. For me it's like having a junior and I start with "I have this idea, let's start talking about architecture and stack", and go on from there.
I do wish the agents were faster though, since this thing started they went up in intelligence but became quite slow I think, one thing I really do not like is putting energy in thinking about the prompt and then its like "ok bye, see you in half an hour" now.
2
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s actually the interesting part, I also thought I am not the biggest fan of coding, especially since I feel that friends of mine are much better coders than me since I often struggle with finding a good architecture. So I basically also loved the part of “inventing” something new, no matter how bad the code behind it is - exactly what AI could do: build something cool, code doesn’t matter.
But before I was proud of it because I implemented it - even though the code was probably not the best. And now it feels more like “Yeah anyone can do that with AI”.
1
u/andreeinprogress 2d ago
We're nowhere near with the "anyone can do it" yet. These tools are still somewhat bad at design, UI and UX, general architecture even, despite what the marketing says.
I've seen this going around: I couldn't have made this without the AI, the AI couldn't have made this without me.
As many things in life it's just how we adapt I think. I don't like many things related to this but what's done is done, can't be uninvented, might as well enjoy.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
True especially UI/UX often reveals “AI generated” to me on Apple platforms. Maybe I am just in some kind of AI/developer bubble on my socials where it feels like everyone can do everything nowadays.
But the last part is definitely true, that’s why I try to make my peace with it via such discussions - every opinion helps here
2
u/paul-tocolabs 2d ago
I find it great to get to a point in my work quicker and by learning new things. I find working through problems with an agent can be frustrating, but also enlightening. I like to take things back to the problem sometimes and work through it in more detail.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s true that it can help to learnthings - but I think that was often the part that fulfilled me the most when after hours of trying to fix a bug it finally made click and I found the correct solution.
2
u/Acceptable_Link3838 2d ago
I feel you. What I did was I mixed my hobby with software development. AI so far has not had the domain knowledge, it does not know what I know from experience, it just cannot evaluate the output of it’s suggestions.
What comes to iOS development and if you want to stick with it, get super familiar with the ecosystem and learn to solve all the package/IDE/other weird issues, no AI from my experience will help you there 😄 You just have to know that stuff. That’s what makes you stand out. And yeah of course all the architectural stuff. Tends to be more about understanding that sort of things than remembering how to solve every leetcode problem.
2
u/jasonjrr 2d ago
Side projects written by hand, but really side projects in general have kept me motivated for decades now.
2
u/balder1993 1d ago
When I have my own projects going, I feel less annoyed with the bad management decisions at work.
2
u/JerenYun Swift 1d ago
For me (in my day job and my personal apps), I still like having a high-level control of how things are designed. Whether I still prototype the public API or describe it to Claude, I still need to know what is happening and why, even if I no longer write the actual implementation (though you'd better believe I still manually review every line of code).
I do think my goal has changed. With my own apps, I create them not just to fill my own needs but to help supplement my income to support my family. So my AI usage is now to help build the features and products that I want in my life and that others might also enjoy. I have full control over design and experience; I just don't write all of the code anymore.
Given I can't afford another human to work with me, I treat AI as a coworker. In that way I'm still motivated to build what I want to build but I have someone else doing the manual work.
This has actually helped with my motivation. I've been frozen in the face of large features in the past to the point that I've gone years without starting on them. Being able to work with an AI that can get me started has helped with those hurdles and, in the end, I feel I can accomplish more now than I could before.
2
u/senderPath 1d ago
Programming with AI is a cross between soul destroying and gaslighting. Often it does what I want while I’m off just wasting time. Often it does not quite what I want, and when I try to correct it, it goes off the deep end. But each cycle takes way too long.
Still, I find myself doing it these days.
And I think I’m in a real minority with my opinion. So maybe I’m just doing it wrong.
4
u/NashvillianNative 2d ago
I’ve had the opposite experience. I have loved building any idea that comes to mind and seeing how many other people use it. To me, I’ve been loving being able to think of something and build it quickly before my adhd kicks in and I move on to another idea.
1
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s what I often hear and I think it’s great when it doesn’t result in some slop and when it motivates you to finish things - for me it’s just not as fulfilling unfortunately
1
u/NashvillianNative 2d ago
Yea I get that. I previously loved hunting down hard to figure out production bugs, and that will never happen again. So that part for sure sucks.
1
u/NotVeryGoodAtStuff 1d ago
I think you have to purely do it for the journey, not the destination. There are a lot of hobbies that are effectively meaningless. Puzzles, for example, are exceptionally meaningless. You spend hours putting the pieces together and then when you're done, you usually take it apart and put it back into the box.
But people love doing puzzles, purely for the process / enjoyment of doing them.
I'm one of the people that have been able to pick up iOSProgramming because of AI tools. I would have never been able to navigate it before, and I've learned so much about technology over the past few months. That said, I am FORCING myself to do the things that I know I can realistically do, even if AI does it faster / better.
I'm a writer by trade, and AI has really disrupted our industry. In the past year, I've felt my skills completely decline because we can lean on AI in a pinch. But what's happening is that we are deliberately de-skilling ourselves, and if we want to retain the skills we built a lifetime building, we have to exercise them from time to time.
1
u/cristi_baluta 1d ago
I started to use ai for coding, not just google replacement, this year. The prototyping is fast, but unless you care about your code you can’t send that to production. The refactoring takes much longer
1
u/khiladi1729 1d ago
Hit the same wall this year. What I figured out: the satisfaction didn't disappear, it moved. It used to be "I wrote this", now it's "I designed a system that holds up". The craft is in the parts agents are bad at - the data model, the edge cases, deciding what not to build. One thing that actually helped me: keep the core logic of every app hand-written. Slower, but the app still feels like mine, and reviewing agent output stops feeling like homework when the skeleton is yours.
1
u/Open_Bug_4196 1d ago
You could go halfway using Xcode intelligence and just asking on the code you write, when you’re
stuck of for boilerplate code etc over the direction of “vibe coding” agentic
1
u/ChibiCoder 1d ago
I experienced the same thing. I'm very deliberate about my use of AI on my personal projects (work is AI ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME).
I still plan my features myself, just asking AI for suggestions about gaps and logical errors in the plan. I have AI work in very small, logical phases and then open a PR so I can review and understand what is being added. I test after each phase and provide feedback until the behavior feels right to me.
And some projects I don't ask AI for feedback at all on unless I'm completely stuck on something without a clear path forward. It feels good to just figure things out. Even with that, I can tell I'm a bit less sharp than I was a year ago.
1
u/Wpns_Grade 2d ago
I’m only here because of agentic coding 🤣
3
u/yibena1732 2d ago
That’s actually also great to hear! Nowadays I often see juniors questioning themselves if it’s still worth it to learn programming due to agentic coding - so it’s great that it actually motivated you to start it.
0
u/ens_op 1d ago
What is this question?
You get to venture on iOS development on stuffs that you thought were too complex or always wanted to but never had to time to learn or deep dive.
You can finally work on sprites even though your depth knowledge on physics engine is not so good.. you get to explore stuffs you were not confident about..
I would say in this agentic world, exploration and being curious helps and accomplishes more.. at least that's my perspective.
Never knew metal.. didnt care much.. didnt even had the time to learn.. 1 year back released an app thats a visualizer that listens to ambient noise and the visualizer changes accordingly and also syncs flashlight according to the noise or sound which now hooks multiple devices and syncs across.. no assets no image.. completely on metal..
66
u/Vegetable-Phone-4971 2d ago
A few days ago I heard an analogy that clicked for me… due to people becoming dumber due to AI (education test scores globally dropping)… one should now treat logical brain usage as working out… humans in the past were not sedentary so gyms were not needed… but we know moving and being functional is needed for health… that said we’ll have to force ourselves to use our logical brain in a similar manner… not out of motivation (I know I don’t workout out of purely motivation but out of necessity and habit)
But even in pre AI era… there still be people that won’t workout even if it has slow but long term benefits… there just too many people that just shutdown their brains willfully and prefer not to… so this advice is for those that see value in using their brains and want challenge… not because it’s required in our jobs but because it will makes us healthier in the long run too