Keeping programming fun

August 28th, 2026

In a conversation I had last week, the topic of using AI for debugging code came up. We both agreed that actually, using AI for this purpose, aside from being not very stimulating to our brains, also takes away one of the most satisfying part of programming: debugging. The entire process of trying to locate the bug, inspecting source code, and scouring the Internet trying to find a solution is not only a great brain exercise, it is often very rewarding. In fact, to me, this part has always felt like solving a puzzle and is part of why writing code appeals to me.

I believe some of the joys of programming are the thinking exercises involved. When implementing a feature or designing an algorithm, usually it helps to devote careful thought towards its design. A specific type of creative thinking must be recruited to solve these types of questions. Similarly, solving bugs asks one to look at the code, perhaps also that of underlying packages, search StackOverflow or the git repository for relevant issues, and inspect or think about the possible values of variables used.

Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Nowadays, a very common scenario is to just give your code to a large language model (LLM) and let it figure out the solution for you. In my opinion, this is such a shame: not only does it reduce our mental capacity for such problem-solving, it also takes away the fun of this part. Especially for people who got into programming for similar reasons to those listed above, it seems almost weird to me to hand this off to a machine. Where’s the fun in that?

Perhaps this should be a call to return to ‘manual’, creative designing and debugging. To use your own, biological brain to come up with solutions and clever designs. We are very much capable of it, in fact, we’ve been doing it (in the computing domain) for decades! It would be a shame to let these capabilities go to waste from offloading to code-producing machines. I definitely notice the satisfaction of solving a problem this way. I already dislike the use of generative AI, so pledging to minimise its use for debugging is not a difficult ask of myself.

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