Simon Willison cites Jeremy Scheff: coding agents strip the puzzle-solving joy from programming

Simon Willison quotes Jeremy Scheff's "My obituary for programming" in a blog post, revisiting how coding agents have changed professional programming. Scheff writes that programming was once one of the best jobs: companies paid you to solve tricky logic puzzles, the harder the puzzle the better the pay, and even easy puzzles paid well because ordinary people couldn't do them. Programmers set their own strategy, scheduled their own timelines, and defined what was and wasn't feasible. Scheff splits programmers into two groups: those who like building working systems and care little about which specific problems they solve along the way will keep benefiting from LLMs; those who see direct problem-solving itself as the main source of joy face a very real loss. The piece targets professional programmers, especially developers who treat coding as puzzle-solving entertainment. Once coding agents take over concrete implementation, this group's intellectual challenge and sense of control in daily work are diminished, and the source of career satisfaction shifts.