It will continue to be a mystery only solvable by the dwindling number of people clever enough to combat the problem with strategies like the many offered here.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?
I've got a "smart" TV that I didn't want, but that's the only thing they offer in my price range anymore. Maybe 5 years old. Stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, an actual hardware problem. Bricked. Opened the TV, cleaned the contacts and uncreased some wire strip. Has been working ever since. Most people would have thrown it out and bought another. But I'm the bad guy for using incandescent light bulbs.
It's unbelievable that we try so hard to solve this problem even after CRTs are extinct. Every LCD-type screen is easily made to refresh at any rate below its max. If we can't show a 24fps movie at 24fps on our TVs (or smoothly smoothed at 48fps)...what are we doing as a society? It's not like people think TV is an unimportant corner of their lives.
Something about people successful with computers makes them quick to claim something is easy based on the number of steps needed, without regard to the ease of remembering all the arbitrary or sometimes contra-pattern steps required.
The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help.
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
According to demos, AI coding tools are allowing neophytes to instantly create working apps and websites with mere descriptions of what they want. According to devs, they're 10x as productive because certain time-consuming tasks are condensed like unit test writing, code reviews, and code refactors and clean-up. So we're to assume that in the age when the typical App Store offers a million apps we'll never be interested in, soon that number will be a billion.
In comes Wanderfugl. A tool for traveling that I will never need, where just trying to figure out what it does used more time than I wanted to spend on it. Now with AI, there will be several shiny new travel apps like Wanderfugl for you to learn and choose from literally every time you go on another vacation.
Wanderfugl may be wonderful, and an achievement. But the reaction of this Seattleite is "What's the point anymore?" This is why I am uninterested in the AI coding trend. It's just a part of a lot of new stuff I don't need.
Example: new Yahoo! Mail AI summaries helpfully added to the top of each mail. Thanks, now I get to read each email twice! With the original text now placed in a variable location on the screen.
Unfortunately it's the coders who are most excited to put themselves out of business with incredible code-generation facilities. The techies that remain employed will be the feature vibers with 6-figure salaries supplied by the efforts of the now-unemployed programmers. The cycle will thus continue.
Spot on. The home computer never became accessible from the kitchen, and the storage system most anyone uses for recipes, if not paper, is the web or some other internet-accessible source. (Don't know for sure but I'd bet photos of recipes found online, viewed on a phone, is the most common.)
Reliving the days when the possibilities were endless and we weren't already captured by an entrenched computing path is important. 50 years ago, every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened. Why not? (Reasons aren't hard to come up with, but the process of doing so draws our imagination toward what computer interfaces could have been and should still be.)
It was always just an estimate but today I verified it with a chatbot before I made any claim about the time. Caught it in a mistake too, which I untangled by reminding it that food calories are actually kilocalories.
I always pick them up. Every penny buys enough pasta to keep you alive for another 15 minutes. So in case I ever go broke, I've staved off my eventual starvation by 15 minutes.
Enlightened take. For similar reasons I often say that going meta and fussing about your own happiness--literally basing your happiness on whether you are happy--is a doom spiral. If you're asking yourself "Am I happy?" I can give you the answer: No.
The post asked a hypothetical question about human motivation. "Why would I..." It came as a question but presumed that the answer was so obvious that the point would be clear without an explicit answer: with such a policy, people won't bother creating the products that lead to unicorns.
My peeve: electric cars that make noise to make sure that blind people around them can hear them like they hear gas-powered cars--except they make it 10x as loud as any gas-powered car.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.