I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.
I have little to no interest in AI coding - I try it every couple months but always regret it, git reset, and go back to coding by hand.
It feels quite lonely these days. The general energy and enthusiasm from hn was a big source of motivation, or maybe community. Now using hn feels quite isolating.
I do see the occasional post about going back to hand coding though, and their frequency seems to be on the rise, so hopefully that correction continues
(I don’t need to see no AI, to each their own, just would be nice to see an equal amount of hand coding content one day)
Programming will become like esports. Maybe out of the 30 million programmers who can program without AI, only 5 million will remain, but that is still a large number.
I don't like it either, but that's the way it is.
Especially after clients have suffered the new found arrogance of non-experts riding on LLM output.
Look, let me be perfectly clear: if you're getting what you want out of your job and your personal projects, hobbies, whatever you do with your time, awesome! If you feel like the trade-offs of including LLMs in your workflows are good for you, great!
Just don't delude yourself into thinking this new technology, this new tool, is free of trade-offs. Net positive for you? Ok if you think so go for it. I haven't found the inclusion of LLMs in my activities beyond replacing the broken state of traditional search worth it. That's it. I'm not against it, I just don't find myself getting net positive value from deferring to code generated by these tools, is all I am saying. Nothing more, nothing less than that simple statement. Not for me.
I go by interesting problems and I like being able to chose from more options due to lessened expertise competition. Why people voluntarily renounce expertise is beyond me, but they are and I welcome the increase in choices of engagement I have been experiencing.
I would never engage in uninteresting work at any rate of pay, and working with LLM output directly or mediated is quite uninteresting to me.
But including ever more complexity in the process, by depending on complexity-slinger systems that you don't fully control or even understand, is not the solution, in my view.
If you lose control over the precise, detailed specification of the domain knowledge that the code is, ultimately you are just a glorified business analyst. Besides, the inherent complexity of the implementation is not without essential complexity that needs mastering for security and performance reasons. Deferring that mastery to some tool is self defeating. The complexity doesn't disappear. You're just shuffling it around and when it leaves your purview you are merely creating opportunity for someone else to capture that value.
Ultimately yeah the vision of being an LLM jockey who doesn't know code might be viable or even numerically dominant in the market in future. Why would you descend the value chain though, and voluntarily, that I don't understand. Competing for volume isn't historically in the interest of the autonomous worker. Maybe I'd feel differently about it if I owned capital and had some corporate strategy behind it. As an independent actor, I don't see it favoring me.
I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM based tooling" seems pretty unlikely.
> The accounting profession is facing a severe crisis due to a shortage of accountants.
https://www.cpajournal.com/2023/12/01/the-accounting-profess...
> An entire generation of potential competition is getting addicted to the subsidized corporate tooling.
I think that using LLMs as tools for work is just like accountants using spreadsheets. If you want to describe both things with the word "addicted", then fair enough. But in my view, in both cases it is just people using a technology that is useful for their work.
It does seem that there is a shortage of accountants, but this doesn't seem to have anything to do with it... Like, "not enough people are entering CPA programs because it requires a big time commitment for not the best pay and horrible hours during tax season" seems like the main reasons and "the workforce got too addicted to Excel" seems like not one of the reasons at all?
I got into it at a very young age, but the syntax and the languages were just the means to an end of building and creating. I'm academically interested in algorithms and data structures and distributed systems architectures, but I have no desire to actually code those things by hand.
You're probably not hand-writing your software in assembler.
Next to nobody will be writing code in 2050. It was always just a stepping stone.