My old job feels distant now
pinecoder.dev
pinecoder.dev
I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.
I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
When I hear that term I usually think of people who brag about their job and sling copy-pasted untyped Python and JS from StackOverflow while being willfully ignorant of infrastructure, architecture, security, algorithmic efficiency, and anything else that makes maintainable software. Micro-dosing K and listening to too many Huberman podcasts are probably solid tells too. When I hear vim, however, I think about greybeards.
Did I miss the memo? There has been a non-zero amount of performative TUI obsession happening in the technical space for the past five or six years but I didn't think that using a fifty-year-old modal text editor was a shibboleth for being a brogrammer...
That's because word got out that the field pays well but most people who had the sociopath desire to make a lot of money didn't also have the skill to get a programmer job. So they did what they always do: attach themselves to a living host and leech it's blood. In a pond of IT field water, for every fish (programmer) there were at least 20 leeches (project managers, product managers, scrum masters, designers, architects, you name it).
I thought several times why I chose to be a fish and not a leech and the answer was not that it's the moral thing to do or that I'm not that bothered as long as they let me with a little blood left. Rather pragmatically that it seemed safer being able to find and make my own food than rely on finding and sucking out the blood of someone who does it already.
For 20+ years they added more and more blood sucking parasites to the poor fish and now, finally, they eliminate the fish altogether. Fine!
I'm just curious where will all the leeches go. What they'll suck on from now on. Can you suck the blood from an AI agent? The future looks exciting if only to see how the parasites adapt (or die).
If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun. But AI makes my burnout somewhat more tolerable.
Anyway, nothing has changed for me, except that I dont have to deal with google search results anymore for things. When the LLM gets stuck I do still go out there. But its rare.
Nothing has changed in the way I do my job, except having to put up with slop from people around me, or from business people pushing slop towards the dev team and wanting a pat on the back for it. That part has changed for the worse.
The complete willingness to traffic in nonsensical documentation that doesnt represent any real requirements as an excuse for doing a job is pretty sad, and I take note of who does it and I make sure to never trust anything they publish. And usually stop reading it.
I call it "crossing over", once I see someone do it and replace their work product with LLM slop and distribute it, they have created a barrier that will prevent me from working with them forever.
Still, there were a lot of times where I was catching myself having fun.
If you work for the right organization and work remotely you can just use AI to be more lazy. This is especially true during this transitional period where many colleagues are bad at it or refuse to use it.
I guess it all depends where you’re at. If you’re still in the phase of life where improving yourself at work and producing work you are proud of is exciting, AI might make you feel like your work and value has been diluted. You’ve been turned into a product manager when you wanted to be an engineer.
If you’re in the phase of life where you’ve decided that work is a means to an end, and simultaneously your company doesn’t expect you to produce 2-3x output, maybe this new era is pretty awesome.
I fall into the latter category. I’ve learned a new musical instrument mainly during work hours. I’ve gotten a lot of quality time with the elder scrolls morrowind. I started going to the gym every day. In the short term, the fact that I can make the coding machine do all my tasks for me has been a net benefit. I’m just not sure how long it’s going to last.
For me, the biggest benefit is being able to produce an initial POC that I can learn from before writing my own code. And, as you pointed out, it’s also brilliant for refactoring work.
(where the top guideline on [link] clearly states: "we do not accept submissions that are either outright AI-generated or conceptually similar in terms of style, verbosity, generality, scope-creep or signal-to-noise ratio")
I think the most likely outcome is that you’re ultimately going to reach the conclusion that the best option is to leave.
I suppose you could always convert that message to imply a personal standard rather than company policy, and then defend any criticism coming your way as acting in good faith on behalf of the company and its mission to prevent low quality / potentially dangerous PRs.
But yeah ... not as strong an argument if you're stuck with that.
Having said that, if the higher ups are "all in on AI", you may have luck reversing that logic and having an AI filter all PRs on the basis of "quality", where you get to define what counts as quality, as above. You could even have an automated reply to say this PR failed to meet our AI filters, please revise accordingly (and possibly dump either the guidelines or AI-generated feedback on how to correct the PR before it can be seen by a human).
This way you get to tell your higher-ups that you're using an advanced AI pipeline, while simultaneously filtering out (or at least deslopping as much as possible) most bad-quality, generic AI PRs. win-win.
He takes that, tells claude to add it to his docs, claude mangles my correct manually written directions and spits out a garbled and nonsensical version, and the project owner just throws that right into his docs.
Like where do you go from there? Even when you don't use any ai someone else just uses it upon you. It's like a bizarre new form of Bowdlerization.
Everyone sucks on all sides as far as I can tell. I really don't understand why people are accepting this paradigm of using ais for everything. Is everyone really that incapable of resisting the whatever it is you get from giving orders that they don't even care what results from the orders, just make me feel like I caused a lot of stuff to happen.
This is all so self-inflicted too.
I don’t want to go back to those corny bro programmers.
It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
I envy their optimism.
Circling back to these replies: Ah yes! The best slacktivism is having the bots do it for you!
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
Software has been saturated for a long time.
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.
does the world use more or less software YoY? (LLMs counts as software btw.)
the differentiating factors have changed but the underlying demand has only increased.
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
What a nightmare of a sentence.
Also, talking and listening to AI for directions is safer where the Ai is like an intelligent person. An example the AI giving you contextual directions like that new mechanic you are looking for is next to your favorite McDonalds in XYZ city or town (provides context to something you're familiar with so you just drive to a familiar place).
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
Recently on a long drive I was working on an AI agent network concept talking it through and after each push to it's repo I would discuss more and prompt it to make more updates. On Wednesday at a bar with 2 unemployed software dev friends they were testing out my dating app Ive been working on in the car/in general. They provided me feedback on the dating app and boom GPT made the updates in less then minute.
"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
Ok got it never have a handsfree phone conversation while driving if it involves a lot of brainpower. Which is super subjective and id say talk to chatGPT to create an idea of yours and see if your mind changes on this topic ;). It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
No, I prefer to talk to people.
Yet i love technology and using it in novels I see many others will be embracing in time too.
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
right now the meme is we all became managers of agents. the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
You need to normalize that with world population, or a bigger population and a smaller percentage could be the same number of people.
Of course it is still a bit simple, because the distribution will not be uniform per country.
Then we need to know why 150 and see how other numbers look like, ideally per region. My guess is industrial revolution but it is mixed with different timings and political events in different places.
Regarding
> What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
Obviously talking to the client, or does your llm power itself on and starts working without any input from you?
I’m not sure this analogy works. In fact I’d argue it’s the opposite. Food is an example of something that is relatively stable in terms of consumption per capita. There’s only so much food a person can eat, so if you make it easier to produce, then jobs producing it go down, as we’ve seen. But software isn’t like that at all. There’s essentially no end to how much software we can consume, and so as it becomes cheaper to produce, we’ll likely produce it in even larger quantities. Again, as we’ve seen.
This is what agile software development was always meant to be in fairness. It was the business people wanting to infantilise technical staff that created all the layers and walls away from users.
What is needed is a human at the beginning, to decide what needs to be done - and a human at the end, to decide whether it’s finished.
For a while at least, specialized knowledge will be a huge asset, if not necessarily strictly necessary, for the beginning and end.
Possibly even that might pass away - but I m a little more skeptical there, because a fully automated proceeds of choosing what to work on is really a whole different world altogether. It’s not just one where humans aren’t required to do menial tasks, it’s one where humanity isn’t required period - at which case, what’s the point of any of this.
I don’t see us getting to that point within my lifetime.
I've been thinking the same, this is very well put.
Dont change. Software developers do not have to change anything they control their means of production and we dont HAVE to use any of this stuff. IF you are saying that there will be non-engineers willing to step in to hit enter (as in the business/product people) and LLMs will be good enough to do with it, Im ok with that.
I encourage business people to go down that path, especially since I have no organizational responsibility to help them. So if they run into even one little issue, I wont look at their code, I wont let it into a repo and I can just walk away.
There will be people who cross over and will want to help the people using LLMs and some will be technical. But it wont be in large numbers and it will be based on extraction and not pay very well at all. It will pay less every day as the LLM usage goes up to the CTOs desk.
More power to them! At the end of the day someone WILL have to hit enter, and it wont be me in some low paid slopshop.
What Im saying is the industrys future and mine are not intertwined. The tech industry is of no interest to me as a software engineer. They have jumped their own fake shark.
Nothing fortunate about it. That's the part I hate the most about today's LLMs. That you still have to do QA for them regarding the design. I should be able to arrive at cool result with 5% of current steering effort, if any. I still feel like a bottleneck between nothing and cool stuff existing. Unfortunately it's unavoidable until they read my mind and know what cool means for me.
I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.
I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.
But yeah, disrupted careers is real. And the faster the economic or career discontinuity is, the harder it is for people to find new jobs or paths to new jobs.
I want the UI to be snappy. I used to dictate using
observables and other optimization preferences - and
sometimes still do. But I can also merely add
constraints - the image should process within 15ms
presses <enter>. Oh shoot - I meant to write 150ms
but… oh… I guess lets simply see i the model can do
it? Wow. I realize… I need to re-evaluate what I
think of as possible and not.
Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.
However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)
But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.
In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.
Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet way too big on the wrong side of this misunderstanding.
As in struggling to find acceptance by the rule makers?
or As in struggling to be capable of delivering value?
(just asking to try and understand your reply)
Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent
however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)
I think of it more like framework laptops, light phone etc which exist due to a fundamental decision to be a certain way and buyers value that fundamental feature.
I think that the value of hand written code has gone up, and will continue to do so, as a direct consequence of anyone now being able to generate code with LLMs.
That’s how I feel, in any case. Win my heart with a euphoric 3am commit message, typos left in.
One of these things is not like the others. Your silicon valley bubble privilege is showing.
At least with keyboards you can say they actually replaced typewriters but the other two are just paying someone else to do the same labor.
That was the day I realized being a software engineer from greater America is totally different than those from SV. The coddling was (is?) unreal.
Don't get me wrong, I partake in the group hazing ritual of guys who can't cook—it's good fun. But on the tiniest bit of introspection it's pretty obvious it's well on the way to becoming a hobby. We're already 90% of the way there with the hallowing out of the 'middle' between glorified warming prepared foods and enthusiast home cooks. The class divide isn't really cooks/non-cooks anymore it's DoorDash vs grocery store freezer section. Sad but not unexpected.
edit: to offer a slightly more substantive reply I will offer the Merriam Webster definition of cooking, which is "to prepare food for eating by a heating process" which applies just as much to warming preprepared or frozen foods as it does to enthusiast home cooks. I agree with you that the class divide is exemplified by the extremes of rich idiots who can just order Doordash for every meal and people who rely on the grocery store freezer section. The difference is that the people in the grocery store freezer section are actually cooking their food, while the Doordash people aren't, and the former category of people is substantially larger than the latter.
We not only can, but we should. It will result in a much higher quality product, which works better, is easier to maintain, and has fewer bugs. Despite the hype, LLMs are not actually good at writing code.
I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago. this guy is driving straight off a cliff and doesn’t even seem to realize.
curious, is this the default culture at tech companies now?
At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.
Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!
consumer subscriptions are subsidized but the companies make very healthy margins via api pricing, which is what enterprises use, and cost per intelligence is dropping rapidly
Money out > money in. https://isaiprofitable.com/
That can't go on forever, which is why the big AI companies are crying for regulation to slow things down - they need to make some of that money back before others come along and start eating what little moat they have.
That, and a lot of that investment money seems to be moving in a rather circular fashion, which usually means that when things change it will happen quickly as there is effectively one pot that will all dry up at the same time.
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
The overall perception I see most popular on HN of "AI" is that it's a waste of money, natural resources and we should be "doing something else".
I'm old enough where I've personally seen multiple AI winters and also been through major disruptions - the PC era, the consumer internet era, the cloud, social media, gig economy and now "AI".
For every major disruption, the biggest naysayers have been the very groups that got disrupted. They eventually had to either retire or find something else to do.
There's no logical explanation or data you can provide to these naysayers that will change their mind. They have dug their teeth into a narrative disconnected from actual evidence and that's now their identity.
As a result, I have a strong hypothesis that AI will forever redefine what knowledge work - including software - looks like and entails. Credentialism and rentseeking by educational institutions will be a thing of the past. Human experts will be largely employed by frontier and specialized AI agent companies and labs.
I have been extremely lucky to have invested early in Cisco, Google, Amazon, Dell, Uber and NVIDIA - wasn't very sure when I made those investments so much so that I invested only funds I could afford to loose.
I'm now fully leveraging my investments into AI. IF AI goes to h*ll, the consumer, retail, commodities, energy markets are so strongly coupled to it, that I doubt anyone will come out of it for less than a 20% correction, and I will be way past 100 when it does recover, so I have nothing to lose.
Yeah it won't be a student making $10 an hour replacing him, it will be an experienced dev making $10 an hour because hey at least that beats starving to death.
The next step after "juniors are doomed, but seniors still get work" is pretty obviously that senior salaries are going to start rapidly dropping.
I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.
My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.
So far I've seen relatively little anger of that level, except perhaps aimed at MS for the state of Windows. And unfortunately for the humans most companies high on AI juice are more likely to follow the path of finding better ways to use AI (or switching to what they think is a better model) rather than re-engaging with the meat workers, is such a user revolt seems imminent.
My DayJob is riding high on AI AMT, though quality is not currently falling (in fact by some metrics there is an improvement) because people are properly reviewing everything that comes out of it. I'm still planning on not touching the stuff though, if it comes to a choice of “AI or be redundant”, I'll be redundant, but even the Luddite that I am can see there is a benefit if it is used well.
What do you do now? I'm also looking to get out of this industry, but it's tough to voluntarily give up the pay.
Nevermind that the calculation of their retirement number was what I was suggesting in the first place.
It's amazing to me that even HN is full of this kind of petty jealousy, where people are ostensibly amiable to founding their own businesses and owning their time. God forbid someone retire. I expect to get downvoted on Reddit for even daring to mention I can afford bread, but I didn't expect that kind of thing here.
Maybe you should choose a different sin, you know Envy is the only one you can't have any fun at, right?
This is what is happening to the industry. It's a fact of life. A new technology has disrupted the method through which software is created. There's no going back and there's no pretending we can continue not using it.
You either adopt the tools now and have trouble finding a job later or have trouble finding a job now.
That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.
I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.
I don't think this will be a hill forever, after all folks have managed to get new novel mathematics out of these models, but for the medium term it seems like the good (software) business to be in is selling shovels to the people digging for AI gold.
Knowing these things might not really be needed going forward, but it was a good workout, and I'm grateful I got a chance to go through that even if it becomes largely unnecessary.
This person is not an engineer anymore, but it'll take a while for them to admit it to themselves.
I always wondered why so much of discussed politics centers around race and gender, but I think this is a good hypothesis.
"More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."
And I mean literally: the jobs that I had 5-10 years ago, that I built a copywriting career out of, simply don’t exist in 2026.
I work 90% without AI, and don't plan to integrate it any further. It's an overhyped and overrated tech that will die out soon.
In minds in danger of substituting counting, imitating, slop-spitting, relinquishing control for thinking, designing, daring in practice and not in prompting.
No hard feelings against the OP; they just happened to be the trigger. I fully understand I'm the shoemaker equivalent from 100 years ago. I just don't care--or rather care too much.
Give claude the jira ticket, implement it, open the PR, review the PR, merge it. Rinse and repeat.
What is even the point of any of this anymore?
Before he died, Tim Bryce had been trying to convey, since decades ago, that the document-and-diagram person is the real smart one in the room, the one contributing actual value. The programmers are just translators, turning those specifications into something a machine can execute. What's more, because they arrogate to themselves more value to the organization than they can actually justify, and because they resist discipline and organization, they're usually a liability to the company, and to society at large. Why does the TV and every device attached to it need a separate remote? Why don't they all just adopt a universal standard? It's programmers' fault. (No, really, that is a thing he said: https://patch.com/florida/palmharbor/amp/28237018/the-proble...)
Bryce was absolutely right. Now, with AI, there's barely any need for programmers anymore—just people who can describe the information systems the business needs. He'd be laughing his ass off had he lived to today, as the people who to whom every business had been beholden just watched their value drop to zero.
There's just no value anymore in being an obsessive technician anymore. There's no value in being a nerd. And here's a secret: the people you thought used to value you, secretly resented you and wanted you gone. Tim Bryce just said the quiet part out loud.
AI has freed you to focus on what's really important: being convincing in business meetings and charming at cocktail parties. Y'all need to go grind on your social skills, because AI won't be coming for those for a while yet.