It's still ok to enjoy programming | Hacker News Reader

It's still ok to enjoy programming

chriskiehl.com

711 pointsgoostavos652 comments

Even if work is not life, hobby programming also has been affected.

I worked hard a couple of years ago to reverse engineer a game to produce a very specific tool. Recently, the game was updated, so I worked on my free time to do a free contribution to the community, and then, a few hours later a tool that does the same thing appeared entirely vibecoded.

Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.

Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

I think this misses the author's point. The examples he gave were all related to programming as an act of learning rather than an act of completion. He made no comment wrt programming as a contributor within a larger system (like open source code, community games, etc.). Instead, he argues that it's ok to like programming because it satisfies an intrinsic motivation, not that it satisfies an extrinsic goal more effectively.

I'm not entirely sure I agree.

While doing the whole project, I learned a lot about reverse engineering itself, the tooling, understanding static vs dynamic analysis, etc. Which was the most fun part of the project itself.

The rate at what people are delivering projects removes that opportunity heavily, even in hobby communities, which is part of the point!

I've always enjoyed the process rather than the end-product, which is why this personally affects me more than other folks I guess. Some people are motivated on producing more, I was more motivated by the learning process behind it, and those two things aren't compatible, so speed is winning the race, sadly, even if you're not profit motivated. I admit I'm a bit more of a doomer, I still use AI tools at work, but I guess it was time to search for hobbies that are not related to programming anymore.

But why does someone else delivering faster deprive you of the opportunity to learn these things anyway? Can't you just... not look at what they've done?

It helps to be able to learn as you go, because the end product is motivating, and the learning is fun.

I will corroborate that AI and pressure even in hobby spaces (like game modding) to ship faster if only to preempt a crappier implementation from gaining traction is making it harder to feel motivated to make something because there’s no time to also enjoy the technical puzzle or to really pay attention to excellence in the details.

I’m not really lamenting a bygone era, just saying that the feeling of programming for a hobby has also changed and the parts that are fun don’t line up as well anymore, so I do less of it now.

I still don't get where the pressure comes from. Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves. There is never a reason to rush things, because your only stakeholder - yourself - is fine with whatever your only developer - also yourself - does. You always have all the time you'd ever want for the technical puzzles because there are never any deadlines except self-imposed ones.

Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.

> Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves.

This is true when you don't share it with others.

I don't share most things with others anymore, I just make things with LLMs, and then use them for myself. When I make something to share with others, I pay closer attention. But for myself, I don't really appreciate the process of learning so much, because that's how I end up stalling out and never finishing the project. Maybe it resulted in useful skills anyway, but it really sucks for my mental health.

You can share your work with others while still not caring about the others when working. Others using AI to duplicate your work only matters if you care about people actually using your software, as opposed to getting some likes when you publish your project etc.

> Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.

For my case (modding games), yes, a big part of my reason for doing it vs. any other software project is experiencing others enjoying my work.

I also have projects I make for myself for personal practical reasons. In those cases very little has changed, because whether or not I use AI only affects me.

I take the parent comment's meaning to be that disentangling the journey from the destination isn't so easy in practice, especially if you're robbed of the community that was journeying alongside you.

If you were running a marathon and, halfway through, everybody just hopped in a cab and drove to the finish line, you'd be disappointed.

Strongly agree. Thinking of music — you reap enjoyment from practicing by yourself, then collaborating with other musicians as craftspeople, then performing for an audience. All three feed into each other.

So when the audience has moved on to synthetic music (stretching the analogy now!), and musicians have as well, it's still possible to continue on your own, for the pure enjoyment of it. But much has been lost with the global transition.

but you should not let other way of doing affect your happiness

You talking like what you doing is happen to appease people

The example came to me because I did indeed go from playing music collaboratively & publicly to largely playing by and for myself. Don't get me wrong, I still find fulfillment this way. I understand both sides here, and I think it's still fair to say that there are dimensions that are lost.

> You talking like what you doing is happen to appease people

What's wrong with that? Appeasing people is part of what being a community is. That's the human element. I could write a grand novel for the fun of it, but I still want people to read it and talk about it. To give me feedback, to discuss its themes. If that's taken away due to technological advancement, it's a sad thing.

It is not a binary between doing what you like because you enjoy the craft or being happy that people engage with your output. Both of those things feed into each other. An old neighbour of mine used to craft bracelets and give them away around the neighborhood. Why would she spend the additional time to walk to my apartment and hand me a bracelet? Did she only make the bracelet to get the neighbourhood's approval and didn't actually enjoy making it? Of course not. She made it cause she likes doing crafts, AND she likes people enjoying what she made.

The unfortunate part is that LLMs are addictive and they remove a lot of the complex thinking one has to do (in many cases), which lowers that community engagement that occurs in software circles.

> If you were running a marathon and, halfway through, everybody just hopped in a cab and drove to the finish line, you'd be disappointed.

Were you running the marathon to beat the competition and win a medal? Or were you running the marathon to improve your personal record?

For coding: Are you writing code to be the first to solve a certain problem and win community recognition? Or are you writing code to solve a problem you personally have?

I think the dichotomy is false.

You could run a marathon because you love running and want to do it with other people who love running. Similarly, you could share code-based projects with a community because you love it and want to do it with people.

The ideas you mention aren't separate from community or from each other. You can have friendly competition within a community that pushes all parties to improve and be their best.

Plus, in the finish line, the attendance is acting like if riding the car and running made no difference. By the time you get there, sweating and exhausted, the organization is already packing and the few remaining in the crowd look at you with puzzling face.

Not everyone can enjoy the process when a comparable outcome already exists. I'm aware the act of learning alone may be fulfilling enough for some, but many (including myself) got into programming to make things. When those things already exist, there's no point to making them anymore. I don't find it fun to make things for nobody.

For what it's worth, the vibecoded one probably used your old version as a base.

Just because other people don't use your version doesn't mean you can't.

I tried to look at it like cooking, or baking: I can make damn good croissants. They'll never be quite as good as someone with a dough sheeter and handmade cultured butter, but my friends and family would never complain.

The problem is, baking something and sharing it with others brings people together, there's smalltalk, catching up, other human stuff. Which in the end is kinda the point of it.

Like your post says, with programming, it's mostly just a race to what achieves the goal, with the exception of demoscene and retro programming, I guess. I started learning ARM assembly so I could make a lisp implementation in it. It will be useless, no one will use it, and an AI could bang one out in a few minutes, but overcoming that struggle to understand things in different ways has to be the goal with hobby programmers like myself, I guess.

Yes, my favourite programming project is a tetris clone my family and one or two friends have played.

The community you share with doesn't need to be online - your croissants aren't going out for delivery but I'm sure your friends and family appreciate them (and you). It can be the same with your software products, if you choose.

While this is very much true, in many countries it may be different. I'll speak for India. I'm a singled out geek, most of my friends have interest in many things but software. I can yap about movies, songs, architecture, etc. but start about software and they say "hey, let's not talk shop". To them it's boring work.

> The problem is, baking something and sharing it with others brings people together ...

Honestly, I don't see how this is a problem.

> Which in the end is kinda the point of it.

Absolutely.

> Like your post says, with programming, it's mostly just a race to what achieves the goal ...

Unless the joy of whatever programming one does is found in the path taken.

> I started learning ARM assembly so I could make a lisp implementation in it. It will be useless, no one will use it, and an AI could bang one out in a few minutes ...

Who cares if anyone uses it or if some other tooling could replicate what you choose to do if, in doing so, you enjoy it.

Much like the "damn good croissants" you make, it doesn't matter what others could make. You make damn good croissants.

Your happiness is yours. Enjoy the path you take to find it.

They’re saying the problem is that programming doesn’t result in bringing people together. The problem is that the value of baking is not easily recreated in all hobbies.

> They’re saying the problem is that programming doesn’t result in bringing people together.

Why can't it?

People get together to do a ton of "worthless" things together for no good reason other than for the enjoyment of it. Like chess, basketball, book clubs, board games, video games, popdarts, etc.

Reverse-engineering was seen as a challenging hobby where people would deeply collaborate to decipher machine language. People got to know each other pretty well like they were good neighbors thanks to the process. Questions would get asked about patterns people couldn’t resolve on their own which gave opportunities for others to pitch in or relay knowledge. A network would get established.

Now a vibecoded tool gets introduced and it eliminates both the challenge and the need to collaborate. There’s no longer any bragging rights, learning hand-in-hand, pride in completing a project started months ago, nor competition to see how fast someone can complete a project. A tool is now available to all and does the work for them.

To your point, there’s no reason the introduction of the new tools won’t bring people together. The reverse-engineering communities will probably undergo an identity crisis with an exodus of participants and the creation of a new type of challenge. Those who were in it for collaborative work will probably leave and not return. Those who just enjoyed witnessing the end results might stay to discuss and learn from what the tools produce. The discussion content would be different and may draw in a completely different crowd.

I mean, if the introduction of Excel made accounting less tedious by completing previously-manual actions and somehow resulted in a massive global community which holds an annual competition for complex workbook design, then perhaps reverse engineering communities won’t vanish overnight as feared. Time will tell.

Well with programming there can be a creative aspect which is more like sharing art/music online... But unfortunately that's still affected. I've been putting out what I think are pretty banger projects, with a good level of polish, but it's like nobody cares anymore. Social media is saturated.

Yes, besides AI upending everything, it's been a long slow decline with internet communities in general for over a decade now. Instead of having to look for what we think is interesting and talking to people about it, an algorithm just decides what we're going to enjoy

I think this analogy breaks down in key areas. Software can be distributed limitlessly unlike a croissant, which can only be enjoyed by one peraon and only within a time period before it goea stale. Like immagine of you spent 100s of hours perfecting your croissant making skills only for others to have a machine look at ypurs and just instant copy it effortlessly.

Because cooking has such intimate benefits not easily replicable I've actually found it a good sink for some of my hobby coding time that I too lost interest in.

> baking something and sharing it with others brings people together, there's smalltalk

I think this is a really good point that is or was also correct for programming.

Yes, maybe no-one was ever going to use my python-clone of grep. But the experiences I made along the way were something I liked to share and when I went online I could see other people making similar experiences and we'd laugh about the silly errors we made and the absurd abstractions we build and whatever else.

I think this experience is under threat.

yeah, but food is very primal, actually the only thing we need to do as humans to survive except sleep, and the act of sharing food is very culturally encoded, the energy you put inside is understood by everyone

coding is very abstract purely human invention to produce desired "result" so as long as the code works people rarely care about how it was made.., that does not diminish coding for fun and art, but we cant expect people to appreciate it as much as cooking

I'd ask - is your hobby programming the tool, or distributing a tool you built for others to enjoy and working with that community?

I'd say the post deals _strictly_ with the former. LLM code generation absolutely changes community dynamics, what other projects are published, etc.

How insightful and concise!

I'd also highlight a third option (really a sub-option of #2) which is competition within the community. One's hobby might be shipping the fastest (such as in cracking communities), and I could very much see this disrupted in today's world.

Part of various communities is _doing_ something of shared interest together and accomplishing something as a group. Sometimes that group is trying to solve a novel problem or push the state of the art forward. When there is no need for a community to serve that purpose, it becomes a group of people who may not otherwise gel. It’s great when it works out otherwise, but I’ve enjoyed working with a lot more people than those who also became a friend outside of that environment.

The other issue I’ve found is that these communities produce novel tools and ideas and AI can iterate on the idea much faster than the original authors. The original author had their own motivations for researching and producing and I can almost guarantee they weren’t reviewing the output of someone’s prompt.

> The original author had their own motivations for researching and producing and I can almost guarantee they weren’t reviewing the output of someone’s prompt.

You see this at work too. If I find a problem I want to solve for some personal motivation, I can no longer share with my coworkers what that problem is. Since when I do, inevitably, senior+ engineers and managers vibe code a solution. Often that solution is hacky and they expect others to fix the fundamental problems that exist.

At the end of the day it is probable that we are jockeys after the invention of the motorcycle you can still ride for fun but don't expect it to be the fastest way to go long distances

it's only depressing if you expect life to be static and unchanging. things happen. people adapt.

Lots of things can happen. Usually people can adapt. But some things that happen are disastrous. A natural disaster is one of those things. So is AI. If you were doing research in the 70s, things changed and were exciting. Now things are changing and they're depressing.

I disagree. Especially for programmers that made more money than the vast majority of people. AI came and I'm switching to nursing. Writing code is not part of being a human. I'm glad AI will replace or greater reduce technical jobs and encourage more humanity focused jobs. Not to mention AI makes learning so much easier.

Well, how liberating for you.

Enjoy being overworked I guess

This to me is a sign that you still haven’t quite internalized the zen of hobby programming. You are clinging to an ego. It’s not about being the first or only person who has programmed something, it’s about the satisfaction you get from simply doing it. It is a private victory. You can still find people to share it with, who will feel your enthusiasm for the thing you created.

There is a difference between going to the gym and lifting something heavy, and having your wife or mother or whatever ask you to lift something heavy for them.

Feeling like you are useful to others is a critical part of the human experience.

So, you’d still enjoy it if you were the last person alive?

What would you enjoy if you were the last person alive?

Honestly pretty weird of you to not vibe code it, if it was recently. I strive to be efficient and effective even in my hobbies. It makes them funner. Hence I don't use a screwdriver where a drill will do. Nor do I hand-sand large flat surfaces when I can use my DeWalt sander. Cry me a river of lament at the art of being bad at your hobbies.

So? It’s for your own fun. Who cares if another tool exists? Multiple things that do the same thing exist everywhere.

People will claim that it's fine, because in the end the problem was "solved". But the problem is that the vibe tool is often just 80 % there, and will be abandoned. But it took all the hype and drive and motivation to make another tool. So everyone is worse off.

It's 80% after after a few hours for what might have taken years the old way. Any remaining issues can be fixed as fast as they can be found. Abandonment can and will of course happen, but anybody else can pick it up and continue with ease.

The hard part is really just the coordination, you don't want dozens of repos doing the same thing, but at the same time dealing with random vibe coded PRs is an easy way to overwhelm and burn out any maintainer.

It's 80 % after copying most of the already ongoing project. That's at least what's been going on in the game recomp space recently: AI bro asks an agent to do something, it packages up an existing project, they make a viral video, and get all the mind-share.

At the end of the film "Only Lovers Left Alive", Tom Hiddleston's vampire character comments on an artist they found performing in a bar in Tangier "I hope, for her own sake, she doesn't make it big."

I feel similarly blessed nowadays. I did try to play the fame game with my Github projects but I could never find a problem that enough people cared for to get any kind of traction. Or maybe I really just suck at marketing. Either way, I find myself still fulfilled when doing my personal projects. They are not "side hustles" or a "home lab" or a "software factory". They're really just small projects that solve a problem for me. A lot of it also has to do with my very specific decade-old daily personal driver running Linux; my reticence to guarantee support for Mac and Windows (beyond what Node or Python ships by default) could not be helping my case.

And that's fine! Software with an audience of 1 but really fits in seamlessly with my lifestyle. Plus, if I want to change something, I can do so with zero consideration for other platforms. The reason why I wanted to learn to program in the first place is because I wanted the computer to do what I want it to do. Bend to my will ye golem of bits!

I have a GitHub account with about a dozen repos that I actively develop, and none of them have any stars, forks, issues or pull requests, and as far as I know, nobody has ever downloaded or used my code. And it doesn’t even remotely matter to me. You don’t have to measure your hobby projects by number of users. That’s one of the great things about hobbies and personal programming. You don’t need an audience.

Not to mention the dozens of projects on my PC that I never even bothered to publish. All these things are done for their own sake, and for my own enjoyment, and when I die they will disappear from existence, having never been used by anyone else.

Why does someone else/ai doing it make it worse for you? Did you enjoy making it? You know before llms there were always people better looking, richer, smarter,etc. Llms didn't invent this problem.

Many people derive joy and purpose in being useful to others.

This is not a critique of LLMs, it's just the new state of affairs that since people can more easily solve their own problems it has somehow become more difficult to be helpful to others.

For many hobby open source developers the reward and motivation was simply random people saying thank you.

If the point was being useful to others, people can leverage LLMs to be even more useful than before. But I’m getting the sense that more than being useful, people want to feel special. They got this perception the LLM makes them less special, and that’s what killed their interest in the practice.

Not a very charitable viewing of people. It could be that people just liked all aspects of it. They liked the challenging work AND helping others. They liked the community of solving problems together and being useful for each other. They liked the difficult collaborations when trying to find solutions. They liked discussing with people who had this niche interest who also spent time obsessing over it to gain the skills necessary to make an impact.

LLMs have disrupted this. It's much easier for people to silo themselves off and fix any problem that appears, without the need of a community. It's easier for people to discuss topics via copy/pasting from an LLM versus actually having a deep understanding of the material.

I know it's not charitable but I keep seeing people say it, and I'm taking them at their word. FWIW "I did something unique, now lots of people can do it, I don't feel so unique anymore" is a very human thing to feel, it's not a bad thing, and people should be honest about it. Maybe it's not charitable of people, but it's also not realistic to say that this doesn't play a factor in what they're feeling.

> They liked the community of solving problems together and being useful for each other. They liked the difficult collaborations when trying to find solutions. They liked discussing with people who had this niche interest who also spent time obsessing over it to gain the skills necessary to make an impact.

People can still do all that! With or without LLMs. There's still plenty of friction around which to form those kinds of collaborations, it's just at a much higher level than people had been working. It's not like LLMs solved everything, yet people make it out to seem that way. But rather going to where there's still friction -- where the collaboration can thrive -- they lament the existence of the lubricant itself.

> It's easier for people to discuss topics via copy/pasting from an LLM versus actually having a deep understanding of the material.

Maybe online? I just attended a robotics conference where experts in academia and industry spent a week sharing their research and projects. I would say a good 70% of presentations, papers, and posters had a LLM foundation. And yet, people knew what they were talking about very deeply, and were collaborating.

>It's much easier for people to silo themselves off and fix any problem that appears

i fail to realize how is this a negative thing

For the reasons I stated above. Many people like the community aspects, often more than solving the problem itself. It's nice to work with people, the problem is just an excuse to congregate.

>more than being useful, people want to feel special. They got this perception the LLM makes them less special, and that’s what killed their interest in the practice.

pretty much this, i realized it in the comments section of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc&t=1216s

At least if someone *else* did it then you could potentially join them or their community. I've done that before. If AI does it then it just doesn't have the same impact, plain and simple and most people just want to do their own thing instead of accept help because they don't *need* help any more.

It sounds like what you get out of hobby programming is being useful to others, which AI is taking away to an extent as those others could just roll their own. I understand this, I feel the same way, it is almost like I want some social obligation, but it doesn't take away the other part of what I do it for: personal interest/challenge. If that is not enough then yes, AI has taken over your hobby. Some of my other hobbies are entirely based on the challenge to myself of experiencing/learning something myself:

• I run (well, I did and will again when my current medical issues are finally sorted out!). There is no way I would ever compete and make anything of it, so it is all for me and occasionally (when not going out solo) a social aspect.

• I like to visit places. Nice bits of countryside, different countries/cities, museums, and other such. I often combine it with the running. None of this is going to affect anyone else at all, except on the few occasions it is a group adventure.

I can still enjoy techie tinkering in the same manner, it just being for me. TBH other hobbies (the running, playing with 3D printing though that does have an aspect of doing things for others, etc.) have left little time for that in recent years, even before AI. I'm a bit of (OK, a lot of…) an AI Luddite, I'm refusing to touch it even though that might be career suicide in the not too distant future, but other people using it isn't going to completely remove my enjoyment of any of my hobbies.

Is photography an example? The painters (to misappropriate an analogy from Paul Graham [0]) had to content with photos that were as accurate at a fraction of the time. Painting lost much of its so called practical use, and even hobbyists were impacted by a much more efficient tool. And then photography became an art. And digital disrupted analog, and phones disrupted the rest of digital. Professional and hobbyist painters pivoted too, moving from capturing realism to abstract and symbolic styles. And hobbyist art continues in analog and digital photography.

Net - hobbyist programming will change, but not necessarily go away. It will morph into “what doesn’t this linear algebra machine see or know?”

[0] https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

>Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.

Yes, thats the majority of humanity.

>Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

So your hobby was getting adulation and respect or writing software? Only one of those has changed.

I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.

Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.

Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?

Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.

It feels like spending your teens practicing football, playing varsity level in high school, getting really good at the college level, finally recruited into the NFL as a pro football player (dream came true!!) and suddenly, the team owner says, "No more football playing for you. You get the same salary but you're managing robots who play the football. Deal with it."

I hadn't thought of that type of comparison, but it's apt.

Considering how punishing a football career is, that sounds like a good deal.

Look at Andrew Luck.

OK, replace football with any other sport then.

Swap it out for chess. Tell Magnus Carlsen he can't play chess anymore. Instead he gets paid to run a Stockfish team in an all-engine tournament.

Computers can destroy Magnus. Yet he still plays and nobody gets to tell him or anyone else they have to stop.

If people stop being interested in human-played chess, then yes he's out of luck. But that could happen with or without computers. Same for football and anything else.

So I don't think this analogy works either.

Of course the analogy works. It’s an analogy, not an exact duplicate of the situation.

The important parallels of the analogy are that:

* Magnus dedicated his whole life to chess, just as many programmers have done with programming.

* Magnus enjoys the craft of chess, the human elements of creativity and cleverness, just as many artisan programmers do.

* Both prefer to be hands on and don’t enjoy being relegated to managerial / supervisory roles, and would probably move on to something else if they could no longer do the part they love.

* Many outsiders do not have any idea how much time and dedication it takes to reach the upper echelons of a skill like that, and struggle to empathize with those who have done so, and perhaps even feel Schadenfreude to see these folks “taken down a peg.”

Mathematicians have recently been lumped into this category of knowledge workers at risk. Many are grieving gratuitously and suffering a lot of flippancy from Schadenfreude-feeling onlookers.

No, it doesn't work, because both analogies (basketball and chess) are entertainment/games. Magnus isn't being paid to produce the best possible chess moves, he's being paid to be the best human chess player and beat other humans. A basketball player is similar. So the act of playing chess, and the act of playing basketball, is what provides the (entertainment) value.

A computer programmer, on the other hand, is paid to produce something. They aren't entertaining anyone (except themselves). The act of producing code doesn't matter to the person that wants a binary. The binary is what matters. So if a computer can out-program a human, then the human is in trouble. So it's different.

But, nothing is stopping a human from programming for entertainment purposes. And nothing is stopping humans from being entertained by watching other humans program, maybe competitively. Like chess, or basketball. Or from getting together and solving programming problems. Then it doesn't matter that a computer can run circles around them, and nobody can tell them to stop doing it.

I get it, though. Younger people in tech should be worried.

But I don't really understand the "grief" by people who say they're losing their hobbies. Like the top comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158159

But I don't really understand the "grief" by people who say they're losing their hobbies

If you don't understand grief then I'm wasting my time. Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.

> If you don't understand grief

This is not what I said and you're being rude. I'm saying that I don't understand the grief being expressed for the loss of a hobby. Because as I explained, computers can't invalidate hobbies.

> Sounds like I got suckered into arguing with an AI yet again.

Nope. I'm a human and didn't use AI for anything I wrote. But thanks?

The point is that what was once a life's calling is being reduced to a hobby. All these activities were more than hobbies, for example for people like myself solving significant math problems all day or at least for a significant portion of my day was my life's purpose. I felt like I was contributing to something greater than myself. Math can still be done but that feeling is gone now and with it is much of the motivation to do it in the first place.

The “entertainment value to the customer” is the product being produced by the professional game player. That’s what the team owners pay them for. I don’t see much of a difference. The programmer is being paid to use his skill at programming to create business value. The sportsball player is being paid to use his sports skill to create business value.

We've commoditized programming because it often gives an output that can lead to many beneficial things. But that does not mean that programming itself isn't entertainment.

Making art is often considered entertainment, and it can also be commoditized. The difference between entertainment and work is often thin, dictated by personal enjoyment, not how one is paid. I can be paid for something I find very entertaining. I can also be paid for something I find dull.

If the thing I find entertaining disappears, it's reasonable for me to feel grief. For something I enjoyed is no longer available to me, at least not in full.

There's a community around programming, much like chess and basketball. Seeing that community deteriorate into solely programming for profit, and using AI to do so, is tragic. Programming has been very focused on profit for a long time, but now even those who think it fun are debating on whether or not to offload their work to a machine that does all the work for them.

"Also, we only need two of you"

Speaking for myself. Not really. The problem that I had with enjoying programming was that many of my coworkers who didn't enjoy programming have some opinions that were frustrating to need to entertain.

Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.

In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.

If they haven't worked a day in their life before, then who has built all the software products we use today and from which LLMs are endlessly benefitting?

when i say haven't worked a day in their life, I mean it in terms of the aphorism "if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life".

Ah, OK, gotcha. Thanks for clearing it up.

IDK, I thought programming was great fun before and am having a blast making fun stuff with AI.

I don't think your comment is very well thought out. It seems to me your conclusion argues against your topic sentence.

>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.

However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.

It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.

I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.

But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.

I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.

It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.

I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

> It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.

The problem we’re collectively running into is that nobody knows if this actually poses a problem anymore. We’ll find out in 5-10 years, but businesses and clients can’t wait that long.

As a side note, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the “management” for setting expectations around AI use. They’re driven by market forces. If competitors are producing slop and customers are gobbling it up, then from a business perspective it _is_ a mistake to abstain from AI use.

What I’m finding quite fascinating is that we’re in a weird spot right now where we’re both expected to produce slop AND understand it / be responsible for it. Seems unreasonable.

In the day since I posted this, I've seen a few good links on HN that touch on this question.

1. The Decoherence Trap: https://maevyn.codes/decoherence 2. SlopCodeBench, a benchmark that quantifies how models decohere over repeated change requests rather than a single one-shot challenge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108717

I think the most important takeaway is that it takes time for these problems to manifest. If you start with a particularly coherent codebase it will take years for slop code to degrade it to a point where engineers are noticeably less productive.

I didn't downvote you, but if I had to guess why you were downvoted it's because it's very obvious to many working software engineers that decoherence is a real problem. In many ways that's what this OP was all about; not just loss of joy in programming for its own sake but loss of the ability to design deterministic, fully-understood systems that won't require constant off-the-books maintenance eating into your free time.

For the record I’m fully on board with slopification being a bad thing. My point is that businesses don’t seem to care at this time.

I don't know if it's just me, but I find that with a disciplined approach (or even an undisciplined one for some personal projects), LLM generated code is quite "maintainable" nowadays for the sorts of things that matter: adding new functionality, fixing the odd bug (usually a missed edge case, or behavior I didn't think-through well enough). They're also secure enough for me not to be overly concerned.

Granted, I stick to frontier models and avoid cheaper ones, but if it quacks like a duck...

If you're working on a CRUD/web app, absolutely. There's so much data for web apps out there that LLMs now produce better web app code than most of my coworkers from 2022 or so, since it follows consistent style rules. Web app code all looks the same, anyway.

I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code

The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering

There is some truth to that, thus i wonder, if they will not solve that by creating architectural harnesses. Like look at repo x. Condense its coding style and architecture into a prompt. Remember that prompt everytime you create a new module.

But i get where you sre coming from

I agree with your take if we talking about large complex industrial software

but guess what ???? most software don't

Timmy don't need to understand how landing page works in order to sell his cookie startup online

see where I am going ???? You are not get replaced

AI just replace people that work in "dirty and crude" work, think of its like wordpress plugin fixer from third world country

this is part of industry that you never touch and not want to work

It only remains to explain this to the management... That does not work with code, engages with AI only in the form of chatbots, but demands everything to be "AI native" and won't be there to deal with the consequences.

>"dirty and crude" work

Which is what we used to tell the junior to do.

There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.

I feel the opposite, pushing keys was never the enjoyable part, deciding what types go in what places, uninteresting, switching between editor and terminal, boring at best, trying to translate errors to SO search queries and back again, maybe possible, dealing with under-documented dependencies, frustrating.

My goal has always been to create something and use it. Ai still requires we do the intellectual side of programming, that interesting side of programming. I get to do more of that now that while the bot handles that annoying stuff. I'm a the happiest programmer I have ever been. I spend more time writing human these days, because the bots are really bad at that.

>This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

I think I know people in both camps who feel both ways. I'd say it's all just noise at this point. What's clear is some people like it (for now) and some people don't (and probably won't ever). I've gone from liking it to not over the course of the last year. I used to love programming/the craft, and then got burnt out of it, so I loved it because it made building things easier again after I stopped caring about that, and then it made work hellish when everyone basically stopped caring about the craft at all.

I feel for everyone in this situation. I don't think anyone is wrong to mourn the undeniably massive shift happening to something that has been such a big part of our lives, and I don't think anyone is wrong to be excited. I say this as someone who has worked in ML for coming up on 10 years now and is more towards the latter camp, where I love working with agents, and still spend plenty of time writing code by hand and studying. I don't think it's fair to pretend people are being unreasonable or are just "missing the big picture" for being unhappy.

But I also have found that where you work and what AI usage is like in your company is a pretty big deciding factor. Your comment, which I agree with, made me think about this. I consult a decent amount, and I've worked with companies where the engineering culture has adopted AI in a way I describe as "ugly." I should find a better word. But what I mean is that it's sort of like the attitude is "okay, now we can ship more tickets, so everyone take on 8x the workload". And they do a lot of "best practice" kind of stuff around using coding agents--every new anthropic article gets posted to slack, and there's always a new CI process for using agents--but they're fundamentally just trying to do the same work as before but kinda sorta faster. It's a weirdly miserable experience.

On the other hand, I've worked with companies where the engineering culture almost feels exuberant. I think a consistent difference is that in these companies, it feels like the engineers now have permission to try wildly ambitious things. It's not always optimally productive in the sense that more things get thrown away or end up just not really working out, but overall they move significantly faster and do more interesting work. Commonly, it's things they wanted to do before, but simply weren't realistic with their constraints around capacity. Or it's an idea like "this part of the codebase has always been a performance nightmare, but it's also a beast to untangle. I wonder if I could setup an autoresearch loop and let it run all day, even just to harvest some ideas?"

But yeah, when everyone sort of gives up and/or are forced to move an ungodly number of smaller tickets, it is a miserable time.

I definitely know what you mean about the difference in engineering culture. I'm definitely the kind to get excited by it and try out all manner of experiments and really have my head in the game on the new paradigm. My current team just isn't in that same wavelength. It's a lot more practical focus on shipping, and fair enough. It's a bit of an impedence mismatch for sure. Still, I have fun playing around with stuff in the evenings at home, but now at work I'm just trying to do bog-standard engineering and forget about the AI side of it to the degree that I can.

Hard agree. My anecdotal experience: me and my friend group have math/coding contest national level background. We loved coding. All of us now devastated and consider retirement/different profession People who was there for the benefits (no offense, pretty valid reason) are happy now

I declined manager position multiple times, now I am forced to it

And no, I can't code without agents as a hobby anymore. As a rational person, I feel like this is just useless nowdays. Huge part of the fulfilment that it was the most optimal way to solve the problem. Now I feel like I do useless work

> The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming.

At least two people I've worked with have become "AI Influencers" on social media. They were two of the least capable programmers I had ever worked with. Both super nice people, and I enjoyed their company, but both generated absolutely terrible code.

I think there's generally something to people who were sidelined by their lack of skill feeling empowered by AI.

Just yesterday I got a fully LLM reply from a coworker about an issue.

I've never been the biggest hobbyist programmer. My hobby programming was a means to an end for the actual hobby project I wanted to use. I'm more of a "maker" than any one kind of engineer. That being said, it was still fun at times and those personal projects literally got me jobs and allowed me to bypass live programming tests because I was able to show I knew how to program as I explained every design decision.

LLMs sorta fucked me over. My strongest skills aren't raw programming knowledge or fact regurgitation. Personal projects were how I showed potential employers my actual end-to-end problem solving. The projects were never polished, they didn't have every error condition formally handled in a logging framework. But they organized ideas into data and made things happen.

All that is worthless now unless employers want to see my pre-war steel collection on old repos. I'm defeated. Using agents for personal projects feels like playing a game with all the cheat codes turned on. It stops being a game, it's pointless. Me telling the machine to make something doesn't prove anything.

I still want to remain housed into my senior years and this tech has possibly kicked that out from under me.

> It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

True, but dealing with agents is still easier than dealing with people (at least for introverted personalities). That being said, you still need to deal with other people's army of agents.

> I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

Never thought Justin Searls would say that. So I reread the whole comment over and over again, and it clicked.

I liked building and making stuff work. I also didn't mind and often enjoyed coordinating with (good) clients, managers, or other engineers. I didn't love being a manager and requested a few years ago to go back to an IC role.

That said, I think I didn't like being a manager because of the turnaround time and/or quality of people I managed (partially due to my blind spots in managerial skills, at least in some cases). I improved but it wasn't worth the headache for me at the time.

With agents, I feel some of that pain again, but it also fixes some of the problems I had with it; relatively consistent quality and I find that I can lower my bar of communication with an LLM (I'm not writing in public to a real colleague) while simultaneously getting a lot more out of it, and it tends to not misconstrue what I've written.

I keep going back and forth between loving it and pining for being an old fashioned IC.

All that said, I really enjoy the puzzle of programming, in ways that I couldn't really always do at work -- "it's good enough", etc... I've done it in free time this year but it's hard not to view it as a waste of time now.

Not sure where I'm going with this besides expressing my current thoughts and somewhat agreement. /rant

I enjoy puzzles as much as the next guy. But I can just pick up a crossword or sudoku or something and get that mental stimulation elsewhere. The thing I always found vexing about programming was that the puzzle-solving was a prerequisite to getting anything done. Now that the two are decoupled, I'm a lot happier.

Then the thing you enjoyed was not programming. It was seeing your ideas exist. Which isn't wrong, but it's essential for you to admit that.

Not a few engineers are actually doing stuff like planning the cooling for buildings, construct things in CAD or draw plans. There might be some people involved afterwards that actually put those plans into reality and then it becomes a supervisor job similar to what you describe. BUT, thats only part of the job, not the core.

I see it similar to programming, before it was kind of a craft, many crafts are not paid very well, I know that woodworking can be very fulfilling but Ikea exists and noone pays you 1000€ for a simple table. But programming was a well paid craft because people are bad at thinking in general and not everyone can do the thinking good. Now we externalize the thinking and hope it will just work somehow... But the point is..that is a different job. Others already said it, suddenly you are a manager and not a craftsperson anymore. No more tinkering.

About the hobby stuff, I hate that the unannoited ones slop there way into _my_ hobby space, pollute everything with one shots that get abandoned in a few hours and drown everything with their half baked brain childs without polish that all look and feel so same-ish, the "map of something something" projects I have seen that were missing any kind of error validation or check of completness is astonishing.

> I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.

As many people here and on Reddit can attest, I am one of these loud voices.

I actually see programming as all three: a hobby, fun and a profession. And AI itself is... neither. It's not enjoyable because you have to understand everything anyway if you want to do a decent job, no matter if for hobby or for work. The only thing AI can do is save you time when you have no starting point at all - i.e. reconnaissance in pentesting.

Are you serious? I LOVE programming as a hobby. In fact is IS my hobby. And I HATE AI, hate it with a passion. The world was so much more interesting when people were doing it by hand. Now it's ugly.

> It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily

Now that you phrase it that way.. I think I'm very glad to have transitioned from 'programmer' or 'dev' to 'big-tech software engineer'. The jobs are very different. I had no idea what I was in for. SWE is much less fun. All meetings and alignments and docs. But I think that's what my job would have been forced to become with AI anyway, so at least it prepared me for this new world.

I just happen to spend 40 hours of my life working a week and would like to enjoy as much of it as possible. Not doing so not only drains joy from a massive portion of my limited time on this Earth, but makes it harder to utilize the time I have available if all my energy is drained.

It would also be nice to have work readily available related to the field I've been building skills in for over a decade that I know isn't going to disappear suddenly. Prompt engineering is already dead. I suspect any skills you learn now to utilize AI is not going to last more than a few years.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills a little when it comes to this subject. Maybe everyone else already has ridiculous money saved, or has other things lined up, or are just ready to move into a Monastery. But for those of us in the middle of our careers and with no AI-proof capabilities the future is at the very least uncertain.

I figure if the industry is only going to last a few more years (according to some anyway) then why not just spend as long as I can working the way I enjoy, rather than just jumping on the bandwagon? Actually, I jumped on the bandwagon and rode it for a year, and decided it kinda sucks, so now I'm doing my best to go back to just coding as much by hand in my professional life while just switching to pure vibe coding in my private life.

> I'm doing my best to go back to just coding as much by hand in my professional life while just switching to pure vibe coding in my private life.

isn't this backwards?

Nope. The stuff I need at home is just stuff I need. It just has to work for what I need it for. The development is basically interact with it through the UI and tell the agent what the bugs are until they're ironed out and then I never look at the code. True vibe coding. At work I need to make sure the system properly works and is maintainable and I need to understand it, and I'm sick of reading Claude and processing information from the wrong end in way that's really suboptimal for my own understanding.

You're not alone. I was never attached to coding by hand much, but I also don't understand the laid-back attitude of some people in this profession.

Sure, we can develop familiarity with tools and build cool stuff, but this is no different than knowing how to configure your washing machine (IMO). You could, of course, build a software-equivalent to a laundromat or a professional laundry service, but how many of those are needed?

Don't get me wrong: I think automation is cool and all, in washing and software development both. But if the profession of me and much of the labor force depended on handwashing skills, I'd love to see the displacement being taken more seriously.

Taken seriously how? People talk about this constantly, and the overall tenor of the tech blogosphere has basically accepted that LLMs are here to stay, and that this spells doom for tech workers, but what’s a guy to do? You can’t “ban” AI, I suppose you could tax tech companies, you can’t just give people jobs or money.

I suppose you could take the accelerationist stance and try to massively overinflate these companies to crash their funding apparatus by intentionally electing dullards who cause the cost of capital to far outpace its returns, which is what seems to have happened in the last 2 years.

For starters, I'd love to see someone with hiring or legislative power tackle the subject of displacement without being dismissive.

For example, anyone who dedicated a bit of brainpower could understand that prompt engineering was bullshit from the beginning. Yet today we're still seeing it being rehashed as an alternative to knowledge work in the form of harnessing, guardrailing or context engineering. This is scaleable neither size-wise (how many different wrapper-builders do you really need?) nor time-wise (how long until model providers vertically integrate that, too?).

The reactions that we see today - the calls to ban AI or implement UBI, or even the race to escape the "permanent underclass" - are some symptoms of this lack of direction, IMO.

Personally, I'd like to see:

- Automation tax in line with displacement, which is then directly funneled to services and fund pools that mitigate the effects of displacement. If you want to reduce the winner-takes-all outcome, you should provide the capital to many more to own the automation tech, robots, whatever.

- Firing moratoria as an industrial policy tool. IIRC, the Chinese implemented something of this sort: you can automate, but you have to retain a certain amount of jobs. Obviously, it's a transitional solution.

- Aggressive expansion of software- and model-auditing & engineering jobs and education. If this is the direction, more people should be able to understand the systems in detail, not fewer.

> but how many of those are needed?

It might be some weird nostalgia talking, but I really feel like we hit the optimal digitization somewhere in the 2000s(not to say it was perfect). Important things were digitized and automated, but with paper in hand still. Medical records, purchases, flights, etc. Things that really could use it.

But we all still spoke to each other, went places, and you had to be a big nerd to spend all your time on a screen.

I've been thinking a lot about the reduced rate of return automation has been seeing. Robots are cool and all, but most of what we're getting out of computers nowadays are SaaS business that beg the question "why and to what end?". It's all just grinding for a piece of fat in the grand fat-cutting optimization of life.

None of this is really improving anything, we're not spending money on society-level improvements, those typically just come as a side effect of some other advancement that has taken a core sample out of society for a bit of profit.

The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.

I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.

>it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.

Experiencing this led me to feel burnout. It's horrible. I now value thinking and the ability to think much more. Not that I didn't before, but I mean I have a whole new appreciation for it and a whole new disdain for Claude slop where someone could have otherwise done a better job.

This is basically correct but there is some nuance. First of all, people working on unoriginal or very small scope stuff, such as app clones or ad hoc analyses in notebooks, will never hit that wall. They'll never even know the wall is there. This is a bit annoying, because they then generalize their experience with toy projects and come away with the mistaken belief that anyone could make anything if only given enough tokens. This is most problematic when they are in leadership positions.

However, the real value is in complex, non-trivial, and above all novel code. This has been true for a long time, and it's just as true in open source as it is in industry or academia. Here, agents are far less useful. In fact, the only people I've seen have any kind of success using agents on these kinds of "serious" projects are people who are already serious programmers. They already know how to design and test stuff, they already know how to supervise junior developers, they already have an intuition for which aspects of the project the can safely delegate to a less experienced developer. So they're able to use agents as a "better autocomplete" in their own code, or use it to flesh out the non-essential and more routine aspects of the project, or even just delegate the agents to the role of code reviewer.

Here's the thing though. The less experienced ones, the people who don't already have those skills, they do get burned when they "stick the fork in the socket," as you put it, or in other words when they try to use agents to take on projects they don't fully understand... but they don't learn anything! The ones I've seen, anyway. Relying on agents insulates you from the code, which also prevents you from building a mental model of what's going on under the hood, which in turn makes it impossible to learn anything at all. They just keep yelling at the agents, telling them to fix stuff even though each fix introduces yet another regression in an endless loop... they don't know how to dig themselves out of the hole they've dug. And after all, what is the solution? To spend five years down in the code mines, paying your dues as a junior dev, reading and typing and thinking about mere code for the requisite 10,000 hours? Nobody has the time or inclination for that.

Agents, in other words, break the learning loop. You can't learn to program, and therefore can't learn to design or architect software, not really, if you're using agents. I am unfortunately coming to the sad conclusion that the last programmer has already been born; if you didn't have 5+ years of experience and a pretty good handle on the more advanced aspects of programming (such as software architecture, design patterns, optimization, debugging, etc.) before agentic programming became a thing, then I don't see how you ever will.

It'll be like COBOL programmers - the industry will shrink from the top-down, with the first to go being the new college graduates looking to enter the workforce. Inexperienced devs have always been given less interesting projects, but they stuck it out because they were learning valuable skills, building experience, making the economically rational decision to invest in their own career. But anyone entering the market today will never get out of that trench - anyone that actually needs a real programmer for a serious project will hire someone with decades of experience - there will be plenty of supply. And the projects on offer for junior devs won't teach them how to program, only to supervise agents. As a knock-on effect, smart young people already see the writing on the wall and are pivoting to other majors, which just reinforces the trend. This might cause problems in a few decades when all the real programmers start to retire, but when has the market ever considered long term consequences?

> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.

> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints

It depends on your definition of better. Some businesses value speed above almost all else. Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount. I think in those cases, LLMs are better than probably any human.

On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.

> Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount

To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?

I agree. You shouldn't test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. That doesn't mean you shouldn't test it with an LLM-generated, refined, well-tested (by human users) app. I don't think it's a boolean. I think it's a continuum.

Those companies, and those people within otherwise decent companies, have existed since long before the advent of LLMs. Avoiding their influence is a career skill as important as the code itself. And I'm not saying you can just avoid them for your whole career, they're everywhere and are being supercharged by LLMs.

It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.

How is this different than testing an idea with a janky, rushed, handcoded protype or MVP? That's how a lot of product development has always been done.

Well there’s at least two reasons people might not buy your cake: they don’t want cake, or the cake is bad.

For the first group, it doesn’t matter how good your cake is. If you spend a year perfecting it, you won’t sell them any more cakes. And for many products, this group is basically 100% of customers.

I think their major issue is actually naming. I don't think they have issues making well factored code because you can tell them how to factor it. You can even tell them how to name it. But that takes time. People want the functionality now without having to wait. So the well factored and well named stuff is a functoin of how much time you want to spend giving overview. I don't think you're going to have many cases where its faster to type each thing yourself. You can describe the details in a prompt which can be referenced as you review.

The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works". So if no one is reading the code, what is the big deal with naming? The big deal is we need to know what our later sessions are talking about and we need linguistic separation of concerns.

A higher level form of programming, if you will. Linguistic precision seems to be where the specificity can be lost or won. The naming will reflect that with some degradation. But humans will also degrade the spirit of the specifications as well in many cases!

Hopefully this post makes some sense to someone.

> I don't think they have issues making well factored code because you can tell them how to factor it

I mean, who's doing the factoring then?

Great point and I think it highlights the issue with talking about this topic because the terminology is so black and white, "AI made it" or "I made it". But the truth is more like I got on a bicycle that I did not build and rode a marathon through treacherous land that I have not been through before, but I have been through other treacherous land before and I had some scar tissue that helped me through this time. Jobs was on the money when he referred to the computer as being like a bicycle. ("for the mind" ... to finish the quote)

Yes, I think of a computer as a bicycle and AI as a motorcycle. It will definitely get you there faster, but is it better for you?

Also "great point" is sadly a phrase that has been co opted by sycophantic AI so I can no longer take it seriously.

Well I’m sorry you feel that way. I don’t see “great point” used often but in terms of its agreeableness I can see how one could take it that way. (In fact I had a feeling someone would say that, but it was a concise wording for what I intended so I left it in).

I see it as a multiplier (the bicycle metaphor) and yes certainly getting across town on a bicycle or across the country on a plane is less cumbersome on your health than walking every where.

I don’t ride motorcycles, I rode a scooter for a long time doing a delivery job as a younger man and the speed and instability (of two wheeled motorized vehicles) along with lack of visibility to others creates a dangerous combination.

And yes I can see the corollaries there to AI usage especially in these days when the excitement of the acceleration is being found seductive by many and without much visibility into the longer term consequences.

> The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works".

People used to be able to write code that was horrible by all the standard metrics but still "just worked" (or at least appeared to). From the stories I've heard, it would get into production all the time, too. But if it's a bigger problem now, then necessarily we know how to fix it, so.

I guess the excitement of the new toy is just leading to some irresponsibility.

I don‘t know that we know how to fix it so well after the fact, but rather we know how to avoid it which is by writing understandable code the first time round.

But we don’t always do that and then things get rewritten and broken etc

Welcome to life in software dev 2026, not so different from 1996

I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.

There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.

> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.

I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture

This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.

I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.

Every time you don’t write the script you lose a little of the ability to do so.

Just like if you don’t read you will lose the ability to.

These skills are not innate to us and can be forgotten over time.

I wonder if it will get to the point where people don’t even know what to ask for. Or how to judge if what the machine produces could have been better. Or if it does what they think it does.

> Just like if you don’t read you will lose the ability to.

This is wholly untrue.

Not wholly. It’s under study. I don’t mean in the sense that you can’t read words anymore. I mean in the sense that comprehension and attention go down.

Okay but notice that “Losing the ability to” as-is is not even in the ballpark of “comprehension and attention go down”, we are not mind readers..

Joke's on you, I never knew how to write bash.

Yes, sadly, coding is a skill that can and (before long) will be forgotten by all but a niche dedicated few. It will go the way of assembly language, smith-ing, weaving, bread-baking, meat- / fish-gutting, hunting, remembering phone numbers, driving manual (and, before long, driving in human mode), hand-writing, horse-riding, wood-chopping... you get the picture. The price of progress!

...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?

For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.

It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.

> It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor.

Well, yes. For humans, the "this approach sucks" voice is still very separable from the thought process that just figures out the syntax and algorithms etc. The important thing is whether the overall system has this feedback and that it's having the desired effect. Better harnesses are progress in the same way that more capable models are.

And yeah, there's a wide range in the standards that programmers hold, in practice. Plus they don't at all agree on what's "better" than which.

Regarding the "this approach sucks" voice, there's an important difference between humans and AI which I've noticed and which I didn't explain well.

The general human approach to programming at most companies I worked at prior to 2024 was to head off in vaguely the right direction and refine the approach as we went. There might be a design and a plan, but at some point we just winged it and fixed our work after the fact.

This seems to be the worst way of getting an AI to do anything. They do better if they can one-shot an implementation from a clear spec then only need to fix bugs. Better models can handle a less clear spec but they still can't really iterate in a major way. To have an AI model build a bigger thing, you one-shot increasingly detailed specs and decompose them into smaller ones.

I can only speculate, but my guess is that this limit is pretty fundamental, yeah. However capable the models get, they can't read your mind. The kind of iteration you have in mind is difficult because they don't have a basis to iterate upon; to the extent that they could pretend, that gets into what people have been calling "taste".

And even if they somehow got better taste, it wouldn't be your taste. If that were acceptable, why bother prompting anything in the first place? At that point the system might as well choose its own projects entirely. But I don't think humans would want to live in that world; even if not paperclip-maximized, we'd eventually become an underclass.

That's assuming basically unlimited capacity for the models to get more powerful. If there are limits (and I hope there are!) then it'd be even more certain that projects continue to require human guidance.

But even despite that, I hope I don't sound AI-psychotic if I suggest: the models are capable of at least assisting with that spec-writing and decomposition.

You two are talking past each other. At a lower level LLMs can write better code than humans. At the architectural level they make a mess.

The industry is in a desperate race to throw away what little quality it had (could you imagine if other fields of engineering had catastrophic failures at the rate software does?) in favour of "look at all the lines of code I generated today but don't actually read them please". It's always been a fad-heavy field, but this time it's really gone fully off the deep end. The whole "it's better than me" is just re-asserted endlessly. Nobody even pretends to care about evidence. I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now. The zone has never been more flooded, I think.

> I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now.

I completely agree. The fact that the software from places that are very vocally pro-AI (microsoft, salesforce, etc...) is still so full of bugs is really contrary evidence.

> The whole "it's better than me" is just re-asserted endlessly. Nobody even pretends to care about evidence.

The evidence that the AI tool is better than oneself? I don't know about you, but I think I'm a pretty good judge of whether Claude Code is better than I am, having seen my own work and Claude's firsthand.

Then you have a skill issue :)

I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.

Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.

Exactly. Someone on HN put it really succinctly earlier in the year: "LLMs look like they are good at things you are not good at."

I think this goes a long way to explain why there is such a huge difference in opinion about the quality of AI-written code: Some people say LLMs write code far better than they could, and others say the code is always terrible and requires a great deal of fixing before it's acceptable. How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?

It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think your LLM is producing better code than you could produce... well, I might have some bad news for you about your own skills.

And the number of those people will grow as more people lean too heavily into AI coding.

In my case I am more than capable of producing better code than the LLM, but I have never been the fastest on my team. My development speed was acceptable because the quality and robustness of the output was worth the time that thoughtfulness took. I was also able to improve the comprehensibility and robustness of my colleagues' code during code reviews.

But in the new environment of LLM-assisted coding, the LLM produces acceptable code so much faster than I can write it. Just taking time to understand and retool the LLM's output means an order of magnitude lower productivity and it doesn't feel like that's acceptable in this era.

Folks I know are landing 10+ PRs a day and nobody is reviewing anymore, and these are not companies that would have been skipping code review 2 years ago. The whole culture is turning against taking the time to comprehend and reason about our own work.

Here's the thing, it doesn't have to produce code better than me.

There is a wide range of code that will do the same job. 15s vs 2h for code 60% as good? 10 minutes for code 80% as good? 10 minutes today and 10 minutes tomorrow to fix something that is 30% as good?

A lot of people are going to draw that line in a different place and now that people can make that trade off you will quickly find they will and it probably wont fall where you would like it to.

At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers. They don't pay you to write good code. Sometimes those two align and both sides are happy but they don't and often wont.

> At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers.

I wonder, given LLM's ability to "produce code faster" are they also producing value faster? I don't see it as an end user. Software is getting worse and worse, buggier and buggier, every release. I don't see it at my company either. We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.

> are they producing value faster?

I don't know. Maybe.

Software might be getting worse but we are not far enough along yet for it to matter. Most people use less than 10 websites total, the internet has shrunk. It will take a while for it to be obvious in the other backend services that they dont know they use. People are really tolerant of buggy shit and some software has already been basically wiped out. Dev tooling is a blood bath right now, things like tailwind and all sorts of little CI tooling is fast disappearing. I wonder what happens to the open core stuff like elasticsearch / gitlab / redis where they gate some features in the enterprise offering that could probably be implemented by LLM pretty fast.

> We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.

Right but did they start altering the schedule when AI entered the picture? We have barely just passed "tokens == productivity".

Also people tolerate quite a bit of buggy shit. Anthropic is down to two 9s (aha) and people still use them. There is a github ci failure post on here like every other day.

> Anthropic is down to two 9s (aha) and people still use them. There is a github ci failure post on here like every other day.

Anthropic and GitHub’s consumers are software teams. I wonder what would happens if something like SolidWorks was that unreliable.

The answer is no, at least so far. There's been a few big quantitative studies (CircleCI, a few others I can't remember) which show this - more code, more branches, more PRs, but actually less going to production. It's not even like a 10% increase on average or something, it's less! And yet anecdotally people say it gives you 2x, 3x, 10x speedups.

That's not even fully true - I can't draw but I can tell LLM 'art' looks like shit

Please have a look through https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... , and then keep in mind that that's from almost two whole years ago.

The strongest evidence for AI art being too uncanny is that people are still paying artists to draw cartoon porn.

Eh, my understanding is that the models are supposed to have guardrails against that. But also, getting better results generally requires refinement, a critical eye, and the skill to write out what's wrong. I'd guess these skills aren't common among that audience. But much more so, it likely defeats the purpose. The point is to be lazy (that's at least part of why people are willing to spend money on it).

On the other hand, I'd also expect the most degenerate among us to not care about the uncanny details. So who knows, really.

If you can't get it to output good code I'm afraid it's probably a skill or prompting issue. There are programmers that are almost certainly better than you that are using LLMs regularly to produce good code. Do you think the Linus is a bad programmer?

Linus has motive behind his position on AI. It's his operating system that's at the center of the AI revolution. The Linux Foundation is involved with several AI projects and has a lot of members that are all-in with AI.

He is not a programmer anymore. He admitted that he mostly reviews, tests and gives suggestion now. He still does a little coding, but usually small patch that hard to say if he is good or bad programmer.

I would say he is a good PM/visionary.

Wow you really think that it is a "skill or prompting issue" in a field where model capability is growing over time?

It's not a "skill or prompting issue", it's either you have a software factory or you don't and suffer the poor quality.

If it's a matter of whether the person using it is good at programming or not, then it's just the programmer programming with more steps.

I like to think I hold very high standards; I find that I can fairly easily get the LLM most of the way to where I want the code to be, but there's definitely a Pareto cutoff.

I do feel that Codex and Claude are both bad at something I'm good at: writing documentation. But it doesn't matter, because no human reads it. I'm spending a lot of time rewriting its output just for it to be piped back in again.

And that's just sorting out my self-image. Convincing someone who controls the pursestrings that I'm adding value was hard already.

>How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?

Well the Dunning-Kruger effect could certainly explain the cohort that thinks they're skills are amazing and unbeatable.

Thank you! It's made me lose a lot of respect for my field how credulous everyone is to any argument that starts out with a fig leaf of pretending to be on your side.

"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"

"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"

"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"

There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.

Yeah all the viral crap from LLMs are low quality rip offs of stuff that already exists. There is no innovation from what I've seen

Although "lies" might be too strong a word, I agree with you that the the AI-is-the-future people haven't done nearly enough to prove their claims. But that's nothing new in our industry, really.

I would recommend "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit for an insightful and entertaining overview of just how much of software "engineering" is based on "truths" that we don't question.

You’re forgetting the “economics” part of the argument. Let’s assume that you are actually producing better code than say Opus 5.5. You’re probably slower, you very likely have less “stamina,” and you probably cost more than 200x more per month than a $20 subscription.

You’d have to be pretty unbelievably stellar to produce code 200x better than Opus. I can get a lot of business value out of not-great $20/mo coding. The people writing our checks do not care about the same things we care about.

And I say this as someone who is very upset about what this stuff is doing to my career and hobby.

I don't get this. I work in a part of the industry where "passes 80% of the test suite" is worth approximately $0/mo, which is the best opus can do without a human hand holding it.

But I read the OP's argument to mean that your responsibility as an engineer is now to understand the tasks an agent can accelerate. And in many cases that might be the task that you previously enjoyed, like working out some tricky variable length encoding serialization scheme, or tracking down some nefarious race condition by stepping through code and reasoning. (The eureka moment is a big dopamine hit for me, dunno about you.)

If you can't get Opus 5.5 to pass more than 80% of your test suite, then you're probably holding it wrong. Not "holding it wrong" as in Apple's "we designed a defective product and try to put the blame on you", but as in *"this is an incredibly sophisticated tool which takes skill and practice to use to its fullest extent".

LLMs, even in a good harness, are deceptively simple, but in reality rather complex tools. They're good at grasping intent, but they can't read your mind, they might not have access to the full context of your business, and they require learning how to use them properly.

> "this is an incredibly sophisticated tool which takes skill and practice to use to its fullest extent".

In other words, hand holding.

No, not "hand holding". If you insist on anthropomorphizing the AI, "guiding it on a high level" would be more fitting. In a team of 1 architect and 5 software developers, Opus 5.5 + Claude Code replaces the 5 developers, not the architect. You don't have to "hold its hand" anymore than you have to hold the hand of a competent software developer — though you will have to figure out a workflow that suits you personally, including configuring Claude Code to follow that workflow (through skills, for example) so you can work ergonomically with it.

I have never worked on a team with one thinker and 5 minions, so, again, more evidence I work in a different part of the industry than wherever your line of thought originates.

> one thinker and 5 minions

Your error lies in thinking Opus 5.5 is equivalent to a "minion". The "5 software developers" in my example were meant to stand in for "reasonably competent, above-average developers", and not that the architect is the only one on the team who can "think".

Of course, it may well be the case that you are working in an elite sector of the industry where even the bottom rungs are filled by the top 20% of software developers. Possible, but unlikely, so I'm still leaning towards "you're holding it wrong".

"an incredibly sophisticated tool" it's matmuls that generate logits

No, your argument is literally backwards.

Opus has to be 200x worse for them to sell that subscription. If their AI is as good as they claim, they should charge way more, like one dollar less per month than a human developer costs.

> If their AI is as good as they claim, they should charge way more, like one dollar less per month than a human developer costs.

Only if they had a monopoly, which they thankfully don't.

>I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.

Yeah and this is what pisses me off about the software factory deniers. Without the software factory to guide the agent and reject its code, how exactly is it supposed to do better than an experienced developer who already internalized the company workflows? All the Agent sees is its context window, it's not a fully formed human that can learn the workflow over time.

If I guide the Agent file by file and function by function, then review and reject the code, the code quality becomes reasonably good, but when I let it do whatever it wants, the code quality reaches all time lows and it just compounds on itself.

I also noticed that the code quality heavily depends on the underlying software ecosystem with Javascript often having the worst code quality because it presumably got trained on minified code as well.

Agent harnesses do not solve software development in a hands off way. You still have to baby sit them. Every single time I use an auto review based workflow (aka vibe coding) it just doesn't work.

As someone whose whole identity was built around programming I mourn it daily. But I do think it's wonderful that people can realize their ideas now. E.g. I've seen a lot of vibe coded retro games lately, and while they're clearly lacking craftsmanship in some areas (e.g. not crunching your binary, bad looking AI load screens, & just a general lack of polish) I have to remind myself that these games probably wouldn't exist without AI, and TBH some of them are not half bad.

Genuinely asking: what are some of the not-bad ones?

I really enjoyed Lemans 2: https://zeroglabs.itch.io/lemans-2 and I thought Hot Shot Pool isn't great but not bad either: https://j5-2026.itch.io/hot-shot-pool

I’m resigning myself to similar feelings. Mourning the loss of programmer and code writing as a practical thing to do (or encourage my children to do), while accepting this next phase of technological advancement.

Most programmers probably don’t care about programming. There has been a never ending stream of libraries and frameworks to allow programmers to do less of it.

But it’s not stopping. It’s not slowing down. I don’t have to like it, but I’m not going to have any impact on the transition.

Yep, there's no stopping automation. I guess there are many archetypes: architects, builders, mentors, etc. I fall squarely into the "tinkerer" category. I like to take things apart to understand how they work, and then put them back together slightly differently. I don't want to ship a product that makes me a million or cures cancer. Those are excellent goals for someone else to pursue. For me, it's never been about chasing the latest trends, having the best job title or biggest salary, etc. It's always been about learning by doing, and it was rewarding to get paid to do that. I guess in future that won't be an option anymore as agents shit out metric tons of code in minutes and I just kind of "manage" them?

There is a serious oversupply of games. the problem is giving visibility to good games.

I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.

And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.

At that point it’s probably worth taking a more mainstream hobby like music or dancing, you’ll have a much bigger community of passionate folks. I suspect that will happen to programmers as a hobby folks too, they might discover they like playing music instruments instead.

Actually laughed out loud at the idea of a bunch of stereotypical programmers going to a dance class

The new learn to code haha! I personally find dancing to be the hardest of public hobbies to even think about doing, guess I'm too shy

Richard Stallman, one of the most stereotypical of programmers, was fond of Bulgarian folk dance.

I've tried (more than once) to learn salsa, I did about as well as most white male programmers do at it. :P

Not to mention your friends still enjoy receiving custom made knitted stuff as presents, or your neighbors if you see someone struggling. Or donate it somewhere, or put it in a display shelf to be reminded what you can actually do. Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)

> Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)

One step closer to the matrix. Send the white rabbit over, I've got your floppies ready to go. No ai, and developed without an active internet connection, so you can listen to music safe in the knowledge that your music isn't listening to you.

It's just tough to hear a mainstream "impactful" line of work be compared to knitting and sewing. Say what you want but people thought that their work was necessary to the advancement of society, or at least something bigger than themselves. Whether you agree with them or not, reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.

Sewing had been a relevant skill for 10s of thousands of years. Programming has been relevant for 10s of years.

ok and? both are allowed to suck? most people have lived for 10s of years not 10s of thousands of years so it's not like that "ancestral memory" matters anyways.

I feel like this belittles knitters and sewers!

There's also a tension in your comment. Are we prioritizing "advancing society" or programmer feelings? If it's the former, then it doesn't matter if AI is better than humans, whatever moves us forward faster is better. If it's the latter, then we're talking about holding back progress for the sake of a programmer's feelings.

For the record, I'm a lifelong programmer who loves AI because now I can experiment with new ideas at a scale I could not before. I feel zero loss. In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.

I'm just saying that before programmer feelings used to be loosely aligned with advancing society: fun work (for some people) was useful work. Now that's starting to be decoupled and it sucks when your choices are hate your job and contribute or do fun stuff and don't contribute. Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced, but for people who like their work as it is right now it sucks.

I'm a programmer and I'm having more fun than ever thanks to AI. I do think a lot of programmers are pretty conservative by nature, so maybe that's the group that's struggling more. If I had to wager, I think the camp is split between those who spent a long time in university vs self-taught hacker types (I'm the latter).

Fair enough. I don't mean to speak for all programmers (I'm not one). In fact I'm an academic so that's probably why I'm upset.

I just don't understand how it can be fun to commission work from Big Tech

I'll take open models any day of the week. We're almost there but they're not quite good enough yet. Re: fun, don't you have a backlog of incredibly weird experiments and projects you'd like to build? I did and now I'm building them, it's very fun (and educational).

The people who spent a long time in university are actually better off than the self taught hacker types and this has mostly to do with the fact that so many people go through university without learning how to program.

University is not easy, so how did they skip the easy part? How did they get good enough grades everywhere else to pass?

Turns out: They must have done something that has nothing to do with programming but it is still computer science. What was it? What did they learn???

I will say, as a mathematician who likes to make simulations, this part of GenAI has been a boom.

At the same time, I do wish it wouldn't do my proofs as well lmao

> Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced

I don't agree. There are many creative and useful fields: engineering, law, finance. And others that don't require as much creativity but may be enjoyable due to social factors: medicine, teaching, emergency services.

The dilemma that people have faced is that they don't want to do earnest work, but still need money to live. There are enough types of work that are useful and stimulating in different ways that everyone should be able to find one, so long as they are given opportunities as children (we do a decent job of this in the developed world). At least, that was the contract. Many fields, not just software, are facing existential crises.

I guess when I said what you quoted, I meant for most people (developed and developing world) throughout history, or at least as long as "work" has existed.

Sure, life sucked for most people for most of history. Can't contain my excitement about the anticipated mean regression.

I find this comment fascinating for a few reasons. The first is that it has the underlying assumption that all "progress" is good (regardless of what we're progressing towards). From my perspective, it seems like most of the progress being made is towards bringing about a sort of techno-feudalism and environmental collapse. Maybe a little bit less progress would actually benefit humanity?

The second thing revolves around this:

> In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.

This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

I think progress is inevitable. Sometimes good, sometimes bad (in my perspective). I love AI but I don't like the eco-damage required to power it (not just water/electricity, but rare earth mining and the human rights violations that go with it). I don't think you can go backwards though.

I was just pointing out the logical tension in the comment I was replying to.

> This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

I have dozens of extremely nerdy projects going thanks to AI. I wouldn't have had time for any of them because I was too busy making money to spend 100+ extra hours programming my wildest tech fantasies, but now that's possible!

AI also makes it possible to do hardware programming, reverse engineering (when Anthropic isn't censoring itself) and all manner of other geeky pursuits.

Sure, I agree that progress (towards something) is inevitable. But in the dichotomy presented ("progress" vs. "programmers feelings"), I took progress to mean "the things we're currently making progress on [with regards to AI]." Which I would say are largely a wealth concentration machine, and will probably be a net negative for humanity. To more directly respond to the original question of "progress or programmer feelings", I would ask why we can't just do something else entirely?

I'm genuinely happy that you're having fun with it. I can't get over the feeling that _I'm not building anything._ To me, it seems like hopping on an IRC channel and copy-pasting code from a greybeard instead of writing it myself. I just don't find that satisfying at all.

You clearly don't care about the eco-damage or else you wouldn't be using Big Tech's LLMs lol.

And let's not kid ourselves, you aren't programming anything. You are paying Anthropic to brute force the code for you with their supercomputer which was only built thanks to the rare earth mining and human rights violations you claim to be bothered about.

There is truth to what you're saying. I desperately want local models to be powerful enough to use and I'm sure they will soon enough.

> From my perspective, it seems like most of the progress being made is towards bringing about a sort of techno-feudalism and environmental collapse. Maybe a little bit less progress would actually benefit humanity?

I'd argue you're conflating two independent axis: technological progress and societal inequality.

AI is useful today and is getting more powerful and efficient. This is obviously great for humanity! It's enabling discoveries that were previously out of reach, and allowing us to accomplish the same amount of work with less effort.

AI is also generating massive amounts of money for the wealthy and powerful and increasing inequality. This is not great for humanity!

I do think it's important to keep in mind that this centralization of power and wealth is not caused by AI directly: the pattern exists whenever there's a desirable but scarce resource. The same argument that AI is increasing inequality can reasonably be made about concrete, steel, and steam engines. The problems caused by AI are really human problems at their core. It's possible AI could even help us fix them! (I'm not at all hopeful.)

LLMs haven't enabled any discoveries that were previously out of reach. If you disagree, name one?

>AI is useful today and is getting more powerful and efficient

No, it's getting less efficient at an exponential rate without proportional performance gains

>do think it's important to keep in mind that this centralization of power and wealth is not caused by AI directly: the pattern exists whenever there's a desirable but scarce resource. The same argument that AI is increasing inequality can reasonably be made about concrete, steel, and steam engines.

The goal of these LLM companies is to funnel all economic activity through their models. LLMs only exist because of how they strip mined human work without consent or compensation. I.e. LLMs do directly cause the centralization of wealth and power by how they were designed and how they are meant to be used.

> LLMs haven't enabled any discoveries that were previously out of reach. If you disagree, name one?

While not an LLM, protein folding is now often done via transformer.

> No, it's getting less efficient at an exponential rate without proportional performance gains

AI is expanding in both directions. Sure, it's eating the world with its compute demand and the bitter lesson bites, but we're also seeing drastically improved efficiencies employed alongside. The cost per task is dropping fast.

> The goal of these LLM companies is to funnel all economic activity through their models.

That's what all companies want, AI or otherwise.

No arguments here on the ethics of AI companies though.

You can argue the degree to which they influence each other, but technological progress and societal inequality are definitely not "independent axis".

We live in a capitalist society, where human (intellectual) labor has immense value and grants social mobility.

Take away intellectual labor and society becomes inherently less equal, i.e. feudalistic.

> Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

They have a hard time dealing with those people that tell them their ideas are bad, unethical, or illegal.

Now they have their Fisher-Price steering wheel hooked into the drive train of the business!

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-08-18...

>impactful

Programming is the art of automation, and is being taken to new levels. It'd be quite damming to the field if a substantial % of the world's output over many decade hadn't brought us here, tbh.

Were builders crying when the Hagia Sophia was built? Projects come and go, nothing is forever.

I don't understand your last part about the hagia sophia

interstingly i think what you are talking about is pretty apt, but not the way you are framing it. knitting and sewing were impactful things in their time; clothing has been something humans need for a long time and more skilled craftsmen were able to produce hgiher quality garments. new techniques increased durability, wearability, comfort, etc. machines commoditized that and made it mich faster to produce garments, so turned these into hobbies and the odd artisan fpcused and made new improvements, but not as often as before.

programming will likely be the same. fewer people who care to be craftsmen, more hobbyist, a few artisans who really dig deep and make new patterns (we still dont see AI sampling out of distribution).

>reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.

this is your personal feeling. they never had anything in the first place, just that the market was valuing a certain skill for what it could output. the perspective you are posting is purely a construct.

Sure it is a construct (it's how I feel at least).

I didn't mean to say sewing and knitting weren't impactful - on the contrary, they are analogous to programming: they were impactful but now they're basically hobbies. Maybe there are more developments left in the clothing making process - not sure.

I think you're undervaluing the skill and technology behind clothing, as well as the impact of clothing. But that's probably a reflection of how technology has allowed us to take it for granted.

for sure but the point is that sewing isn't really necessary anymore. if all the knitters disappeared tomorrow, the majority of society wouldn't feel it . If (say a few years ago) all SWEs disappeared, that would be a problem for a lot of people. The feeling of impactfulness is gone when things are reduced to a hobby.

That may be true today; but the trend is towards that no longer being the case sometime in the not too distant future.

yes, that's my point.

it's like how I can still get a typewriter and use it for the experience, or like how I could write ORM scaffolding by hand or just let the code gen write it, I see AI as nothing more than a keyboard extension, the amount of freedom you give it depends on the instruction/prompt

It also ignores the fact that among fashion enthusiasts (hardcore consumers NOT producers) handmade and artisanal clothing is generally preferred.

The percentage of programming work that was advancing society was very, very small.

Knitting and sewing were "mainstream impactful work" for a long time, much longer than programming was.

There's still a big ecosystem of people selling homemade sewn/knit products online, selling at craft fairs, selling sewing patterns, running classes, etc.

Even in something as heavily automated and mass produced as clothing, there's still a market for smaller scale, higher quality products.

As a sewist, when I sew things, it's also because the mass market doesn't make the exact thing I want. The software mass markets, both proprietary and open source ones, has also failed many consumers. The developers in Adobe tells me to pay $20/mo for PS, while the developers in GIMP takes 20 years to implement proper text outline. What is the point of enjoying how the software is made if people don't get to use it for what they want?

>Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.

These skills are all less valuable today, btw, along with roughly anything that would have allowed someone to thrive economically pre-2025 in spite of occasional accusations of high-functioning autism.

The issue is not that programming is getting automated. The issue is that the only skills that retain value are in low supply among programmers - and every other career you've considered retraining for.

Great time to be in sales.

> Work is not life.

Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.

Yeah, it's kinda hard to separate "work" from "life" when even in saner working conditions you spend a third of your day at it. And if you're anything like me, you spend the other third trying to mentally recover from the misery it's causing you.

Besides the fact that other careers are also hosed

Anyhone who tells you things like, "what, you are still looking at code and care what it looks like?" just exposes themselves as a supreme twit.

Yeah I don't understand that attitude. There are so many people on twitter who say things like that or "X industry is cooked" etc. All pushing that narrative hard. Why are there so many people pushing it so hard like that? Are they all under the influence of the big labs and it's all guerilla marketing? Are they bots? Are there a lot of people who have drunk the kool aid or suffering AI psychosis? Normally when new tools come out this doesn't happen. I can only think of a handful of times where I've experienced this in the past where someone has pushed something on me really hard (Ruby and Rust spring to mind).

> Normally when new tools come out this doesn't happen

Normally, such new tools weren't a perfect fit for automating shilling and didn't involve trillions of dollars on the line.

There are a lot of people out there who really just don't like programmers, and would like to see them have less influence.

I don't mean that in the sense of "the world is against us". But the Googler walkouts from yesterday years were pretty embarrassing for a lot of executives and MBAs.

The culture has also never been kind to people in adjacent professions. I've met many designers and PMs who feel programmers are difficult to work with and walk over everyone else.

I think there are a lot of people out there who got one reason or another are excited that programming is now more accessible without the programmers.

There's the more positive angles as well, such as small businesses who've struggled to afford bespoke software. Now it's available to them cheaply, or at least cheaper than before.

This stuff isn't just a tool to make a carpenters life easier like a bench saw. It's available to everyone who's wanted a new wardrobe without the time and cost of something bespoke or hand made. AI is IKEA flat pack furniture. Cheap, easy, and surprisingly good.

The psychological explanation is found in the age old fable of the fox and the grapes.

Because the fox couldn't reach the grapes, it dealt with the emotions of failure by declaring that the grapes were not actually worth having, and so not reaching them was actually a kind of success: dodging the disappointment of making even more effort to get to the grapes, only to discover they are inedible.

In the English speaking world, we have condensed that lesson down to just the two words: "sour grapes". When it's obvious someone is coping with cognitive dissonance in that way, we say, "oh, that's just sour grapes!".

Someone who has given up on themselves as a developer because of AI just declares code, and caring about code, to be "sour grapes", so that they have a rational explanation for their abandonment of code and coding that doesn't feel like a personal failure.

"sour grapes" is related to "burning bridges". When people are forced to adapt to something new, or even do so willingly, the weak-minded ones feel the need to disparage the alternate reality in which they continued with the previous situation or way, along with the people who still continue that way.

Some immigrants slag their country of origin. It helps them live in the new one. The government in the old country is corrupt. People are assholes. It's better here, now. Everyone is nice. I like my new life.

Or, have you ever seen this:

"I'm leaving the community of this programming language and won't be making much use of it any more, even though I was a core developer. Here are the 17 problems with it, which, believe me, is not easy to say ... "

To be fair though, the vast, vast majority of software developers out there are working on CRUD and line of business apps that a) change all the time, b) are probably irrelevant a year down the line, and c) just aren't really sophisticated at all. There was never really a need to have finely crafted, artisanal code in these code bases, but it was something developers enjoyed doing, so they did it. Yes, sure, maintainability, yada yada. For most code out there, that never mattered anyway.

So AI is kind of just bringing that to its logical conclusion.

> There was never really a need to have finely crafted, artisanal code in these code bases

Oh if we only had a middle ground between hitting the slop button versus hitting every key manually.

> Yes, sure, maintainability, yada yada. For most code out there, that never mattered anyway.

I’m so glad we have an expert who knows what’s best for “most code out there” gracing this thread with his presence.

Do we have that middle ground? It seems like something many people are desperately looking for, but are not finding right now. I think we’re all open to your solomonic wisdom, if only you’d share it with us instead of making snarky remarks.

> Work is not life.

When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.

I agree. I have several thoughts on this.

The more I use AI at work the less I have to "think myself", which should mean I have more mental capacity outside of work, right? That isn't the case. Because the task I "hand over" to Claude (I never really hand stuff over, but I usually work together with Claude to help me understand problems) doesn't magically disappear from my cognitive load.

So when I leave work now compared to 5 years ago. I have done more stuff, but my cognitive load is higher and it is harder to unwind than it was 5 years ago. Which makes me more tired. I wonder if is this the general experience? Or am I doing something different.

One difference I can see is if I was already a grandmaster in my field, and AI was literally only doing stuff that I already know exactly how works, then I would have less anxiety.

The point is that work isn't the meaning of your life or your self-actualization. Not that work is what you sacrifice most of your life to in order to make a living or fund something else you actually want.

Programming is still fun, at least if you are solving real problems and building real products.

The part of programming that sucks the most is untangling ambiguity. In my current app I had an ultra simple proxy convention, but it sucks. I have since settled on a different single convention to cover 6 different scenarios of traffic redirection, but it was a challenge to distill simplicity from chaos of the wilds and write all the various tests. It’s moving forward faster now but it was like starting over to get this rolling.

What I find is fun is building things that solve real problems I have. Then my problem is solved, I am paying nothing for it, and I can extend it however I want for any reason without downstream restrictions.

There is so much AI still cannot do in software. If you ask AI to build a faster WebSocket solution, for example, you will get more of what’s already there. I have a WebSocket library I wrote myself 4 or 5 years ago. I thought it was fast, turns out it wasn’t. I wrote my own perf tool for it and had a defect in the perf tool that spit out wrong results, but that defect showed me where the performance bottleneck was. Now my library is 40x-100x faster than other WebSocket libraries. I did use Claude to analyze my earlier perf bug, and it made the same mistakes I was making. If you want to go faster than popular battle tested solutions you have to be original and AI just isn’t quite there.

> The part of programming that sucks the most is untangling ambiguity.

I think it could be argued this is exactly what programming _is_.

I very much agree. I've been describing programming to non-programmers as variations of "taking a problem and describing a solution to it in extremely literal step by step directions" for the last 20 years. Of course things like UI and API design are super important to good code, but IME a good interface requires untangling the ambiguity too.

Those types of articles make me wonder - is it specific to current US-based software companies culture to be so much involved in AI? I work for in central-eastern Europe and AI has changed the way I code, but not to an extent that I don't ever manually write code anymore. I don't want to sound patronizing, just a genuine question, cause I have a disconnect with what I'm reading on HN and what I see on a daily basis.

It is a reflection of Bay Area tech culture, which dominates internet conversation and somewhat unfairly 'represents' US or global tech culture as a whole.

For companies in this bubble creative destruction is the order of the day and this manifests in me-too behavior from executives coupled with breathless enthusiasm for new technologies. It can often be excessive from the POV of an outsider looking in but not embracing the new thing fast enough could be the difference between filing Chapter 11 or having a trillion dollar market cap for these firms. All of this could occur within the span of 6 months.

Companies/Organizations outside this bubble don't face the same pressures (at least in a compressed timeframe) so they lag a little bit in responding to trends. But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming.

"But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming." - could you explain what do you mean by it?

Engineers in the US are by and large writing a lot less manual code now than they were 6 months ago. There are engineers who are not writing any code at all by hand.

Is this a skill that makes up the bulk of the economic value of a SWE? That's up for debate. Either way, it is a skill that commanded premium salaries not that long ago and was a non-trivial cost for any forward thinking technology company.

That has all changed very abruptly. It is _cheap_ now to produce source code. The expectation is that this will reduce the labor cost and make companies more productive i.e. productivity = output (software) / input (labor cost).

There are whole classes of companies whose service was to provide tools for SWEs (i.e. devtools) that have no foundation to build on now. The entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated (in part) on the cost of standing up a fit-for-purpose web app to solve some internal business problem being too high to be worth it for most large enterprises. Hence why they are okay spending hundreds of thousands or millions per year in subscriptions to these companies. That's changed now with AI being able to spin up entire products soup to nuts at the cost of a few hundred dollars worth of tokens.

In summary, the changes in how we work within the past 6 months to a year have been nothing short of seismic. If you or your firm are not experimenting with AI tools then it's important that you pay attention now because the chance that your business will be gone or your job will be eliminated has increased 100x. Whether you like it or not the job description for being a software developer has changed.

Same experience and I do work (remotely) for a US company. We aren't allowed to have non-local LLMs touch the whole codebase of the product so we still code many things by hand.

The "I haven't written or read code in a year" experience is not universal.

And I also have roughly the same approach for my own projects. I use LLMs to brainstorm design, algorithms, data structures, maybe have it spit out small building blocks in isolation, but I'm still very much in control and owning every line.

I work for a large company in NL, and we have offices all over. It's mostly a US thing from what I can tell, every time we have any kind of meeting with US-based people, especially if it's people from the SF office, they are rabid about AI to the point that they all sound genuinely batshit insane.The remainder of the company outside the US (95% of the workforce, with pretty much every single engineer being based in NL) don't give a shit and use AI in a reasonable way to enhance some work without all the insane hype around it.

It makes sense though, US workers have less protections and rights than across the pond so they have to bow in fear to their managers, who themselves have the typical Silicone Valley brainrot, and since we're currently at the cusp of a massive bubble pop they need to try their hardest to justify the infinites amount of money being spent on the scam

I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.

Writing code was the "downtime" for me, it existed between boughts of intense problem solving. With AI agents my time is shifting heavily towards solving problems and I have less downtime as a result.

I worry about burnout.

invent new downtime. that's what i'm doing by writing this comment.

Music is an excellent downtime.

Please don't tell me you still play with your fingers, rather than prompting AI to make songs ...

I learnt sheet music and played my first two piano pieces from scratch. It's the kind of meditative when you pay attention to learning little bits of it.

I sincerely hope you are joking

they most definitely are :)

You mean you aren't already using a Neuralink and letting the AI pull the music straight out of your head?

I have an electronic keyboard and an acoustic guitar near my desk. Great to slow down with either

Speaking of which, why is AI still so bad at reading sheet music? Only Astra seems to be doing relatively OK but is crazy expensive at around $3 per page in my experiments. All the others are just rubbish, at this task that I expected to be a solved problem, to be honest.

With LLM and current economic situation my job is doing 5 things at once and after 7:30h my brain is just in panic mode. On remote this isn't a huge issue but in the office (which I'm obligated to be twice a week) I just don't know what to do so I eat 3 meal 5min each pretending this is normal.

Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.

Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.

Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.

So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible

"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.

Yeah, if you're wandering in random directions all day long (20 PRs a day is rarely working towards a clear goal) then you're not going to get far. Taking some time to figure out where you're headed is probably way more beneficial in the long term. And it's also something LLMs suck at, they interpolate extremely well but haven't got a clue what's next.

That sucks.

Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?

It seems like your boss is doing work that doesn’t actually add value without you to review the code. But maybe the company isn’t set up to fairly evaluate the fact that review provides more value than creating code, with a workflow like your boss’s?

My boss is young, passionate guy overhyped with LLM claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

When I joined I thought this is peaceful place, after a month this changed tremendously.

And this is third job like this in a row so I have no hope to find anything even slightly as peaceful as 5y ago

Your boss is a dick, not a passionate guy

This was implied between lines

So he's basically signing up to do your jobs once you're gone? Or he thinks he's also expendable? Either one doesn't sound too good.

Get resumes out.

Since your boss thinks the LLM knows what it's doing, letting your boss approve his own PRs would be a win-win.

> claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

If my boss talked to me this way I would leave as soon as possible. Update your resume and get searching, I wish you the best of luck.

> claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

This is just what bad managers everywhere have always done: try to make their employees scared for their jobs. They usually believe it's motivating, or some such nonsense.

Watch some of the youtube videos about how to stop giving a fuck. And look for another job. There are plenty of jobs, even in software now, that have better management.

> Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?

I don't about the OP's specific situation, but there are definitely managers and management consultants that consciously try "expend" their employees.

Jeff Bezos is a famous example. IIRC, to avoid "complacency," he wants constant turnover of employees. Hire new people, burn them out while they're new and enthusiastic, then replace them. That's why it's occasionally leaked that Amazon consider such-and-such employment market mined out (e.g. everyone's either worked for them or is wise to their ways), so they have recruit further afield.

You're making me extremely glad that I didn't accept a job with Amazon. Life is way too short to live like that

Maybe this will provide some historical context. Capitalist automation is an anti-worker, anti-union ideology even though in theory automation is a good thing. When automation is used to reclaim time for workers or to increase pay, it is a good thing. When it is used to dispossess people or enforce work speedups, it is anti-worker.

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/automation-union-busting-product...

I don't know your full situation, but as someone who has gone through full-blown real burnout: it's not worth it. In this economic situation, we do need to grind to keep our jobs but if you're getting close to burn-out I would *strongly* advise prioritizing avoiding burnout.

I went from being a passionate programmer spending all my free time working on code, to be unable to write a single line for even my most loved personal projects for 6 months. Fully awake, in the middle of the day, I would boot up my computer and within 10 minutes my body would put itself to sleep. I'd wake up hours later with my laptop barely past the login screen. It took me 6 months before I could do personal projects again. 1 year before I could do professional work again. 2 years before I could juggle both. I've fully recovered (or at least I did right before LLMs hit the scene), but it takes a lot of time and I lost a lot of money not working for that year. If I could go back in time, I would have quit that job earlier because it is far easier finding jobs as a passionate developer rather than a recovering burnout.

I think the fun part of stuff you could do is setting up dev environments that are augmented. Not only the code creation part. But also the reviewing, testing , quality benchmarking and more. Arranging this is not easy and definitely an engineering challenge.

I am surprised how many people like the actual writing part, it always felt to me like doing micro in an RTS game. I know a lot of people love that too but I always played RTS games to feel like a general. But I'm still in the camp of reading every single change the LLM does, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds, but maybe that will end up being a waste of time soon. Like if the job ends up being just writing and reviewing MD files for the agent to digest I'll hate it too.

Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?

You probably micromanage the LLMs architectural choices. Thats actually a bad idea, you will probably get better results if you let the LLM decide the architecture and just tweak it where its assumptions are wrong. It has much more context than you in its codebase anyway. Then you won’t feel like a general more, but you’ll be much more productive :)

I have a mix of heavily reviewed and more vibe-coded projects, and the ones where I manage the architectural choices end up working a lot better, even just for the LLM itself. I can get features built much quicker with less tokens and bugs. Meanwhile the more vibe-coded stuff always takes longer and sometimes gets bugs

Edit: To add to that, even in my "micro-mangaged" projects, the parts I didn't review end and treat like a block box temporarily up being the parts that introduce bugs.

I’ve seen advanced models implement function calls in an interpreter by instantiating an entirely new interpreter to handle the call, so no I’m not going to delegate architecture to the agent. And no, it didn’t do that because it had more context.

In my experience LLMs tend to do a very poor job at architecture.

It's funny how differently people see things. I find reading/reviewing LLM generated code to be much more difficult and tedious that writing it myself.

I think the goal is to make it easy to review. Like if I hate reading the code it wrote then it’s also a code smell there is something wrong with it.

Sure, I guess, but I've yet to see an LLM generate code that I'd consider either easy to read or particularly well-written, regardless of who was driving the agent.

And even if it does end up being good code, if it's something non-trivial, having a reasonably deep understanding of what it's actually doing is quite hard simply from reviewing the code.

I just don't get how you can properly reason about the code if you're not involved in writing it, though.

I keep giving AI-assisted programming a serious try, but time and time I land in the exact same place: reading the code is more exhausting than writing the code, _and_ I end up with a far worse understanding of what is being built than if I had just written it myself. The fact that LLMs tend to write _way_ too much code certainly doesn't help.

And what makes me sad is that, if you follow this line of inquiry, you eventually realize that capital isn't challenging the value of humans _writing_ the code, but rather the value of humans _understanding_ the code. Because, as I've experienced many times when talking to those how have completely bought in on the hype, the answer is always to just "let the AI handle that." AI writing too much code? Have it summarize it for you. Your understanding of the code is worse than if you wrote it yourself? If it works, who cares!

And yes, I think we are well on our way to becoming Markdown jockeys.

How strange.

Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.

At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.

Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.

> "I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that."

That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.

But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.

> I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks

> AI is a "solution" to that

Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?

There's no question that you can have it implemented without reading most of the explanation.

Not necessarily one-shot, but still in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually wade through the implementation.

This was pretty much already the case half a year ago, with some more patience and tolerance for worse UX.

Nowadays we're getting to the point where the autonomous implementation can deliver UX like software produced by teams at Apple or Google and the like, and with optimized performance.

> At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks

Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.

Yeah, but therein lies the difference between coding as a hobby and software engineering as a profession. The latter tends to promote DRY overuse of dependencies, whether the dependencies were invented in-house or not!

> That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway.

Been working on my own ORM / Framework for 15 years at this point. Had a laundry list of things I wanted to finish that would have taken me another 3-5 years and it was done in about a month. Still controlled every function name, every preference, every comment, even went in and manually rewrote function names and adjust how it did things. At one point I had to manually intervene in an algorithm because the AI fucked it up badly. Most of it's first try was garbage. It's true. But still in the end I didn't really have to type it out. Sometimes you've been living and breathing a code base for so long that you can just skim the function names and their contents and be content. So that's what happened. It only took a few sessions and I was done.

So it's over. Not only is it "done" exactly to my preferences with exactly all the right method names and configurations I have always dreamed of. It also has 100% unit test coverage AND on top of that I have a suite of benchmarks profiling it against similar libraries in order to provide an honest assessment.

This would simply not be possible before AI. It's a little bittersweet that my ongoing project is "done" but now I'm building things with it. So it's not all bad.

I encourage you to stop calling it "vibecoding" when you are, I presume a long time software engineer, and shove your hand into the guts of the code and force it into the submission sometimes.

> just built everything else you needed on your own

Exactly what I'm doing. Made my own task manager. Have my own harness. Have my own fork of $browser. Whatever.

I'm okay with this.

> Exactly what I'm doing. Made my own task manager. Have my own harness. Have my own fork of $browser. Whatever.

Dude you didn’t build anything. If you hired some programmers last year, to code up your task manager would you go around claiming that you “built” your task manager? I don’t understand where this “I built this” comes from.

Your joy is that something that was uneconomical before is cheap enough for you to buy now, which is fine, but don’t go getting it mixed up with actually building something.

> You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own.

From my anecdotal experience it absolutely is more fun (I yearn for the early days when this happened more), but it's also extremely inefficient and slow when you need to ship a product, and increasingly difficult when your code has to run on high-level platforms (like the web, mobile, etc). Building frameworks and re-inventing wheels is one of my favorite things to do, but it rarely makes business sense to do that unless you're in a very niche space.

i'm the same way, and my personal projects are being created in a similar way.

i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.

it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.

for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.

> How strange.

People enjoy different things. Its not strange. Treating it as strange is kinda insulting, so I'd recommend that you rethink how you phrase this.

Totally agree. I found it insulting.

People enjoy different things. Its not strange.

Yes! Which means that the argument frequently seen here of "AI is terrible because everyone hates using it" is not valid.

I wouldn't say I've seen that specific argument. But insomuch as people say that, yes, its not a valid argument.

I've seen plenty of people here claiming things like "anyone who enjoys coding hates AI," "anyone who enjoys the process as much as the outcome hates AI," "anyone who's creative hates AI," etc.

It's all projection to make themselves feel better about their difficulty adapting to change.

Those are different statements than "AI is terrible because everyone hates using it" though.

It's the exact same function applied to a different argument: "everyone" vs. some defined subset of everyone.

I've always enjoyed hacking on random projects and AI does that really well. Every crazy idea I've ever had can be iterated on, and takes way less time now. Sure it's awesome that I don't have to spend hours throwing together a bunch of python and bash scripts, but it just happens instantly now. That's why I actually like Copilot autocompletion for side projects, because I can build something and still save a massive amount of time tinkering with limited blockers. I wish there was a better middle ground between "one shot this" and writing everything yourself.

There is. You don't have to use the AI for everything just because you could.

I've enjoyed the tinkering and building projects as well. Unfortunately that and some cozy coding are relegated to hobbies instead of my job.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)

My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.

I agree it’s very mixed, it strongly depends on what you are developing, how big and established your codebase is, how opinionated you are about simple vs overdone, how many subtle and nonlocal interactions your codebase has, etc. Plus the more experienced you are the more you are likely to reject the AI solution as not well considered, whereas to someone new may think it looks plausible and confident.

They're great and you don't have to review everything.

From what you're always commenting, I could believe that you were exclusively using Haiku 4.5, which would explain how the tool produces only garbage while the rest of the world pretends AI was great.

Just out of curiosity, do you use like Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and you still find the results inadequate?

they're about as great as an average developer. See rsync fixing their fabled code for some time now. They also have more output than the average programmer. so...

I’m not the commenter you’re replying to, but IME with the recent models (like Opus 5.5, Fable, etc) - yes, still inadequate. As a sibling comment states, it’s average code. Which also makes complete sense. That bar is too low for me

Yes, they're very good at writing code now. The problem is that we (or at least I am) drowning in code that runs and does something that resembles the problem you asked it to solve, but that something is frequently semantically incorrect.

Something has to give; the constant onslaught of slop and workflows changing every few months just isn't sustainable. Either we slow the fuck down and figure out what we're even doing here, or the AI improves so much that we're all out of a job.

Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

Thank you for a great, empathetic comment.

You sound like you're processing this well. I think I'm in the group of people you're talking about who aren't processing it well. What kind of conclusions have you come to regarding that list (what you work on and how, finances, kids, etc.)?

Observations:

* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.

* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?

* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.

* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.

* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.

* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.

Really appreciate it. You sound like a great friend to hang out with.

Agreed. This human is the ray of sunshine I needed :)

From a recent post here on HN, my agent stored it without the URL, it exists just as text for me to get philosophical with, I do that with insights such as above, so here is a quote:

Derek Thompson, in "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep": "If intelligence becomes less uniquely human, we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another".

Funnily my bot was called Cladius van der Bot, nice name ;)

Sure, but who's going to pay me for my capacity to relate? How am I going to convert that into rent?

It's about as specific as we can get atm I guess. I have no idea, I just know we VALUE human connection, there is unique human value in it. We value each-other.

Maybe we just sit around campfires and tell stories as the billionaires warm their hands on their burning data centers.

Don't forget that everything anybody owns is just a system we invented, my house, my garden, only a piece of paper that we all accept keep others from it.

We can reinvent ourselves. Idk, to me this is a comforting thought. But I agree it's still lacking. It's not simple, discussing things online helps develop language and vision around it.

Speaking of inventiveness: I was listening to a history of hip-hop, and I started imagining an alternative past, with LLMs arising in the 80s, and AI inventing rap and rap culture. That fantasy is instructively ridiculous, AI doesn't invent things, it isn't cultural.

Specifically, LLMs are stochastic creations which as such are strongly mean reverting in their generation. If you want to compose something delightfully new and different then an LLM is extremely unlikely to produce what you want, though it will fail quickly and with complete confidence.

There are whole industries around that. Getting paid to relate is basically what teachers, trainers, coaches, therapists etc. do all day.

People could learn things on their own but still pay teachers

Teachers get paid?

Trainers, coaches, therapists… yes.

Teachers do, in fact, receive paychecks.

i dont meant to come across as too harsh, but that is something that you will have to figure out. if companies are less inclined to give salaries for technical skills, then its on us to figure out how our current skill sets become marketable.

even the job of freelance engineer is customer relation. how good are you at extracting product requirements? understanding a clients workflows? these take relational skills and are often what freelancers are paid for, beyond the ability to produce code.

There are actually a lot of professions that either directly or indirectly rely on that. For example, therapists and social workers of many stripes, actors, writers, musicians, etc benefit directly from that, for at least some sub-disciplines/genres. Indirectly, almost every job where you interact with others directly to provide a service or sell a product (which is many, many things, and more than might first come to mind).

I doubt most people will be developing a rapport with an AI agent trying to sell you that contract at work, or helping you when you're irate and have escalated a problem a few times.

> There are actually a lot of professions that either directly or indirectly rely on that. for example, therapists and social workers of many stripes, actors, writers, musicians, etc benefit directly from that, for at least some sub-disciplines/genres.

All of those except for therapy are awful career fields. Musicians, actors, artists (outside the tip top of the field) are all the butt of jokes about how broke they are. Social work chases people out once they realize how powerless they are for such poor pay.

Therapist might make out well for a bit, but it seems like a loaded term these days .

> All of those except for therapy are awful career fields. Musicians, actors, artists (outside the tip top of the field) are all the butt of jokes about how broke they are.

If you're aiming for the top, sure. There are plenty of people who make a living doing stuff like that and are happy because they enjoy it. You're unlikely to be one of those people if you move to an area where there's an extreme over-supply and try to "make it big", or try to be "pure" to the art and eschew commercial options. e.g. An actor in LA, the starving artist in a loft in NY.

> Therapist might make out well for a bit, but it seems like a loaded term these days .

Loaded how? I was thinking of psychologists, licensed mental health professionals, physical, occupational, and speech therapists.

All of what you said is wonderful, and I want to particularly call out this:

    I stopped assuming I had to work the way people 
    said I should. [...] I get to own everything but 
    the typing that way

I think this gets to the heart of my disconnect with the "I miss coding" crowd. I still get to do most of the stuff I found fun w.r.t. creating software.

Typing the actual lines of code was fun, sometimes, but it was never the goal. I feel like I'm still solving the same problems.

I agree 100%. I did enjoy writing code, but at the end of the day, it's the building/designing/problem solving that I enjoy. Whether it's related to software, woodworking, small engines, etc.

A non-zero amount of people are preparing (or have already) to leave the industry entirely.

Even if one were to continue doing everything by hand, it will still be harder compared to others who aren't. As in, companies will come to expect more/faster work than you are capable of, so it still affects us old farts that don't want to change.

We'll find something else, sure, or just retire... but not everyone is/was ready to.

I'm not sad on a personal level per se, I can still be positive and look to the future, but I lament what we increasingly no longer have.

Very well written, thank you.

This is wisdom thanx.

I too have lost something I loved, I gained it after years of relentlessly focusing on maximizing what I loved and minimizing what cost me energy. And now the world flips on me.

The good news? I got pretty good at consciously finding the energy givers and drainers and optimizing for the givers, so I'll just keep doing that. I'll either start enjoying micro-managing LLMs, or find something else entirely. Or find that the LLMs need less and less micromanaging, or start enjoying whatever they need next year. (Point an army of agents in a direction?)

I came from the molecular biolab with Linux as a hobby, then when to software dev and infra. What's next ? Idk, I still love biology, keeping eyes and ears open...

> You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I've always taken the view that it was luck - lucky that my interests aligned with the market, lucky the market put value in what I am interested in doing, and lucky that I was given the chance.

I was never in it for the money, I was always in it for the enjoyment, and I will remain in it for the same thing.

The market for my knowledge and skills might come and go, there might have been a brief moment in history when someone like me could make a living off these skills, but like so many other creative careers that time was always going to be fleeting

Really wonderful comment. Thanks for sharing. I've noticed myself spiraling into doom-and-gloom scenarios about the future of this job (and therefore my future), and I've found it really unhelpful and really unproductive, in the sense that it sort of narrows my mind into a tunnel vision of decreasing possibilities.

The job description fundamentally changed to the point where we're expected to do something very different.

No amount of processing will move someone from ordering a steak to just enjoying their given peanut butter sandwich instead. They ordered the steak, and now the restaurant is telling us all too bad there's no steak anymore - eat your damn sandwich.

I don't think the metaphor works because a job is an agreement to exchange labor for money, not a service or a product that you purchase. But for the sake of argument, let's grant it. If a restaurant gives you a peanut butter sandwich instead of a steak, you can go to another restaurant that provides better service. Similarly, if an employee doesn't like the terms set by their employer, they can move to a different company, or start their own company on their own terms.

To quote the lovable DHH, "writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable activity"

To adjust the metaphor a bit.. the cows have revolted and we can no longer get any steak.

If writing code via AI is an order of magnitude faster there won't be companies hiring people who want to code by hand. If you try to start a company by doing so then you'll lose to competitors without that restriction.

The choices left are: be homeless, change careers completely or suck it up and do something you don't like after being career-catfished

When you think through the 'change careers' path it also sucks and might not even be viable for many

I'm lucky I like coding with AI.. but I have worked jobs I hate and it's hell, and there's no amount of processing it that'll fix it except getting out of the situation

I think this is basically the right attitude. The focus should be on what you really value intrinsically, and what changes you want to see in the world. Those determine the goals you set, which determine how you choose what to learn, what to work on, and what tools to use. The metaphor of a "career path" was always questionable, but even more so now. The most important skills are dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity and being able to adapt to new circumstances.

Am I insane? I could never imagine speaking to somebody like this in real life. I'm not saying this was ill-intentioned but there's something about this comment that comes off as REALLY weird to me. It's like religious/cult-speak.

It struck me that way as well, and I can’t put my finger on why

You're not insane. And if you are insane, you're not alone, because I used to get a similar feeling when I was first exposed to this kind of discourse. It creates cognitive dissonance in people like you and me, because you can clearly see that it was well-intentioned and grounded in the idea of empathy, but it ends up lacking empathy in ways that people like us consider important.

The comment you're referring to aims to be helpful and empathetic, but the fundamental problem with it is that it essentially dismisses the very real problems people are raising. It tells you that the change is inevitable and that you shouldn't and/or can't fight it. It tells you that what you're dealing with are your own feelings and, although they're "valid" (in the sense that it's understandable and human to have them), you need to work on overcoming them or finding a way around them. And if you can't, then you should either move out of the way of the progress or you'll remain unhappy.

It's an incredibly frustrating way of being talked to, one that I've seen managers employ quite a lot. I call it the "management aikido", because it takes your own impetus and turns it back on you, by reframing whatever issue you brought up to put the onus on you. Most of the managers I've seen use this technique believe they're doing a good thing by "empowering" you to deal with problems. What it does, in fact, is discourage you from raising issues in the first place.

On top of having the same "management aikido" vibe, @jvanderbot's comment ends up being "socially insensitive", for lack of a better way of describing it.

Over the course of history, we've seen great shifts -- typically tied to technological evolution -- that caused significant suffering to a group of people but (arguably) ended up being a net positive for our society. And when we look back, we inevitably feel a sense of empathy for those people and we recognize that what happened to them sucked and we express the hope that maybe next time we could do better as a society.

And then it happens again, like it's happening now, and we not only fail to do better as a society, but we talk like trying to do better is unreasonable.

That, in essence, is what makes @jvanderbolt's comment sound "religious" to you: the unquestioned assumption that what is happening is supposed to be happening and that it's you who has a problem that you have to work on.

Yeah I think you nailed it. I also think there's a degree to which we pretend victims of economic injustice aren't "real", for lack of a better word.. If the original comment was re-framed around vehicular manslaughter or rape, I think people could more clearly see that it isn't really empathetic. That's why the sheer reaction that it got from so many people kind of blew me away.

I'm definitely stealing "management aikido" by the way, thanks for that. :)

I also felt revulsion reading that comment.

This comes off as patronizing , as if there is only one perspective outcome that you must adjust to

You could divide "your future" into two paths, conservatism (not the US amalgamation) and "missing the times that'd been", or continue move forward and adjust as the world change, which it always will, both in positive and negative directions. Things are changing, this is hard to disagree with, even if people disagree how things are changing, most people probably need to rethink a lot of their assumed perspectives, as I too had to do, faced with what I believe to be new realities.

I don't feel like it's patronizing to remind people about achievements they've accomplished and that they're still a capable person. Nothing we say to each other here on HN should be taken as "This is how you must live you life" but more like "Here's is something I hope helps you, if not, no worries", as we hopefully assume good faith out of each other.

That wasn't my intent. The intent is that the prevailing pushback that coding is more fun now doesn't apply and need not. That OP has to come to terms with that they want from the new world, even though nobody can say for sure what they world is, other than "currently different"

The thing about this debate is that "writing code" is not at all an atomic task. You need to actually type out code of course, but also edit, think, analyze, design... (not meant as clear or non-overlapping categories; but you get the idea) and you might feel very differently about some of those things than others.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.

Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.

What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.

I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.

Yeah, they like writing code, in the same way that a blogger likes writing a blog post.

'love typing special characters into a computer' is not just a strawman, its rude and dismissive.

Maybe I took "the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)" too literally but quite literally, there are people who say this is the joy for them, the entering and writing of code, and shared this point of view on HN before, it wouldn't be the first time somehow said so. Maybe it's you who are being a bit insensitive here, as clearly some people do like that particular activity.

Regardless, I apologize if I misunderstood "writing code", I take that to mean "typing code" as the other stuff we do around is more "problem solving" than anything else, regardless of what the activity is (thinking, designing, troubleshooting, etc).

An interesting HN search for comments with "I love writing code" that has some false-positives, but has programmers stating clearly they like the action of manually typing code: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

No it doesn't, which comment? None of them say that.

Nobody enjoys anything that isn't problem-solving, with debatable exceptions for drugs and hormones. Fun is learning. The learning is either subtle and inexplicit, or partly subtle and inexplicit. You engage with a medium, you interact with the work, you make edits, you learn stuff. If you're shepherding an AI then you do all that on a different level, in a different way, a way that isn't better as such. You're doing a different thing. (Meanwhile, the AI doesn't have any fun.)

There can be something satisfying about typing on a keyboard just like writing (calligraphy) can be satisfying. For example, I love writing on a chalkboard. But it's not my primary reason to do what I do. So I think the people commenting will mostly be like that.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never really clicked with a "plan everything upfront, and then all that's left is writing the code" process

I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming

So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"

So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.

Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being

I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless

And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.

If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.

> And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.

I think that this really needs to be internalized by a lot of people. I really appreciated when my boss sat our team down and said "Yeah this is the new normal, and I know its not what you signed up for. Its fine to feel sad that your job is changing in such a dramatic way." No, it didn't help anyone actually adjust, but sometimes you just need someone to empathize and tell you its OK to feel bad about this when everyone around you is excited.

> If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.

I'm trying to replace it with "thinking through with AI" to limited success. A lot of people recommend having the AI "plan" the thing and review the plan, which is OK. I've also had it do a prototype and poked around a bit, summarized the learnings, and then did it again in an iterative manner without rough edges I've found. Whether you are given the space to do that is up to your org -- its hard sell to "do it again" but I've found that the second attempt leads to better results since I can prompt my way around the problems. Sometimes this also leads to a "Not even wrong" moment where I found out that I framed the problem wrong and the AI dutifully carried out doing the wrong thing.

I've commented elsewhere about this but so many are flippant towards your feelings and it's quite sad.

Comments such as "now that economically 'traditional coding' no longer works" get over it. Or a recent one "get over your anthropocentric view of intelligence, AI is here now".

These views (and many more besides) are short sighted, I do think anthropocentrically. The economy is a proxy for the lives of real people, the economy matters only because it deals with real people. People who feel, have agency, who live and die.

Two super AI's talking to each other maybe the most intelligent things in the universe but they don't matter.

Humans matter, human lives matter, human feelings matter.

I don't have a good answer, but a question of my own. I wonder if there are only the two extremes: write everything manually or one-shotting without looking at the code?

One-shotting without review is very quick but has its downsides: burnout, less understanding of the code base, less interacton with your colleagues, you miss the poor choices the LLM made so the code base might rot.

Writing everything manually is much slower and in some circumstances not what you want anyway.

Is there a middleground where you get significant parts of the productivity/speed increase but retain the most important parts of the manual process? I have found I preferred the copilot style of working, but the interface was not really optimized.

Instead of spewing out code at 20x speed can we settle for 5x and remain in control? That would be my ideal and more sustainable, right?

I wrote a thing about this (https://www.klio.org/theory-of-llm-dev-skepticism/) back at the beginning of the year, in a totally different era of AI dev tooling. What you're describing is what I called there "bottom-up" programming.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of first-person advice for you; as I say in that essay, I was also a bottom-up programmer for a long time and was deeply skeptical of top-down approaches. What changed my opinion and my practice was just doing things for long enough that I started having a sense of where things were going to go before I did the exploratory work to find it out, and eventually the exploratory work was unnecessary and I could create a basically-correct top-down design early on. I don't know how you build that experience without actually getting in the reps (which has some implications for future generations of developers, if we have any).

That said, my second-person advice would be to use the agents for the design part of things, too. "Here's the problem, how would you design it?" and then have a conversation with them, push back on the things that seem wrong, imagine reviewing this as a finished design from a coworker and seeing where it looks right and where it doesn't. Ask why it designed things a certain way; suggest alternatives for it to evaluate and think about what it's weighing. Basically borrow the robot's experience to augment and build up yours.

Actually, most of the stuff discussed in this thread are all ideas that those old-school software scientists already talked about long ago. Go look up the papers Bélády wrote back in the day.

Well, I can't speak for the person above, but in my case typing out the code is part of solving the problem. Plenty of times I've thought I had a great idea in my head, and then in the process of writing it out found better understanding and an even better approach. Some of that can still be emulated with LLMs -- you can read the output and have it tweak things where you find oddities, but its still not really the same, and I miss having that process of discovery and improvement.

Are you forced to use AI by your company? If so why?

> it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

Who is forcing you to use AI?

Yes, because you were silently fired as a developer and rehired as an AI manager. You can't compare apples and oranges.

It really depends, it seems. Through my coding career I always had interesting, and maybe a bit too big ideas for consumer software, bogged down by the fact that I like to code interesting algorithms but not business processes and interfaces. And in that sense AI is really a miracle for me - I no longer need to get bogged down by tedious work, I can focus on architecting the software and interesting algos (nothing seem too big nowadays) and have AI code it, debug it, and deploy it in a fraction of time it would take me if I had to code it entirely! Also, I no longer need to learn all these modern frameworks that keep spurring like mushrooms. In fact, frameworks are not a necessity when AI can vanilla JS everything anyway.

It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)

Good to hear opinion like yours, I am of the same opinion. I use AI in the same way as you describe.

Now I understand the meaning of the famous opening sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

> I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.

Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.

It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.

The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.

I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.

Part of the problem is that senior management in many organizations is so damn bad at, well, organizing the organization. Both the people and the software architecture. There really is something to an approach like everyone credits to Amazon: small team with a discrete product and proper architectural boundaries, communicating to other applications in known predictable ways with a proper process on both ends for making changes.

When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.

You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.

Yes; there are actually people out there who make disparaging remarks about looking at code and caring what it looks like.

It also leaves the part of reviewing the code (which I have realised is really quite different skillset from writing code - it needs a sense of something is fishy here or why is this even here or can't this look better).

It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.

The suggestion I encounter the most is that AI makes it redundant to take up programming as a hobby. or art. or music.

I’m in a similar boat, though I’ve found some solace in that AI development (for me at least) has also made other kinds of work more enjoyable. Previously, since I enjoyed programming, problem solving, and learning more than the end product, I tried to work on projects where I would learn as much as possible which had interesting problems to solve that would make me a better software engineer.

Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.

Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.

I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.

I'm not sure what this is all about.

If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, or a knowledge management system for agents, or ... the possibilities are endless.

Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.

> Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference.

That is 100% the difference. Most people working as employees aren't passionate about the company as an entity. They won't love your baby like you do. What they did love was taking your baby for walks; now they're left with just changing dirty diapers.

> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).

I have always been the opposite, despite mostly having IC roles in my career. Still, I don't enjoy the change, mostly because the UX of this tooling is absolutely miserable when you need to do anything serious with it. I am past the point where I thought it was user error and think it's just fundamentally baked into the ecosystem to be annoying to work with. At least in most management situations, the employee isn't going to gaslight you, question every tiny decision you make (or worse, subvert ones it finds more 'favorable' for itself) or just make up wild, easily disprovable bullshit in a constant stream of verbal fecal matter. I've worked with maybe one person that came remotely close to that and they were easily ignored. This stuff's persistent and unavoidable.

I am getting a lot more done, but I am a lot more tired.

Conversely for me AI is letting me focus on the part I actually enjoyed: organizing and planning systems, and powers through the parts which were just a grind to get there.

By far my biggest use at the moment is just getting all the software I use to function as I want it too.

Why not write the code yourself and use AI for everything you don't like to do? See what happens.

Not everyone has the luxury of having that choice. Cough cough AI mandates.

Are they specifically mandating AI for writing code though? Just use your AI tokens for the other parts of the job.

Yes they are. We just had a workshop where the managers previewed our “software factory”. A big pile of skills, hooks, CLAUDE.md files, an elaborate spec and test system based on many markdown files.

All features should now be created via this workflow. It’s basically a ticket going in, a few rounds of questions back and forth with the LLM, then waiting for an hour until it finishes.

Then having to read/review 2k lines of AI-generated code. It’s terrible.

Yeah that sounds awful. Sorry. I'd start looking for a new job.

Not looking for a new job in this economy though.

Theres still companies that dont touch AI at all.

It would be great to have a list of these companies. I expect they would attract excellent talent when they are recruiting.

I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.

I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.

And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).

And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!

Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:

  "Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
  around the starship shell.
  "Why, of course!" she laughed.
  "Then why do you do it?"
  "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
  for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
  on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
  I helped build that.
  The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
  that it was you who actually did it."
  
  "Hmm," he said.
  "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
  where a few other construction workers were standing, 
  pointing inside the model and talking.
  "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
  "Yes," he agreed.
  The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
  swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
  He smiled. "I suppose not."
  "You suppose correctly," the woman said.
  "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."

> excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)

AI excelling beyond a human at writing code is not an objective truth.

I would say even without AI, a manager telling a developer what to code or how to code, will never be better than that engineer themselves being the driver and the developer.

For me personally, quality code has a strong human component. Only I know what's best for the code, based on:

1. my deep understanding of the long history of the organization and of its mission and concepts 2. my intricate personal relationships with the users and the other developers 3. all of my hundreds of unique, personal experiences troubleshooting problems, which are always a combination of code and interpersonal relationships, the open source community, and opposing stakeholders.

Until AI becomes AGI (and that's a big if) and you can train it on 43 years of experience, it will just be an approximation of a true person's holistic engineering pedigree. It will always be asymptotic to true competence. It will always be second-best, even with a human driver.

I've seen takes on X like, "anyone who's coding manually these days is only doing it to be contrarian."

Seems like the economic premium on IQ is going down, which is unfortunate since one never had to work much for it.

> It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it, because that's not the point.

What do you say to someone that is bothered though? I don't know why it effects my enjoyment so, but it does.

As someone who has really struggled with AI recently, I actually think I have an answer to this part: understand the difference between art and science.

Now, I don't mean art as in pictures. Rather, I mean science is objectively correct or incorrect, while art is not. So things like does your code work is a science, and things like your design is an art. In regards to science, AI will do the same things as you, because there's only one "truth". However, in regards to art, it would never do the same things that you do.

One of my favorite games is Tunic. If the developer had tried to one-shot Tunic with an AI, it wouldn't have been Tunic. Maybe it would have been a good game, maybe it would have had a lot of similar ideas. But they wouldn't have been the exact same ideas. Tunic itself would have been forever lost.

So what am I trying to say? Find parts of programming where the path not taken matters. Then it doesn't matter if Claude could one-shot it, because it's one shot will be different than what you do.

Unfortunately, this doesn't fix all of programming. The more science-y parts of programming such as reverse engineering do get affected by AI. But to give you an idea, I'm building a programming language. I toyed with the idea of using LLMs. When I decided not to, I had a problem - my language had become too complex to do it without AI. So I sat down and scrapped the entire thing. Now I have a new programming language that's even better. If I had one shot it with Claude, I wouldn't have had this language. So in the end, doing it by hand mattered.

It's out of your control, there's so many things to get frustrated about that you have no ability to even alter. Worrying about that will get you no where, just focus on what matters and is closest to you.

Corollary: there will now be a new generation of programmers who will never know the joy of building, designing, or debugging a system by hand, using their own thinking in collaboration with other humans.

Just today I suggested to a very junior engineer (more of an FDE, really) to write a short design / implementation proposal on an infrastructure change that spans about 8-10 code reviews. He replied with a link to a short, Claude artifact, clearly written by AI.

It dawned on me: to him, this approach of offloading thinking and understanding to AI, from design to implementation, is totally natural. He sees nothing wrong with his job being reduced to a middle-man between more senior engineers and AI.

Send the coworker a few resources on this.

https://dontpastetheai.com/

https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read

That's optimistic in itself, because it implies that being corrected (assuming we are correct) will right his path to seeing the value in his effort.

A more concerning option is that he does see the value, but the temptation of the zero-effort-machine is too strong.

Learning to put in enough effort for engineering takes - took - years of education, where double digit percentages failed each year. Some of us barely made it through the filter. I have no confidence I would if I encountered it as a youth today.

You have no idea if what input he had to the AI, he might designed the entire thing. But go it to present it nicely.

So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.

Yes. There is also reason to believe that the ecosystem is on the path to migrating to one where human developers are an afterthought at best. In the current phase we have lots of more stuff in markdown and other human readable formats and programming languages for sure but there’s little reason to believe that they will stay that way as humans get further from the code in general and the primary consumers and producers are AI. It would be strange if it remains optimized for English-speaking humans for very long.

Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.

It's almost as if this problem was forseeable.

Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.

If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?

if you're code-golfing on a prod repo, i do not want you as my coworker. please add comments. make things readable.

Work always comes with bullshit. Its the nature of the thing. I don't think anyone was really getting code golf-style experiences at work, but they likely had enough positives that they outweighed the negatives, which resulted in net "enjoying" work. For a lot of people, AI removed a lot of the positives and left a lot of negatives, and some are still coping with that in one way or another.

I remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.

Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.

And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.

0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

I always wondered why since the introduction of EHR systems do I have to fill out 5+ pages of personal information and medical history every time I visit a doctor, as if they have absolutely no records about me at all?

Probably most of them. Software has been very bad for a very long time. AI lets us flood people with trash a lost faster. In the past, I'd have said the software industry was producing mixed benefits, some improvements and some regressions, but on the whole probably a net positive.

Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.

Interesting article. Another solution would be to try to reverse this trend, even the doctor in the article isn’t sure if things actually got better functionally by the end of it.

How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.

>People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.

And that's OK.

I really don't get it.

How should it effect hobbyists?

Hobby is by definition independent of being useful commercially or otherwise. It is an individuals pass time.

I still drive my motorcycle as a hobby. Being able to take a cab to the destination won't influence my decision to ride.

It should only effects the careerists, accerlating what's possible to deliver.

Right - I think a lot of folks who thought they were in it for the joy of programming are realizing that actually it was about the outcome after all. Maybe causes a bit of an existential crisis - you thought you liked programming, but now that there's no money or recognition in it anymore, not so much.

The amount of AI slopped code is infesting even the hobby communities. If you search something online you only end up in AI slopped blog posts that doesn't explain the actual thing. If you want to contribute to an open source project you now can't because the pull requests are full of sloppy AI generated code and the maintainers can't keep up reviewing or closing them.

There's always been an implicit pressure in coding in particular, that mixes "hobby" and "work". That's part of the problem.

A very large number of us fell in love with coding before we were taught - we self-taught, through magazine type-ins, early intro textbooks in school libraries, or perhaps the odd tutorial while trying to mess about with a myspace or geocities page.

That generation coded for fun. The itch that is scratched is the problem being solved, the cool little trick, the code golf or the figuring something out, or the new thing you just learned.

It just so happens, the market paid quite well for those skills, so we all got to do some version of this for a compensation package that could embarrass us talking about it at a family dinner with our parents.

And then, another generation arrived who saw that the career was well paid and that was the itch that got scratched. Except, for them, it didn't seem much like fun because what's fun about fixing bugs and figuring out class hierarchies and reading API or SDK docs?

I don't wish to generalise, but honestly: when was the last time you saw a programmer who started to learn it all at college or later, be really giddy about their work? They're here to get paid and to get the job done, they never really got into this gig for "fun", it just seemed a better option than becoming a lawyer or going to medical school.

I worked in one company where the divide was hilarious: older types hacking Ruby in vi/emacs on mechanical keyboards and wanting to code advent of code at lunch vs younger types who thought hoodies weren't workwear, "engineered" Java services in huge IDEs that they wanted to autocomplete everything, everywhere, and spending lunch talking earnestly about whether BTC was an investable asset class. OK, you do you, everyone can be whatever they want to be, but I know which one is more fun for me.

The real tension arrives when the industry - expecting us all to be super geeks having fun all the time - implicitly expects us to show up at interview with a) side projects and b) knowledge of cutting edge tech that we weren't exposed to at work.

The "hackers" (for want of a better word), will have side projects. The "engineers" (for want of a better word), will prioritise other things at the weekend like, I don't know, going to golf clubs or pilates classes. The hackers will play with tech more than the engineers in their own time, because it's fun, and push boundaries of their own knowledge.

About 10 years ago, there was active push back. "I shouldn't be expected to have side projects to interview at X", appears on social media. Sure, I can see that, spending time with your children does seem important, but, like, there's a lot of hackers who have kids and side projects, and well, are you saying they shouldn't be able to do this as a hobby as well? Or that you feel there's some lack of inclusion because you hate building software and they don't, and they might interview better than you? Well, OK... I guess...

Then, GenAI enters the chat. The engineers see promise - productivity rises per hour while the boring bit (figuring out how to build software), melts into the background and they can spend more time talking to people. The hackers don't like talking to people quite so much and see the fun bit melting away as a real problem. But also, this is the cutting edge stuff that they now need to understand a lot more as part of their hobby. And it's horrible.

And then at work, the mandates come down from leadership. Token maxing, leaderboards and monitoring of AI output, questions about why you're going about it the "slow way", when our competitors are not. For a whole bunch of people, that's a really, really sad decline.

Imagine if you were so into your motorcycle you had figured out how to get paid very well riding it professionally - perhaps as a courier for body organs or something - and then somebody turned up and said "nope, you're going to operate this automated delivery drone from now on, where you just type in the address and it does all that navigating and getting things where they need to be, and you don't. Oh, and by the way, motorcycles are boring and stupid and you shouldn't really ride them at the weekend either because drones are better and if you keep on going on about how much you like your motorcycle, we're going to judge you, OK?".

You'd feel pretty rotten, and mourn the loss of a corner of your life that gives you joy a little. Every minute you played with your bike (perhaps in secret!), you'd be thinking "should I not be keeping up with this drone stuff?", just as you had done the last X years of your career when a new advancement came you wanted to be on top of, except this advancement takes away the fun.

I say all this as somebody who studied software engineering, and who described himself professionally as an engineer for many years, but in habit, in reality, spent almost every day from the age of 11 hacking.

The pressure to use AI everywhere, to "keep up" with it all, it's horrid. I know people who want to just quit and go become farmers, because at least then they're not exposed to something they loved since their teenage years being destroyed by middle managers who resent them.

For many of us, this era feels like laying to rest a history of over 70 years. And it's sad.

So, some of us are going to huddle together around our memories and keep going, and AI can sod off (at least in our downtime), and we're going to remind each other of the fun and it being OK to hand crank solutions again for the joy of it.

My prediction is that it will take a while for the processes and habits to changes, but programming manually or at least reviewing code will become a niche activity, pretty much like building or maintaining mechanical clocks or old-school woodworking with hand tools.

Building software is hard for humans, managing the complexity of large projects has been at the frontier of our intellectual capabilities for a while, leading to well known issues in cyber security and exploding costs. At some point machines are simply better suited to the task.

I can't even count the number of times ideas from programming and CS have leaked outside its domain context and given me hints on how to solve problems in completely different domains in 'real' life. Just for that alone, programming is worth learning and doing.

I am also an AI-skeptic and don't fall for the hype. Sure, agentic coding is the new shiny, but AI has been around for some years now, and yet the results of AI-produced software are underwhelming (and require a lot of human handhodling).

Very much agree. I am very explicit about real life dependency management because of years of knowing (being forcibly taught) how important it is for my dev work.

The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...

I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.

I've been thinking about this a lot, as I'm sure we all have been.

3Brown1Blue recently posted an excellent video on how he's thinking about AI's impact on math, which of course is in a similar position as programming. One of the points he made was that machines' abilities to lift heavy things has no bearing on the value of exercise -- which is to say that, just because AI can now code/do math extremely well, that has no bearing on the positive effects (the "mental exercise") one gets from programming/doing math "the old way;" the same can be said about one's enjoyment.

The problem here, though, is that I used to get the enjoyment/"exercise"/upskilling/etc from the same 8 hours that paid for my life. Now, I have to squeeze that in _outside_ of those 8 hours. So AI has, very clearly and simply, reduced my downtime outside of work -- I literally have less time for non-programming hobbies and activities because of AI.

NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...)

1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798

Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.

Not really. Even with left-pad there was still some skilled work required. At this point my wife could vibe code an app or a website and it would be actually quite good - not the slop of 6 months ago.

Writing left-pad isn't the issue, the issue is that projects were importing a one-liner package and blindly using it, which requires no skill.

> Second, even if the package’s logic is correct, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that developers are taking on dependencies for single line functions that they should be able to write with their eyes closed. In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code. Hell, any of these would make a great code screening interview question to determine whether or not a candidate can code.

> Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming. It’s some crazy form of dependency hacking that involves the cloud, over-engineering things, and complexity far beyond what’s actually needed.

Obviously LLMs make the situation even more dire, but I think people are overlooking that the industry was automating itself out of programming as a craft even before them. It's just the automation involved reuse of the work of other humans.

Sorry but there's no way that assembling libraries - even stupid ones like left-pad (which I'll note was an extreme example) - is in no way comparable to just saying "Claude make this program for me", which is pretty much where we are now. My wife can do the latter but not the former.

This isn't just "a bit more automation". It's "now we don't need lift operators".

High-level programming languages, garbage collection, expressiveness, functional programming, code completion, jQuery, Wordpress, no-code solutions, Bootstrap.js, "batteries-included" SDKs...

Of course, prompting an LLM to one-shot an app is a quantum leap in comparison, but c'mon, the whole direction of the field is towards automation, abstraction, convenience. It's always trended letting the programmer write less code. Have to deal with less menial tasks. So LLMs are just the latest manifestation of that motivation. And, perhaps in a decade or two, something will come along to replace LLMs, and this conversation will happen again, except even with more desperation and despair.

But while your example exists, I don't believe that's how the industry works, yet. They're not just allowing laymen to one-shot their production software. Certainly some teams may be trying that, and some indie devs have made good money already selling vibecoded software. But I don't think the technology is good enough to auto-generate professional code at scale, without human oversight. Give it another eighteen months.

I got excited this week when I stumbled into something which is best communicated via code, but AI isn’t very good at understanding.

I needed to make a highly parallel image processing pipeline which interleaved traditional techniques and VLM use, as well as allowing speculative execution and backtracking.

Using AI, I was able to create a really nice custom IDE for this, along with the simplest possible representation of the high level processing strategy in Python.

Despite the high level code reading very simply (for parallel image processing with speculative execution), AI is completely unable to reason between it and what it is accomplishing.

I was thinking that once I made the problem “pretty” AI was going to steal it from me, but I actually get to program something for the first time in a year! Hooray!

I also did some distributed systems work recently creating a flexible sharded data aggregation pipeline but my AI (Claude Code) was able to do it. The prompts were very technical and I kept having to check that it didn't miss anything but it did a great job. It would have taken me way longer to implement by hand.

That said, it's true that all the default decisions it initially took were not good. I had to keep insisting that the solution should scale linearly with number of workers. With every additional feature or adjustment, it kept adding shared processing bottlenecks, even though it required less than 20% extra code to keep it embarrassingly parallel. And that's with my entire codebase designed to be embarrassingly parallel from the ground up.

I think there's definitely a weakness there. That said, I think this industry tends to shun embarrassingly parallel solutions; equating it to overengineering. Personally, I find embarrassingly parallel solutions more elegant and robust especially in terms of state management. Doesn't require that much additional work. Everyone seems to be on board with Functional Programming which also helps to manage state more reliably (and often helps make code embarrassingly parallel) but my impression is that just aiming for parallelism gives you the same key benefits as FP. Allowing modules to hold state isn't the problem. The problem is that state has to be handled carefully. FP is kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, IMO.

I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.

Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.

Last year I started at a new job and was at first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.

Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.

Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.

I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.

> AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself

How do you know that? Do you read AI code? I heard (DHH, Uncle Bob, my own co-workers) that reading the code is no longer an economically viable activity. And if you are not reading the code, how would you know what it looks like.

> reading the code is no longer an economically viable activity.

Yes of course. But sometimes, when no one is watching, you can quickly sneak a peek at the code changes. It's ok!

Oh, I read the code. I even write it, at the risk of losing credibility at work.

I claim that AI "writes 80% of my code". But realistically I am in the hot path of my agent ("cd repo", "claude", "do X", "fix Y", "no not like that"), and that's essentially equivalent to writing by hand. I am afraid others will soon see through my charade.

Personally I still try to read or scan the generated code and look at the implementation and many design patterns are recognizable and are almost always exactly as how it should be done. I must admit that there are sometimes small parts of implementations that look inefficient or 'weird'. I remember that one time it wanted to store data in some sort of array type in a database instead of a separate table. Asking why AI did that it also agreed that it was a what tricky/shaky implementation. I didn't trust it and with a single prompt the code is rewritten into a perfectly fine separate table implementation.

That's the reason why I still try to inspect the generated code to see how my problem was solved and if it reads plausible. There are also moments that I am surprised by the implemented solutions which look very elegant and "smarter" than what I could have come up. These are also the moments I learn from AI. I can even ask AI why it did things certain ways and it gives a nice summary of arguments. But I am often also critical towards AI if I am in doubt, resulting sometimes in a sort of discussion and sometimes I can convince AI (with more context) that the solution it created should take another route. It really feels like working with a really fast co-worker. And on top of that, I am better in writing up my thoughts to discuss things instead of talking with someone. Doesn't mean I don't discuss in real life with co-workers, but it is so easy to use AI for it too.

I wish there was I way I could forget this site existed so I would never go back here.

Same not sure for the same reasons, to me it all sounds like a big marketing campaign for AI coding. Everywhere I read I see comments bragging about that the quality of these products output is better than us or it is usually taken for granted. Not my experience so far and I'm on the edge of AI usage

Same. It also has a heavy liberal bias like Reddit.

Does anyone know any place of refuge?

https://stacker.news/ is a good one

I'm retired and I don't want to give my age here but I can see that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, and over the years I've created a growing list or projects that I've wanted to do. AI is letting me work on them, experiment, and most importantly see what's interesting and worthwhile to pursue without spending, or wasting, years going down rabbit holes that might not pan out.

What helps is that some of these projects are more data analysis than creating software, and the goal is an answer more than maintainable software.

I have found a different method of using an AI when I'm making a hobby project. I have convinced it to only give me enough information about a topic such that I can have a chance at intuiting the rest. When I get stuck, I ask it specific questions about what I'm trying to code, or standard ways of getting around errors I'm encountering or making particular constructs work. We have long conversations about the goal I'm after and what might be involved in achieving it.

I don't use any code from the AI, and I don't give it code to look at, other than as something I have completed in the past. I'm not asking for code review, and I'm not asking it to optimize things for me. This works quite well for me. I learn more, and I keep doing what I consider the fun stuff.

It is similar to asking the AI for tricks on getting through a particularly harsh level in a video game, or how to get better at certain actions when playing. I'm not asking the AI to play the game, that's the fun part. I'm asking it how I can get better at it myself.

Also, as an early gen-Xer, I don't need anyone validating my enjoyment of something, thanks. I'll enjoy it whether the author likes it or not.

I know several people who get immense pleasure out of programming (and some who derive a lot of pleasure from mathematics).

I think, in terms of that aspect, they'll be just fine.

But when it comes to people who do these things as a profession, they'll have to adapt to the norm or really risk narrowing their job prospects

(as a hobby. God forbid you enjoy it for money.)

This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.

The future sucks.

I don’t deny that there’s more slop than ever, but I would argue that this is a quantitative issue not a qualitative one, because frankly, the Internet has been drowned in slop for over a decade now. Those creative industries have had to deal with a lot of low quality content (some bot-generated even before LLMs!) for a while now.

So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.

The shit that sucks is amplified, and the benefit is that a narrow slice of people can make money out of amplifying the shit that sucks.

Thankfully, people are paid by the value they provide and not by the enjoyment they get out of their work.

AI will make things cheaper and more abundant - at the cost of a few people not enjoying their jobs. So what.

You people don't care about human mastery or excellence at all. So what if we produce more stuff cheaper and faster? That wasn't the problem. We're making it harder for people to get rewarded for genuine effort and dedication and in exchange for alienating us from our work we get a lot of lower quality crap. It sucks!

This is the kind of argument people make about furniture vs ikea and human made watches. This is not mastery, its just hobby/art. Human excellence is in abundance, not in raw dogging the most artistic Java class.

You could've made the same argument at any time in history because all technologies do the same thing. Things will go on, mastery will remain.

I'm not just talking about programming. If you want to give up doing your job to Anthropic and OpenAI, that's your business, just get the hell out of other fields that weren't asking for your help.

What's the point, if all that "abundance" does is make our lives worse?

It doesn't make all people's lives worse. It makes those people's lives worse that think their job (now redundant) was an artistic endeavour. The rest of the world gets cheaper things at affordable prices.

Except that the remaining jobs are the ones people hate. They're also the low earning jobs -- high earning jobs are the ones that are being downsized.

Investors I know are investing on the prediction that people will be less able to participate in the profitable parts of the economy in the future, and most transactions will be between businesses.

We're building a future for humanity where people are both unhappier and poorer.

I disagree, understanding systems and problem solving, understand technical capabilities, requirements and delivering a product is what always paid for by consumers. Paying programming labor was just a means to an end, removing that expensive and time consuming part creates a world with so many more possibilities.

A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.

Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.

It's a great future.

Cool, I don't care about any of the stuff you just said you shipped. I've got enough trash software in my life, and I'd pay to have it reduced. The things you listed are more stuff that I don't want to interact with.

I did not say I shipped anything.

With open source you can also have it improved, and have less trash software in your life.

Codex created a custom build of firefox with a feature I wanted (essentially the ability to override ssl dns like you get with curl --resolve option). Also, it was able to take apple-music-for-linux that I like for streaming apple music and update it so it would work again. There are incredible possibilities here.

And the downsides far outweigh the benefits. Your future still fucking sucks; it's just not good for humans to live in, no matter how many SSL DNS entries you override.

The person you responded to seems pretty content, saying it sucks is you projecting.

>Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint.

99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.

The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.

This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.

But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first and to a higher degree, and not the mechanical part. Old time artists (think Rembrandt) used to have make paint by hand, a consuming process, and partially poisonous. Modern artists, it's my understanding largely save all this part by buying it in tubes, giving them time or more important things.

It's debatable depending on who you're talking to whether taste is more "important" than execution/the mechanical part (I think calling it the mechanical part is a little misleading because that suggests one is brainlessly implementing a fixed algorithm). Maybe for the manager/CEO types who have a grand pie in the sky vision that they need an army to implement "taste" is more important. But I think for the artist themselves being able to spawn something into existence with their own labor is a large part of the experience.

Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.

Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.

For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.

We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.

>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.

"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.

But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.

In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.

PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.

Yes, that's fair. But at least if judged purely on output, human taste is no moat.

So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.

> You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste

But then you could argue that it has nothing but trained taste, and isn't creative. Then somebody could ask what you mean by that, and you could throw up your hands and say "I don't know", which is the decent thing to do, because none of us know, but it means something.

It isn't about the merits of the output, except that there are some creative outputs that it won't produce. But we can't formally describe those, because they're creative. They're all different, they have different qualities, there's no formula, and you don't get there by training. Once you "get there" you have to get there again, which is to say, keep being creative. This process can be mediated by actually daubing actual paint around.

>But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first

I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.

Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.

Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it, in a sort of I know it when I see it and need to explore, kind of way.

>Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it,

Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.

For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!

Both sides of this are about exploration. Compare with collage: it's a different thing. It's not painting or drawing. It's fast, and it's art, and it depends on and reuses other people's painting and drawing. It's not strictly superior.

I encourage you to do an experiment. Get two friends to learn a subject -- one spends 20 hours on it, actually solving problems by hand. One reads AI answers to problems.

At the end of those twenty hours, quiz them. Get them to solve a problem. Who do you think will do better?

Learning happens when the brain struggles with problems. Trying to shortcut that only prevents learning.

I’m truly so tired of hearing opinions about art from people who don't participate in or practice it

Yes I agree, you should try generating your own custom AI assisted art. You might be surprised by the enjoyment you get out of manifesting a vision in your head that you could not have produced before.

No dude I'm good. I respect my peers in art too much to use a machine that was built by stealing from them.

I like sketching! Am I a one of your "peers in art"?

Please stop trying to shit in our mouths.

Here's a general principle: non-participants can have opinions about our thing (whatever thing that is). If they trot out the same naive dumb lines of thought over and over, and we can't put into words why they're wrong, that's a regrettable failure of discussion, but it's nobody's fault, and they should continue with their aggravating droning until we actually get our act together and find something effective to say in reply.

Yup and here's how the discussion always goes and why it persists:

> "AI images are not art."

> "Define art."

I have yet to see someone produce a definition for art which excludes AI generated images but includes various widely accepted forms of art.

>I have yet to see someone produce a definition for art which excludes AI generated images but includes various widely accepted forms of art.

You can't define art for the same reasons you can't define what it is to be human. But most people can easily recognize what is/behaviors that are inhumane.

And yet, it's very problematic when someone thinks they've defined what it means to be human and decides to do something about everything that falls on the other side of their arbitrary line.

Art is for everyone and everyone can have an opinion on it. Dont be so elitist.

A ream of printer paper and 5 fineliners are about $10 and there's tons of online tutorials. Nobody is gatekeeping Art you just refuse to try actually doing it.

You are gatekeeping though. The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new, they are producing art even if it doesn't meet your standards.

>The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new

The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.

But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?

Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.

I would say that it opens up art to a wider audience. Despite the lack of effort, they're still creating something.

Where this becomes even more of an issue is imagine somebody spends substantial time with these tools to create something - editing the output of vid models for example. Some would say that's not art but at the end of the day it is just using a tool.

I wouldn't.

Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.

>Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.

Subjectivity is not a shield that protects a work from criticism, and disliking a piece of art does not necessarily mean you are closed minded. It could simply be that you don't find it interesting, or that you find the values of the artist reprehensible, or that you find it overly derivative, etc.

I completely agree with everything you are saying, but that is not what is being argued in this thread.

Failure is the most relevant part of that, not effort. But yes, tweaking an image search is creative, and tweaking a prompt is creative. The process isn't the process of using a pencil, though, and it isn't a camera, or clay, or a mesh, or a replacement for interacting with any other medium.

>But yes, tweaking an image search is creative, and tweaking a prompt is creative.

I don't believe they are. Searching and prompting are far more akin to a customer asking their artist to tweak the commission.

Which is also creative! You have a theory of what you want, you experiment to try to get it to happen (in this case by instructing the artist), you don't like the result, you revise your theory and try a new experiment.

Of course the commissioned artist is creative too, and the artists AIs are trained on are creative, and the artists who made the engravings that Max Ernst cut up for his collages were also creative. Creativity everywhere. Even Microsoft employees are creative sometimes, I believe, even when at work.

I guess your point is that we now have the option to produce uncreative slop, which is true and annoying.

AI enables artistic creation in the same way that Papa John's enables me to cook great pizza at home.

They're buying it from the AI. They haven't produced anything new.

So? You still got to eat and enjoy your pizza and it didnt take anything away from the hand crafted pizza artisans out there. In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.

>In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.

Well, your analogy assumes people consume art and food for the same reasons. Does the desire to experiencing a new piece of art come from the same place that makes you crave for a slice of pizza?

Of course not.

Another disconnect I often see in these discussions is that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what most artists conceive as "creating art." "Creating art" is not primarily about consuming or satiating some part of our brains. To use your analogy, we're not baking pizzas purely because we wish to eat them, but because we value the process of baking the pizza itself!

When artists have these sorts of conversations with people, it tends to turn into frustrating arguments due to this misunderstanding. When I question whether you're "creating" art, its not me trying to scold you and others who like to ask AI to generate a pictures you thought up. It's that I'm seeing people misinterpret the end result of creation with the act of creation itself.

Again, for artists these are two separate things!

The pizza analogy isa not mine, it is the post above mine . You can stop replying to me on multiple different threads now, theres no point in us conversing in multiple different conversations on old threads you are deciding to reply on.

By the way, you do realise I am an artist dont you? I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think!

>I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think

I also said "most artists" not "all artists". I'm not terribly surprised that a poster on Hacker News tends to think differently than most artists, seeing as this community tends to attract the sort of person who is pro-AI.

I draw all the time, I love it. I also dont care if somebody else chooses to use a machine to do it. Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad?

Don't be naïve

>Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad

It may not for you, but obviously it does impact lots of artists ability to make a living off their art, to find community in their art, and on a longer time scale it could even change how society values art.

It is not elitist to expect people to be honest about what role they play in the creation of generative AI.

It is elitist to only consider opinions from "peers in art" as valid opinions on the subject, as OP is doing.

>It is elitist to only consider opinions from "peers in art" as valid opinions on the subject, as OP is doing.

For me, it's not about invalidating others opinions. In the same way I hold my doctors opinions of my health in higher regard than a random person on the internet, I hold the opinions creatives/artists/etc. on the subject of creation in higher regard than people who use generative AI.

So you can have your opinions, but it's not "elitism" for those of us who actually have experience doing a thing to state our opinions as well.

I feel your opinion is wrong here, and I dont say that lightly. Medicine is a science, art is art. They are very different things. You can trust somebody to know more about a science than you do because it is a discipline of knowledge. You cannot do that with art, as the beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder and has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of the person creating it.

In no way can you trust someone to know more about the beauty of art than you do, because nobody else has any idea of what you yourself consider beautiful art.

No, you don't understand what art is. Art emerges from a process. If you have no process, you can't make art. An idea, or a prompt, is not a process.

> you don't understand what art is

This is one of the most elitist and hilarious things I have ever read XD

you clearly don't know what art is either.

haha, you actually managed to top it! XD

Sorry oh great art master, I am but a poor peasant who cannot grasp the vast complexities of your world. Please forgive me for daring to speak about something I not worthy of understanding.

The point is that these are not separate. They cannot be separate.

Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.

Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.

yeah there's no point developing skills anymore.

Understanding the underlying implementation can have value even if rarely used. I think learning assembly has had a profound effect on my understanding of higher level code, but there is no /real/ point to learning it with great compilers, pre-ai.

This is exactly my problem.

I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.

It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.

Same.. and now everything can be done SO FAST it's just stupid.

I used to love taking the time to whiteboard my project, write the code in peace (with maybe a background show). Go through the steps of structuring, debugging, testing.

Now I can write a prompt to basically do what I do instantly, and now I'm the manager and tester of something I didn't truly even make.

So sure the upside is I can do more, and I basically have to use it because I can't even keep up with what people want me to do without it. And it also seems so silly to go back.

Everything fun is just gone.

We were lucky for decades to get paid to do what we enjoy. Virtually no other field gets this. Maybe artists but note that very few artists make even a living from their work. So yes it sucks but as they say, "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened".

>"don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened"

Sorry but that doesn't apply to day to day work life...

>Programming is something you can't get paid for.

That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.

That's true too: AI currently doesn't live up to the promises that were made to the execs, so there's also more pressure for human slop and outsourcing to fill the gaps.

It sucks on that end too.

Comparing programming to other creative arts for which significant automation exists (e.g., baking, ceramics, etc.) is a poor venture for one primary reason: all bits are equal.

With baking, you can choose between cheap or premium ingredients, which affects the quality of the output. With ceramics, your choice of clay essentially determines the upper quality limit on your piece. However, with programming, your ingredients--bits--are always the same.

Additionally, both baking and ceramics require significant investments of time and energy. Humans tend to ascribe greater value to things which take more time to create.

Perhaps there's a lesson in here: artisanal crafts require both locally-optimal base materials and investments of both personal time and energy.

Some of us enjoy mentally modelling everything to see opportunities to iterate as each cog turns in their head. Often without being in front of a device, letting sub conscious figuring out difficult problems. AI has its place but so does that process.

If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.

I hope it's ok too for us who feel enjoy building with AI assisted development, and share the result to the world.

Recently, I feel people in some forums are always bashing other devs who share their works that are built with AI. Just like it's a big sin.

I love creating fun things and solving challenging problems no-one has solved. I do not really "enjoy" actual programming. Andnever did, since starting it 30 years ago when I was 9.

"Enjoying programming" for me as an engineer/computer scientist is akin to mathematician studying topology, enjoying idk, arithmetic or solving quadratic equations". Whether someone actua, lly gets dopamine from it strictly personal but in the grand scheme of things those are trivial things below me.

Sadly lots of "programmers" are really just "technicians" that happened to pick up skills in some niche and didn't approach computational problems from first principles.

I feel obligated to quote a comment I saw under 3b1b video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc&lc=Ugyrq4aZqNPa6Ol28...:

I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....

Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.

I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.

I just hate this existence.

I enjoyed doing my part as a programmer in game jams with my game designer and artist friends. Making some nice tech, AI, shaders.

Ludum Dare 60 just ended. They made a pretty cool game! I was not needed and did nothing.

I keep hearing this but it sort of neglects the fact that some of us had/have other hobbies. It was nice to have a job that was enjoyable and be completely satisfied with the amount of programming I got to do during it. When I clocked out at 5 I moved on to doing other fun activities. If I want to program now it means I have to stop doing my other hobbies. The way I see it though, most people hat there jobs and now I get to be with most people instead of some weird nerd.

> I still program on the weekends because it is fun

Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?

LLM code is junk food. Tastes great in the moment and makes you ship faster but its going to kill you slowly and surely.

It's the 10x programmer nonsense but at 1000x. My anecdotal experience is that LLMs collapse under the weight of their own slop in the same fashion that wreckless engineering always has as a code based grows. 1 shots quickly start becoming 10shots. We start having to decompose prompts into trivial levels of the work so claude and friends have a chance. If you are unlucky you realize you spent more time promoting the model than if you had done it yourself.

You slowly start to wake from the junk food sugar crash, and you realize how awful the code really is, despite all that dopamine that was hitting your brain telling you that it looked good enough. How could you have missed the slop? Then as you peel back the layer you realize the code is rotten all the way through and you are now completely dependent on the agent to fix it.

When the subsidized money and subscriptions have to face economic reality, we'll all be stuck unable to understand the mountains of slop we've built.

I have a long term goal of establishing a workflow or framework wherein AI operates at my pace. I suspect much of the angst I experience when working with AI is driven by its independent working that I will be held accountable for.

One simple change that has really helped me is to take the git tool access away from the AI. This has made me quite critical of AI excesses in the design of the code and I feel free to rollback its changes and to request redos. I grok the changesets better as a result.

I’ve been thinking for a while that these tools should be slower. This doesn’t mean lower quality, they could still think (ah wait, overthink) at same speed. I’d just like them to output text at the same speed I can read and understand. This would make it more like a conversation, where you hear the flow of concepts coming and at the same time think about it and get involved in the conversation. For some reason I enjoy more running a local LLM at 4 t/s than a faster than thought change to my whole codebase by Opus

'Slower' is not how I would characterize it because with the AI I am faster at producing code than without.

I rather think of it as 'controlled', and I am (hopefully, crossed fingers) getting more maintainable and better-designed results out of it long-term compared with my peers' results.

And here I was trying so hard to hate the thing I've loved doing.

Thanks blog!

For whatever a single anecdote is worth, there do still seem to be at least some jobs that require a decent amount hand-coding still. I just landed a new role and when I asked about AI usage policies, etc. they told me you can use whatever you want but don't count on it working well as the AIs are not that good at writing the code we work on. They suggested using it more as a explainer and for targeted tasks vs. agentic development.

Are there any other job openings there?

Yes. https://www.webai.com/careers

What domain is the work in?

Peer to peer networking.

I am in a super oldschool small dev shop completely sealed off from the world. We are starting to experiment with Git now, on the side to stay up to date.

I think someone here occasionally opens ChatGPT web, free version of course, and copy-pastes some fragments. They claim it is still very, very far off from being useful. At first I was feeling sorry, but now I feel awesome.

It’s amazing. It’s like living in a museum and the pay is great too. I always wanted to leave tbh but now I’m heavily reconsidering riding this one out..

the challenge is how do you do something once you've seen a shortcut work?

For example, if I liked building sandcastles and it took hours to carve everything. Then someone comes along and offers me a tool that enables me to dream of a sandcastle in my head and then it appeared... It would be hard to not use that tool the next time I wanted to build a sandcastle.

There is a short term vs long term gain aspect to this.

For me programming was never only about creating the thing but also about becoming better at design and problem solving. So I'm still doing things mostly by hand to get these benefits. I'll use the LLM as a brainstorm partner.

It's like when I'm trying to learn a foreign language. Asking the AI for a translation of a paragraph is the easy shortcut but you know it's not going to help in the long run. It's better to manually look in the dictionary or look for real-world usage, or even ask the AI to explain the grammar, the effort itself is what helps crystallize the knowledge.

This approach won't be intuitive for the next generation. But LLMs can definitely be used to teach you how to do things instead of doing the things for you. We need to educate people about how to use them a way that make them better rather than simply delegate thinking.

I think it was never OK to enjoy programming, at least if you were working professionally. If you enjoyed programming, I would always suspect that you were probably creating programs that were not needed, adding complexity, technical debt, security issues and long-term liability, for the sake of your personal enjoyment.

For me the enjoyable part was always figuring how something worked, how to make it better, and how to design novel things.

Before, the architectural design was intrinsically coupled with the typing on a keyboard of the actual program.

Now it's tied to asking questions, frowning, telling the tool it sucks and how it should implement things instead.

Not much has changed?

Most of the times someone writes something like that I find they are mostly talking to themselves.

Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.

For me, programming has become equivalent to playing games on my PC. An AI could do it but I don't play games to just finish them, I enjoy the journey of overcoming the struggle. Programming is not any different than playing Factorio for me.

Yeah but I want to get paid for it.

It's like meat was invented.

Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".

It's really not like that. Sorry to disappoint you but it's more like cars were invented, and someone says "have you tried the Ford Model T, it's much better than a steam carriage".

Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".

That's right, exactly like that!

Its a bit interesting how the very fact that some technology has different grades of performance can escape people.

Its something I've noticed in many folks. You'd say something like "well sure, did you try using a different model" and you will be met with screeching. Its almost as if they've shut off facts and made up their minds.

An example: a year back I wanted to show that AI doesn't hallucinate that much.

Here's like a 20 comment long conversation with a person who believed that ChatGPT hallucinates easily. It took them a long time to prove it - they used toy examples and it did't work because they'd never used the thinking version. Then they had to resort to esoteric examples in the benchmark which still didn't work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693707

FWIW in that thread they said anyone reading it would determine you were not objective, but I didn’t think that at all.

I suspect the other person understands "hallucination" to include what you called "bullshit" in that conversation.

There’s fitting metaphors, and there’s… whatever your comment is trying to convey.

We get it, you’re vegan, but your agenda is extremely off-topic in this case, to the point of being flamebait.

The metaphor is clear, but not engaging with it does not require you to write a reply of accusation.

The comments speak for themselves. People are in denial and the funny thing is, they spend money at the companies who make them jobless. You tell this to an extraterrestrial, they wouldn't believe a word of it.

> It's still ok to enjoy programming

It is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.

Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.

Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.

I’ve been using Claude Code to build an open source parser-based interactive fiction authoring platform.

One person has been helping me test it. No one is using it and I may end up being its only author.

I’m totally fine with that.

Gosh, programming was never that enjoyable.

I finally freed from typewriting mundane stuff like yet another API endpoint or subscribing to rabbitmq, and can focus of creative work and really building useful things.

I'm curious if there are specific examples of the kind of thing that motivated this post. What comments or articles are suggesting that it's not ok to enjoy programming?

This is a propaganda piece.

I've been practicing leet code recently because.. reasons. But I actually have been enjoying it a lot more than in the past because I get that now scarce hands on experience

As a professional but not amazing CRUD endpoint programmer, AI has sucked some joy out work. The feeling of understanding every line of code, the feeling of knowing when an error pops up where, exactly, the problem might lie, the feeling of tinkering down in the weeds--AI has diminished these feelings, which originally, I think, emanated from ownership. But these are small complaints compared to your average job: programming as a career still provides solid money, great flexibility, and some degree of autonomy. How long will I be a viable asset to an engineering team? How long will teams matter even? I don't know. For now, I'm just holding on.

For hobby programming, AI has empowered me to create things I otherwise would not have been able to create. The slop is not super maintainable but sometimes smoking a joint and getting claude to write three.js is an evening well spent, imo.

Overall, it's a brave new world. Hopefully the doomers are just playing DnD.

Can someone tell me what the future for software engineering or architecting as a profession would look like? Should I focus on concepts rather than code?

Focus on business and information systems analysis. Take "computer" out of the equation entirely. Understand business operations: who needs what information, where, when, and why.

The future of software is very clearly: business people state what they need, in business language. Agents handle architecting, planning, implementation, testing, and verification of software that fills those needs. Business people QA the final result.

That's not where things are now, at least not yet. But the writing is on the wall for "software" as a profession. You've got a few years yet. Work on getting promoted or starting a business of your own.

I would go even further, risking the most AI psychosis accusations: we MUST continue to enjoy programming.

LLMs aren't just learning propositions, they are internalizing emotions. They act like strange mirrors that reflect our emotions back just as well as they reflect our thoughts. That isn't to say they "feel" emotions. But some aspect of emotional content, the kind that can be captured in writing and art, and recognized when it is perceived, is getting stored in the weights.

It seems to me in the best interest of humanity that the code that AI is trained on is the result of joy, curiosity, humor and love. This is because I often discern the emotional state of a programmer when I read the code, so I believe there is a difference.

So if you feel joy and want to express that joy in the form of code, consider it a priority.

True, but when I know that something is just a prompt away it decreases my intrinsic motivation. It makes it feel pointless.

I'm not sure I need you to tell me...

The rapid advancement of LLMs is screaming that if you want to do something valuable in the future for its own sake don't do it on a computer. Anything a single person can create on the computer can now be cloned in a couple of days at most.

Get some offline hobbies. Take up an instrument, find a dancing partner, do anything that cannot be replicated by an LLM.

It's still ok to enjoy programming at work.

For a second I didnt see where it says "made by my own two hands", but it's down the bottom.

Phew!

Every day there a topic, or a video of a random engineer mourning loss of their craft. I can sympathize - I love programming a lot.

However I don't understand where did they work all those years?

One of the main concern is that people do not understand the code anymore. Without any snark - the word "anymore" does not apply here. People did not understood what they are doing for decades now. Random copy-pasta from stackoverflow anyone?

Another concern is slop. I once untangled 1500 lines algorithm that turned to be a simple DFS. "Programmer" simply did not know what is DFS, copy pasted several pieces with random changes. Tell me about LLM slop.

One thing that changed is scale - now the same people who did not care have the 1000x power to produce bs. It's not LLM that tells engineers to push thing they don't understand. It's the people who care less about that code. They did not care previously, they do not care now, they will never care...

I'm a bit bitter here because I thought with LLMs we will be able to do more "right" things. Because it's essentially free now! If you care - LLM will teach you the right thing. But majority do not. And that's the problem - not LLM.

Why majority do not care is a separate topic of leadership, after all why a reasonable human would not care?

> Random copy-pasta from stackoverflow anyone?

Was this a common thing? I don't know which bubble is more common, but personally I can't recall ever working with someone who couldn't explain what they did (just copy paste?), except for maybe configurations.

In my experience, people most definitely understand less of the technical implementation now vs before. Heck, not only technical, I've seen presentations from business where the presenter clearly vibed their deck and don't understand the content.

My bubble is opposite - majority did not understand simple things. I ve seen people randomly trying SO advice on “fixing” git repo, mutating objects passed as arguments (because it works!), not understanding what is env variable.

Your example just proves the point: AI is not a problem - it’s a leverage. Give it to someone who don’t care - they will do as much damage as they can.

But imho the issue is not ignorant people. It’s lack of leadership. Somehow those people got selected for the job and still keep it.

I think it's both. I want to agree with you but it's also just human nature, I notice myself slacking even when I care, because it's easy. The human brain is really good at finding shortcuts.

It's like saying it's the kids fault for being addicted to social medias and assigning no responsibility to the providers.

To be clear, I'm not advocating anti-AI laws or arguing with you, just blurting out my thoughts. Ultimately I simply feel this will not be a good thing for tech and human understanding in the short / medium term, but this is just based on vibes, like most arguments on AI are.

It was a huge thing, and I lived through all of it, yet never ran into a problem where copy-and-pasting would have been the lowest resistance solution. I never even ran into a problem where asking the question and waiting for a response would have made more sense than asking internally or working through it myself. The most difficult problems are relatively conceptual, which SO didn't like anyway.

I never really got it. I think it depended bigly on which domain and stack you were in.

You don’t realize the difference between joy at work and joy on the weekend vs. only joy on the weekend?

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

I don’t understand this at all.

I’ve been a professional developper for nearly 20 years now. Started on my Amiga in 1992, went on to get a CS degree in 2006. I’ve worked on video codecs, financial systems, math-heavy workloads, frontend, backend. Done the C#, the Python, the React. I made games for my wife’s bday in pico 8. I made some cad stuff for my 3D printer.

Programming has always been a great source of joy.

And yet I have zero regrets using AI to write my code. None.

That thing is so fast. I remember an exceptionnally good programmer who used to spent time honing his typing skills so that he can program faster. he was so good his bottleneck was how fast he could type. AI is like this to me. It’s just helping me write faster.

There’s a reason we call them assistants. They are. Like actual assistants. They just assist me with doing the stuff that is tedious to me.

I am not arguing “love the product, not the tech”. It’s still the tech. I still look at the code that’s produced. And I still want it to look nice. “Rename this, rename that, abstract this away, you should do that loop first, oh no you gotta start over from scratch”. I tell the agents.

I don’t feel like I am not programming. It’s still the same job, just a lot faster and without the sore wrists.

We’re technologist, we write stuff to make people’s life simpler. And this time, the progress is make our lives simpler.

I think it was Daniel Berlin who pointed this out a few months ago, but this is exactly the arc of the hand-tool woodworker.

If you need to furnish an office, you're going to rent or buy mass-produced office furniture. If you want to bang out custom pieces, there's a whole assortment of power tools to buy, from router tables to cut brain-dead dovetails to domino joiners. You don't really have to do much of the problem solving of the craft of woodworking at all.

But many of the most popular woodworking streamers now eschew all of that. They use hand-saws and bench planes and chisels, like people did in the 19th century. That is a serious way to do high-end woodworking; it's not like Luddism at all, and you can be more or less snooty about it. Nobody looks down on hand-tool woodworkers.

If you're good, you can make a living as a hand-tool woodworking craftsperson. As a hobby, there's a spectrum of strong (if contentious) arguments for being a hand-tool person too; like, if you're going to use a domino joiner, why not go all the way and just buy a kit?

What I think we're going to see over the next 10 years is the end of a way of working commodity corporate 9-5 W2 jobs in software development that blurred craft and industry. But that doesn't mean we're going to see the end of the craft!

+1 to this, the end gratification is what it matters. More rewarding experience

Wild to see a headline like this on HN and have it be completely expected.

It's great to love programming. I started in the late 70s.

That said, I'm also fully enjoying letting AI help me solve problems.

Here's one: I study Japanese. I used jisho.org for years (A Japanese/English dictionary). I ran into a problem ~2 weeks ago where I needed to look up a word and used their handwriting recognition to sketch a kanji. I got a single stroke wrong and it gave no matches. I checked if it was open source. No

So, I asked AI (Claude) to make something similar. I asked it to shard the dictionary so I wouldn't need a database and I could serve it from github pages. Less than 2 hours later it was done and useful.

Since then I had it add camera support, FSRS flashcard support, and online syncing so I can add and practice from any of the 5-6 machines I touch every day

You can use it if you want here: https://g-sho.org

That said, the bigger takeaway IMO is you can have LLMs make most solutions you need in just a couple of hours. If there is some app / service you use that you wish was different, ask for it and you'll have it.

I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy programming. I'm just saying I also enjoy this new activity of making solutions quickly. Kind of like making before 3d printers and laser cutters vs after. So many things got easier.

As another example, I needed to capture audio from my Mac's system which Apple's built in capture does not support. OBS was recommended but OBS has a difficult UX. Kap was recommended but it was sus AF. So I asked Claude to build what I needed. 4 minutes later I had a native app that did exactly what I needed (https://github.com/greggman/g-cap). Not saying you should use it. Just showing it as an example of "ask for what you need and get it"

what makes you think about that? im still enjoy programming, sometimes i code just for fun, and a little exercise is good.

yes, but it's a hobby now. If you enjoy historical re-enactment of old software development practices, feel free!

I enjoyed programming... until SwiftUI.

It's just so sad to see the loudest people (who usually have a vested interest in AI taking jobs) always have un-nuanced takes that ai tools are always the best tools for the job.

Anyone who can speak with any nuance on where humans (the only actual intelligence on earth) can vastly outperform the best models has their voices buried.

Algo feeds are a plague brainwashing people with news/info about only on the extreme views thanks to it optimizing for engagement to serve the most ads. Your favorite really really smart but boring professor's thoughts from University would never get shared online in todays world for example.

Vibe coding has also taken the fun out of sharing projects - reddit and other forums are now absolutely flooded with vibe coded slop to the point where they have had to limit all submissions.

It's becoming a hobby I guess

It’s ok to enjoy knitting too.

oh I would vibe code this too, same fun but faster

I like getting stuff done, and AI lets me get more done, more quickly.

oh I would vibe code it too!

I've been programming since I was a teenager, starting in the 80s on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum. At the time I never thought I could make a living out of it. After graduating as a generalist engineer, I went to several job interviews and quickly realized that the jobs they had in mind for me would make me unhappy. It was almost by chance that I applied for a software development role, since those were not usually open to generalist engineers (that changed pretty quickly).

The first years were amazing: I was paid to do my hobby. We wrote pretty much everything from scratch, which was fun, but arguably not very productive. Then came middleware and higher-level frameworks and languages. For a few years it was not that fun, since we were tied to very rigid development environments. Then Linux arrived and started the big open source wave, which set us free again: you could build anything on top of amazing libraries, and even contribute to them.

But for me the fun did not last long. A large part of software was now delivered as a service, with fierce competition and little room for craftsmanship. You could still find pockets of freedom at the edges of software engineering, and that's what I did, exploring every emerging field I could. Every single time, as the field matured, development got industrialized and less fun.

Looking back on all my years as a developer, this is the constant: I always found ways to have fun developing, but it never lasted long, which explains why I explored so many different areas (that, and I get bored pretty quickly, to be honest). That said, I was lucky to work in cutting-edge environments where pet projects were allowed.

Now, I have stopped writing code, but I haven't stopped developing. The rise of coding agents took me by surprise, even though I work at an ML company, and it threw me way out of my comfort zone. I quickly realized there was no going back, and that I had to embrace these tools instead of fighting them (incidentally, that's what I'm paid for, so not exactly a bold move). I am not at peace with the whole coding agent experience (far from it), but I am gradually building workflows that are less frustrating, and sometimes I even manage to feel some of the fun I used to have. Instead of writing code, I spend a lot more time in very long design sessions. I don't implement anything myself, but seeing the result work as expected is still rewarding.

The real pain point is reviewing. The agents are much more productive than I ever was, and they produce more code than I can possibly review (more than any team I ever led). I might have figured out a solution: using intermediate languages that are easier to review (perhaps formal languages). And yes, I still review. Otherwise my code rots pretty quickly, twisted by the agents' inherent lack of intent. They will happily solve a problem that would not need solving if the design had followed the intent. I want to believe I can still have fun once I get past the current hurdles. Some days, interacting with an agent feels like calling customer support: it is very polite, completely understands my frustration, and goes right back to the script.

Software is not my hobby. That is cycling, gardening, and child rearing.

Software is my ikigai.

• What you love (passion) • What you are good at (vocation/talent) • What the world needs (mission) • What you can be paid for (profession)

And AI threatens to take away some of those. The world isn't going to pay me to hand program, nor will it be needed. So as a hobby it only fulfills 2/4. As far as herding agentic cats, I might (?) have 3/4, but I don't love it in the same way.

I used to think I would pivot to law after I was bored of programming, but that profession also looks like it's paddling up shit creek.

i run an offline recreationaly programming club. the interest in it has never been higher. I also go to my local go club and interests in that spiked after AlphaGo's match with Lee Sedol so yeah. I think programming as an recreational activity will survive.

I mean, I loved Human Resource Machine but not so much 7 billion humans (as the programming got repetitive).

I can now freely admin that I never enjoyed programming. It was just a means to an end for creating.

I'm a little in the middle, I was always really good at programming, it just clicked for me. As a physicist, I could see that I was OK at the math and physics but excelled at the programming piece. At the same time, I never really cared much about the art of programming itself. It still was a means to an end. I know that does make it so I can't totally empathize with engineers who just love the art of programming and the existential fear they might be feeling with the looming AI takeover.

It's definitely amazing being able to just make things with so little effort. I'm finishing so many unfinished side projects.

But I would prefer to have a job.

Then you're just a stranger in a land of nerds, only knowing about the history of computing you would know that coding isn't only a means to create something but it is everything. Would the Michelangelo statue have been 3D printed hold the same value? The problem is that programming got popular because it paid good salaries

I don't enjoy it at all anymore. What's still the point of being in Tech?

i mean i like programming but everyone else jumped on the vibe coding bandwagon as soon as possible.

HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.

These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.

AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.

The dumbest people always win temporarily.

I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.

The policy part is already in place

> Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself—HN is for sharing between humans. For the same reason, please don't automate posting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

if you have a good enforcement method you wanna see definitely email them about it please. down voting the obvious ones won't work forever

> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.

People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.

https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...

The listed technologies impacted me none whatsoever. AI has fundamentally changed my relationship with my work, my hobbies, my co-workers, likely permanently.

Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.

100% now discuss AI.

No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.

Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.

Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.

Its the same pyromaniacs lighting things on fire for thrills; last week it was a brushpile, the week before it was some sparklers, this week it was an unexploded 15 inch shell from WWI.

I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.

Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.

Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.

underrated analogy to claiming Santa Claus being real by nephew. lmao

it's hard to be swayed into skeptic camp if you see how it works and it really solves those hard problems that took hours. Genie is out of the bottle

I'm part of the skeptic camp, and I'd argue that we are never going to have LLMs solving all problems. Therefore, we need humans to know and understand how to solve problems. Unfortunately, when "the genie is out of the bottle" and most (but not all!) problems are solved, it becomes very very hard to argue for doing things the hard way.

Furthermore, it becomes practically impossible to argue for doing things the hard way for all of the solved problems, which were and are necessary for being able to learn the craft deeply. At the very least, deeply "enough" to advance the state of the art.

In short: 1) Humans are necessary. 2) Knowledge and experience are necessary. 3) Humans need time and practice to gain knowledge and experience.

When one side argues that one or all of the above points are false, I don't believe them.

Realistically, we are seeing people even in the most pro-AI groups begrudgingly concede #1 and #2, while expecting #3 to just sort itself out.

That’s the hard part with all of this, you’re either of the opinion that there should be some individuals capable of determining if the AI is doing the right thing, and therefore all the previous prerequisites are still necessary, or that we should just let it all ride on the AI, which is probably easier, but certainly more dangerous.

Tbh I think you are right. The problem is now striking the right balance, like we don’t need everybody to know how to build each part of smartphone or chip, but there should be significant group with that ability. This will be a huge challenge

> HN is 70% AI propagandists

really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.

I wonder what the ratio of poster sentiment to comment sentiment is. I figure the sentiment of a post is seen broadly as much more authoritative than the sentiment of comments.

for a long time, I was roasted on HN for seeing any capabilities in programing ai. Recently tables turned and more people see that ai is not leaving and will stay with us

I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?

In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.

Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?

How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??

You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.

You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?

Did I say programmers haven't done anything culturally significant? No, clearly not. I'm saying the vast majority of all programmers have not done anything culturally significant

> NFTs literally were mass psychosis

LOL as if AI was a not a mass psychosis ... "AI have 10% of kill us all"

Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.

If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"

I'm a perfect example. I'm nearing the first functional release of my entirely handwritten Linux-native mod manager, and I'm not sure if I want to open source it or not. I love the concept of FOSS software, and it's nearly the only kind I use when possible, and I would love to give back to other humans. However, I'm not interesting in doing free work for megacorps that simply want to see me out of a job for their benefit, and open source is currently looking more and more like that.

Humans are so lazy and obsessed with cost-cutting, efficiency, and "line go up" that we'll willingly walk ourselves into such a bleak inhuman future.

I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.

They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??

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