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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad that we don’t write code anymore, it takes a lot of the joy of stuff like this away.

Agreed. I saw the announcement and had an inkling of the excitement I got the first time I tried Crystal, years ago. I remembered how exciting new languages were to learn, and putz around with.

Then I remembered I could open [coding agent of choice] and it'd nearly oneshot whatever I would want to try in Crystal. I got a little disheartened.

Some languages for me were never meant to be 'used in production', but were a creative & learning space instead.

I mean maybe but... There's nothing forcing you to use Claude or what have you to play around is there? I mean an employer might force you to use it but you don't have to in your free time. That's one way I comfort myself lol

You’re right. But the treat was having a hobby that was also professional development. People in other industries have to take courses, study through dreary textbooks… I got to do something I enjoy and get professional benefit. That’s the shine we’re rapidly losing.

I can't comment on the enjoyment aspect, but I'd argue that writing code still confers professional benefits. It might not be the most economical way to ship code [citation needed] but it's still the best way to understand code, and understanding code will remain professionally relevant for a long time yet.

As someone who also feels that with new languages, I see it a little differently. To me, the limiting factor of all these langauges was (no shade to Crystal not really the case there these days) most of them have terrible or no docs, have terrible onboarding, have rough edges that may or may not be fixed.

So it was a gamble learning something new could just result in a brick wall dead end where you can't fix the thing, you can't get in touch with anyone who knows how (or has time), there's no docs to help you on the way, the code base is a mess and inscrutable, maybe written the a language you don't know -- maybe even the one you're trying to learn! It could be very frustrating at times, to the point I'd just pass over some interesting languages if they weren't polished enough. Which is a shame because I know there's good ideas in there, I just can't invest the time to make sense of them. Seems contradictory, but designers are not always the best communicators.

With LLMs, all this consternation is gone. Can it write the program for you? I guess... but also not really because for many niche languages with interesting features, the LLM won't do so idiomatically, opting instead to implement enough functionality to scaffold a Python-shaped solution, and then it writes that.

The neat ideas are still there, the learning opportunity is still there, the ability to leverage technology in a way the LLM can't is still there. Especially in a creative and learning space!

People who work at the leopard breeding factory being upset that the leopards are being bred to eat their faces..

People love trotting out this phrase. But on analysis of its usage for the above comment, it doesn't make any sense. Who is the leopard, the breeder, and why are they upset in that above comment? They don't sound upset, just sad.

I think the leopard is software-as-automation, the breeder is the tech industry, and the exact semantics of "upset" are less important than schadenfreude at automation (and ensuing poverty) coming for the automator.

Not everyone gets to work at the factory, yet they still get their face eaten.

This reminds me of how, say, the YouTuber Practical Engineering works as an engineer, but then goes and builds physical models of how water moves under hydrostatic pressure out of perspex and sand in his garage for fun.

You can still write code. I do it every day, even for work.

And how do you justify that to your boss?

My boss doesn't care because I hit our deadlines, still ship as fast as my peers, and with a higher quality level.

Most of my agentic pilled colleagues get lapped by people using llms as a search tool/ conservatively.

A lot of agentic use creates a feeling of psuedo productivity.

Ive only met two devs who genuinely have supercharged their output with them, but they were also superstars before CC.

The agentic only folks are twiddling their thumbs all day messing with their 20 different meta-agentic tools, thinking that extra thing is finally going to give them those superpowers too.

I think being a "super contributor" has little to do with just having access to llms, but people will downvote this.

I used to see the 20 meta agentic tool thumb twiddling last year such as with Ralph loops and plan modes, but since this year with frontier models, they just...do what you tell them, so I've seen that a lot less today. And thus the people use Claude Code are lapping manual coders, at least from what I've seen.

Seeing the kinds of stuff my coworker is spitting out into merge requests on my codebase via Claude Code is sometimes baffling. It's literally spaghetti code. I won't be surprised if the advent of LLMs causes power usage to surge globally, not only because they themselves use a lot of power, but because the code they spew out is horrendously ugly and inefficient. And then the time they take to sort out the spaghetti code they spat out, to add new features on top, takes even longer and uses more power than before. It's gonna be a mess. I don't see how we can keep going down this road without huge investments into nuclear power collectively.

It does not just do what you tell it, the last six hours of my day are a fckn testament to that fact.

Which is all that should matter. Nobody should be forced to use LLMs if they can do good work without them.

Fair enough but I can also tell you working with an LLM is basically a free second pair of eyes- even if you are the one writing the code.

Everyone who disagrees is just in pure denial or has never properly used an LLM to interact with regarding a code base.

Or maybe lacks the budget, the IT or legal permissions to let AI ingest company code.

I don't know. LLMs second pair of eyes frequently make things up and invent crises.

"It is in this companies best interest that somebody maintains a low-level understanding of our code base."

I've still been known to write a cheeky code or two, even now in the age of LLMs. In fact, it's a little guilty pleasure of mine.

I still do, thankfully not every customer is keen on letting vibe coded applications lose on their systems.

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