[HN Gopher] The Programmer Identity Crisis
___________________________________________________________________
The Programmer Identity Crisis
Author : imasl42
Score : 173 points
Date : 2025-10-21 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hojberg.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (hojberg.xyz)
| protontypes wrote:
| Whenever I see an em dash (--), I suspect the entire text was
| written by an AI.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| That says more about your lack of writing skills and
| understanding of grammar than AI.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory.
|
| This article does _not_ appear to be AI-written, but use of
| the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your
| reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on
| keyboards. It 's reasonable for even good writers to not know
| how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash
| when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean
| they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as
| you have implied.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me
| in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.
| benji-york wrote:
| I don't think the character is that uncommon in the
| output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard
| to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus
| generates an em-dash).
| Kerrick wrote:
| In fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--)
| gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily,
| which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the
| customary hair spaces around the em dash.
|
| Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when
| people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I
| now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct
| than before, but at least people are more likely to read
| my writing.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory.
|
| That same critique should _first_ be aimed at the topmost
| comment, which has the same problem _plus_ the added guilt
| of originating (A) a false dichotomy and (B) the derogatory
| tone that naturally colors later replies.
|
| > It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or
| not care
|
| The text is true, but in context there's an implied
| fallacy: If X is "reasonable", it does _not_ follow that
| Not-X is unreasonable.
|
| More than enough (reasonable) real humans _do_ add em-
| dashes when they write. When it comes to a long-form blog
| post--like this one submitted to HN--it 's even _more_
| likely than usual!
|
| > the extra keystrokes
|
| Such as alt + numpad 0150 on Windows, which has served me
| well when on that platform for... gosh, _decades_ now.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI
| writing
|
| Where do you think the training data came from?
| gdulli wrote:
| That's a silly take, just because they existed and were
| proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean
| they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today,
| depending on the context.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop
| specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never
| to have learned how to use them as part of their writing,
| and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as
| they are.
|
| It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a
| "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.
| gdulli wrote:
| You're overthinking it. LLMs exploded the prevalence of
| em-dashes. That doesn't mean you should assume any
| instance of an em-dash means LLM content, but it's a
| reasonable heuristic at the moment.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an
| em-dash means LLM content
|
| No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there,
| people are getting accused of using AI because they know
| how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Referring to an orthographic construct as grammar is not a
| good indication that you understand what grammar is.
| DannyPage wrote:
| The article itself is very skeptical of AI, so I highly doubt
| that's the case.
|
| Also in the footer: "Everything on this website--emdash and all
| --is created by a human."
| amflare wrote:
| Ironically, I love using em dashes in my writing, but if I ever
| have to AI generate an email or summary or something, I will
| remove it for this exact reason.
| defgeneric wrote:
| I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say,
| roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now
| translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
| almosthere wrote:
| It's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is
| because it was so common before AI.
| kazinator wrote:
| It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for
| which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed.
| Social media posts, blogs, ...
|
| AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset
| documents, like PDF papers.
|
| It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule
| for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and
| turning them into real em-dash tokens.
| svat wrote:
| Not uncommon even on Hacker News:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
|
| On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public)
| posts seem to contain an em dash:
| https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4
| pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in
| total).
| kazinator wrote:
| I use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's
| TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to
| a proper em dash.
|
| Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's
| like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It
| demands attention.
| protontypes wrote:
| Maybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most
| people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.
| random3 wrote:
| Whenever I see these takes, I'm thinking of Idiocracy - a world
| built on very simple rules, like yours.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I published a book once (way before LLMs came along). My
| publisher insisted that I replace parenthetical inserts with em
| dashes. Humans do use them.
| pteetor wrote:
| When COBOL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't
| need programmers anymore!"
|
| When SQL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need
| programmers anymore!"
|
| Now we have AI prompting, and some people are saying, "It's
| English! We won't need programmers anymore!"
|
| Really?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| The problem I have with this argument is that it actually _is_
| English this time.
|
| COBOL and SQL aren't English, they're formal languages with
| keywords that look like English. LLMs work with informal
| language in a way that computers have never been able to
| before.
| skydhash wrote:
| Say that to the prompt guys and their AGENT.md rules.
|
| Formalism is way easier than whatever this guys are
| concocting. And true programmer bliss is live programming.
| Common programming is like writing a sheet music and having
| someone else play it. Live programming is you at the
| instrument tweaking each part.
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| Yes natural languages are by nature ambiguous. Sometimes
| it's better to write specification in code rather than in a
| natural language(Jetbrains MPS for example).
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, the problem is exactly that it's not a
| formal language.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| This is also a strength. Formal languages struggle to work
| with concepts that cannot be precisely defined, which are
| especially common in the physical world.
|
| e.g. it is difficult to write a traditional program to wash
| dishes, because how do you formally define a dish? You can
| only show examples of dishes and not-dishes. This is where
| informal language and neural networks shine.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| This is true.
|
| But in faithful adherence to some kind of uncertainty
| principle, LLM prompts are also not a programming language,
| no matter if you turn down the temperature to zero and use a
| specialized coding model.
|
| They can just use programming languages as their output.
| sharadov wrote:
| I can't agree more.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| The thing is... All those people were right. We no longer need
| the kinds of people we used to call programmers. There exists a
| new job, only semi related, that now goes by the name
| programmer. I don't know how many of the original programming
| professionals managed to make the transition to this new
| progression.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Every time they have been closer to being right.
| greymalik wrote:
| > One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first
| place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.
|
| To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end
| itself.
|
| > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files,
| and dev environments
|
| That may be fun for you, but it doesn't add value. It's
| accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| These are my thoughts exactly. Whenever I use agents to assist
| me in creating a simple program for myself, I carefully guide
| it through everything I want created, with me usually writing
| pages and pages of detailed plaintext instructions and
| specifications when it comes to the backends of things, I then
| modify it and design a user interface.
|
| I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy _designing_
| (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but
| rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I got a few paragraphs into this piece before rolling my eyes
| and putting it down.
|
| I consider myself an engineer -- a problem solver. Like you
| said, code is just the means to solve the problems put before
| me.
|
| I'm just as content if solving the problem turns out to be a
| process change or user education instead of a code commit.
|
| I have no fetish for my terminal window or IDE.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| The issue is that a lot of "programmers" think bike-shedding
| is the essence of programming. Fifty years ago, they would
| have been the ones saying that not using punch cards takes
| away from the art of programming, and then proudly showing
| off multiple intricate hole punchers they designed for
| different scenarios.
|
| Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological
| environment will never devalue their skills. It's only those
| who rest on their laurels who have this issue.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So
| why did you pick software over those?
| MountDoom wrote:
| The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is
| that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard
| that the job pays well.
|
| It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty
| much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested
| in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software
| engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I
| want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star",
| except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if
| you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna
| be disappointed.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people
| here who fell into software development because it's one of
| the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this
| site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and
| developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into
| this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of
| developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into
| this profession due to getting into programming because it
| fed an innate need to tinker, and then after they spent a
| ton of time on it discovered that it was the best way to
| pay the bills available to them.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I got _stupidly_ lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid
| indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but
| also happened to pay well. This career was literally the
| only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.
| cool_man_bob wrote:
| Don't worry, once you're no longer needed you'll get to
| experience that life of poverty you missed out.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Nah, I've reached the point where I'll be just fine.
| Don't worry about me.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Yep, and the younger people like us growing up now are
| just fucked.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very
| lucrative career path solving problems... hmmm
|
| You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that
| doesn't pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.
|
| I feel like there's a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the
| "if you don't _deeply love_ to write code then just leave!"
| train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs
| because we need to pay bills, not because it's our burning
| passion.
| veegee wrote:
| Sounds like a mediocre developer. No respect for people
| like you.
| whynotminot wrote:
| It's a good thing I haven't needed your respect so far to
| have a pretty successful career as a software engineer.
| cool_man_bob wrote:
| You're probably a CRUD monkey.
| 0x457 wrote:
| A bit harsh off a single post. I like solving problems,
| not just software engineering problems and I like writing
| code as a hobby, but I went to this job field only due to
| high salary and benefits.
|
| In fact, I usually hate writing code at day job because
| it is boring things 20 out of 26 sprints.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >A bit harsh off a single post.
|
| I don't think it is. Labeling passion and love for your
| work "tech fetishism", is spiritually bankrupt. Mind you
| we're in general here not talking about people working in
| a mine to survive, which is a different story.
|
| But people who do have a choice in their career, doing
| something they have no love for solely to add more zeros
| to their bank account? _That is the fetish_ , that is
| someone who has himself become an automaton. It's no
| surprise they seem to take no issues with LLMs because
| they're already living like one. Like how devoid of
| curiosity do you have to be to do something half your
| waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very
| likely someone who has the freedom to choose?
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do
| something half your waking life that you don't appreciate
| if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to
| choose?
|
| Do you understand work-life balance? I get paid to do the
| job, I satisfy my curiosities in my free-time.
|
| > But people who do have a choice in their career, doing
| something they have no love for solely to add more zeros
| to their bank account?
|
| Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love
| is something that is achievable in our society, at least
| not for most people.
|
| IMO, the real fetishization here is "work is something
| more than a way to get paid" that's a corporate
| propaganda I'm not falling for.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love
| is something that is achievable in our society,
|
| Which is why I stressed twice, including in the part you
| chose to quote, that I am talking about people who can
| achieve that. If you have to take care of your sick
| grandmother, you don't need to feel addressed.
|
| But if you did have the resources to choose a career,
| like many people who comment here, and you ended up a
| software developer completely devoid of passion for the
| craft you're living like a Severance character. You don't
| get to blame the big evil corporations for a lack of
| dedication to a craft. You don't need to work for one to
| be a gainfully employed programmer, and even if you do
| and end up on a deadbeat project, you can still love what
| you do.
|
| This complete indifference to what you produce, complete
| alienation from work, voluntarily chosen is a diseased
| attitude.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It's because there are a significant number of us for who
| tinkering with and building shit is basically a compulsion.
| And software development is _vastly_ more available, and
| quicker to iterate and thus more satisfying, than any other
| tinkering discipline. It 's probably related to whatever
| drives some people to make art, the only difference being
| that the market has decided that the tinkers are worth a
| hell of a lot more.
|
| For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the
| existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all
| the other freely available software in existence. None of
| that is made by people who made the rational decision of
| "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me
| a comfortable salary, thus I should study software
| development". It's all made by people for whom there is no
| alternative but to build.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _...without somehow realizing that most of us have our
| jobs because we need to pay bills..._ "
|
| Oh, I wouldn't say that. The hacker culture of the 1970s
| from which the word hacker originated often poked fun at
| incurious corporate programmers and IIRC even Edsger
| Dijkstra wrote a fair bit of acerbic comments about them
| and their disinterest in the craft and science of
| computing.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Well, most of them (the hackers from the 70s) probably
| did do it solely for the love of the game.
|
| We're 50 years past that now. We're in the era of boot
| camps. I feel semi confident saying "most of us" meaning
| the current developer work force are here for well paying
| jobs.
|
| Don't get me wrong I like software development! I enjoy
| my work. And I think I'd probably like it better than
| most things I'd otherwise be doing.
|
| But what I've been getting at is that I enjoy it for the
| solving problems part. The actual writing of code itself
| for me just happens to be the best way to enjoy problem
| solving while making good money that enables a
| comfortable life.
|
| To be put it another way, if being a SWE paid a poverty
| wage, I would not be living in a trailer doing this for
| my love of coding. I would go be a different kind of
| engineer.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| At 47, I am an older guy already. But in my generation,
| people who went on to be programmers usually started
| tinkering with code at ~ 11 y.o. (back then on ZX Spectrum
| and similar cheap beasts available in freshly post-
| Communist Europe) out of interest and passion, not because
| of "I want to build a lucrative career".
|
| (Given how massively widespread piracy was back then,
| programming looked rather like a good way to do hard work
| for free.)
|
| Money matters, but coders who were drawn into the field
| purely by money and are personally detached from the
| substance of the job is an unknown species for me.
|
| "You can also solve problems as a local handyman"
|
| That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy;
| my mind is not.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Hard agree, I am 51 and all of this resonates true with
| me except...
|
| > That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are
| clumsy; my mind is not.
|
| if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would
| un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast :)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| > if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would
| un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast
|
| I don't believe that. When it comes to motoric skills,
| including dancing etc., I am probably in the lowest
| quintile of the population.
|
| Of course, I could become _somewhat better_ by spending
| crazy amounts of time on training, but I would still be
| non-competitive even in comparison with an average
| person.
|
| OTOH I am pretty good at writing prose/commentary, even
| though it is not a particulary lucrative activity, to the
| degree of being a fairly known author in Czechia. My
| tenth book is just out.
|
| Talents are weird and seem to have mind of their own. I
| never planned to become an author, but something inside
| just wanted out. My first book was published just a few
| days shy of my 40th birthday, so not a "youthful
| experiment" by any means.
| jmkni wrote:
| Handyman work can pay very very well for those who are
| good at it
| jimbokun wrote:
| You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those
| tech-fetishists that came before you.
|
| Secondly, you are very blind if you don't see that the AI
| making your job "easier" is close to replacing you
| entirely, if you don't also have a deep understanding of
| the code produced. What's to stop the Project Manager from
| vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?
| bdangubic wrote:
| State of the industry both short and medium term is that
| you want to be the one doing replacing vs being the one
| being replaced. Not great but this is where we are at. If
| you are say SRE there are myriad of companies working
| hard to eliminate SREs but they need experts to set shit
| up so that SREs are not needed. Same thing will cascade
| to other Tech work, some faster than others. Career-wise
| I think it is wise now to position yourself as one that
| knows how to set shit up for the "great replacement"
| jimbokun wrote:
| Yes we are rapidly moving towards a time where
| bullshitting will be more valued than deep understanding
| and problem solving. Both LLMs and the broader culture
| are pushing in that direction.
| whynotminot wrote:
| We all owe every part of everything to those who've come
| before us. That goes without saying, really.
|
| > Secondly, you are very blind if you don't see that the
| AI making your job "easier" is close to replacing you
| entirely, if you don't also have a deep understanding of
| the code produced.
|
| Brother don't patronize me. I'm a senior engineer I'm not
| yeeting vibe code I don't understand into prod.
|
| I also understand the possibility of all of this
| potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking
| my job.
|
| What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing
| to use the tools going to change that possibility?
|
| Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this.
| The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of
| petulance + burying head in the sand.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's simpler than that.
|
| It's more of a funeral, collective expression of
| grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a
| glorious, short time in history where it was possible to
| combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity,
| discipline, passion and values and be well compensated
| for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and
| solve them well had value. Not just being better at
| taking credit than other people.
|
| It was wonderful.
|
| I know you don't care. So just go to some other forum
| where you don't have to endure the whining of us who have
| lost something that was important to us.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I get it, but fundamentally this is a forum discussing
| technology, and AI is part of that. Especially as it
| relates to software engineering.
|
| I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto
| a good life as long as I can have it.
|
| The collective whinging in every AI topic is both
| annoying and self-defeating.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I feel like there's a lot of tech-fetishist right now on
| the "if you don't _deeply love_ to write code then just
| leave!" train without somehow realizing that most of us
| have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because
| it's our burning passion.
|
| I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem
| is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about
| what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you
| implement tasks fast with shitty code instead of
| considering the fact that tasks are easy to implement and
| the code is really fast as a strong evidence that the
| abstractions were well-chosen.
|
| Thus, I believe that people who just do it for the money
| have it easier in the "programming industry" than
| programmers who really _love_ programming, and are thus a
| big annoyance to managers.
|
| I thus really wonder myself why companies tell all the time
| about "love for programming" instead of "love for paying
| the bills" and "love for implementing tasks fast with
| shitty code", which would give them people who are a much
| better culture fit for their _real_ organizational
| processes.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees
| programming as a means to an end and nothing else.
|
| If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what
| model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what
| kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or
| what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere
| might have to care about this.
|
| That's also how people like me see programming. If the
| code delivers what we need, then great. Leave it be like
| that. There are more interesting problems to solve, no
| need to mess with a solution which is working well.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems".
| So why did you pick software over those?
|
| Because in a lot of jobs where you (have to) solve problems,
| the actual problems to solve are rather "political". So, if
| you are not good at office politics or you are not a good
| diplomat, software is often a much better choice.
| blashyrk wrote:
| > coding is the means to an end
|
| ...
|
| > doesn't add value
|
| What about intrinsic value? So many programmers on HN seem to
| just want to be MBAs in their heart of hearts
| dingnuts wrote:
| A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't
| add value
|
| A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong
| because the tool is a means to an end
|
| This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand
| the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools
| doesn't mean the value isn't real.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the
| knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife,
| but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a
| chef knife enthusiast?
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives
|
| They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately
| pmg101 wrote:
| But what if the New Way to prepare food was to put a box
| into a microwave , wait 60 seconds, then hand it to the
| customer?
|
| Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior
| product... And is that chef really cheffing?
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster
| was going on about knives, forgetting that the final
| product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever
| tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food
| is inferior, then the food is inferior.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| If that's your analogy, then shouldn't you be able to
| dominate the market by not using AI?
| codyb wrote:
| The point is, a lot of us aren't convinced reviewing 8
| meals made by agents in parallel _is_ producing better
| food.
|
| And it also seems exceedingly wasteful to boot.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's
| all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I
| really like using knives!"), not really about whether the
| food is better.
|
| I think the real problem is that it's actually
| increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI"
| approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a
| big tech company who has spent the last six months
| growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it _never_ could
| have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the
| OP is talking about too, but ultimately I 'm getting paid
| to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached
| to the knives is missing the point.
| codyb wrote:
| Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have
| been able to happen without the decade of experience it
| took you to get to the Staff level engineering position
| at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the
| skills required to review the AI code you're producing
| properly.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a
| robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every
| time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed
| the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time
| carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut
| them himself?
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have
| posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of
| cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!
|
| I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think
| you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI
| makes you miserable because you love the craft of
| programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then
| just...don't use it?
|
| But I think the problem here that all these posts are
| speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without
| using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we
| knife enthusiasts or chefs?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset
| many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers,
| assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to
| us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and
| reheating for us, better and faster than we on average
| do.
|
| The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists
| doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still
| needed. The people making the fast food machine will also
| do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers,
| well, not so much...
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| You'll be doing fine too, just doing other work.
|
| And you can see it coming so there is plenty of time to
| prepare.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Ok then throw a frozen meal from the supermarket into the
| microwave and be done with it.
|
| Outcome is really the same, right? Why waste all that
| effort on a deep understanding of how to prepare food?
| ares623 wrote:
| Careful with the "doesn't add value" talk. If you follow it far
| enough to its logical end, you get to "Existence doesn't add
| value"
| cool_man_bob wrote:
| That's the point lol.
| codyb wrote:
| Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments
| consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your
| working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and
| creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.
|
| Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?
|
| The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with
| Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's
| not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're
| delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've
| never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the
| users?
| rpcope1 wrote:
| How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts
| for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding
| of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free
| lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not
| understanding the tools of the craft, and that not
| everything can be ridiculously simple.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| But it's not that people don't grasp the concept of merge
| conflicts, it's just that the UX of git is bad.
| codyb wrote:
| It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets,
| interactive rebases, understand the differences between
| merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly
| clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a
| problem with Git since I spent a day going through the
| git book something like 10 years ago.
|
| Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which
| people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for
| reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about
| how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say
| the least.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Nah.
|
| Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it
| has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you
| now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem
| in any professional environment.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > but it doesn't add value
|
| Sad to see people reduce themselves willingly to cogs inside
| business machine.
| keeda wrote:
| You can spend as much time as you want on "configuration of
| our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments"
| and otherwise honing your craft, the business machine will
| still look at you as cogs.
|
| May seem depressing, but the bright side is that you as an
| individual are then free to find joy in your work wherever
| you can find it... whether its in delivering high-quality
| code, or just collecting a paycheck.
| kiitos wrote:
| > To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end
| itself.
|
| solving problems is an outcome of programming, not the purpose
| of programming
| RamtinJ95 wrote:
| I think "Identity Crisis" is a bit over dramatic, but I for the
| most part agree with the sentiment. I have written something in
| the same vane, but still different enough that I would love to
| comment it but its just way more efficient to point to my post. I
| hope that is OK: https://handmadeoasis.com/ai-and-software-
| engineering-the-co...
| mncharity wrote:
| I liked your emphasis on individual diversity, and an attendant
| need to explore, select, adapt, and integrate tooling. With
| associated self-awareness. Pushing that further, your
| "categories" seem more like
| exemplars/prototypes/archetypes/user-stories, helpful
| discussion points in a high-dimensional space of blended blobs.
| And as you illustrate, it branches not just on the individual,
| but also on what they are up to. And not just on work vs hobby,
| but on context and task.
|
| It'd be neat to have a big user story catalog/map, which tracks
| what various services are able to help with.
|
| I was a kid in NE43 instead of TFA's Building 26 across the
| street - with Lisp Machines and 1980s MIT AI's "Programmer's
| Apprentice" dreams. I years ago gave up on ever having a
| "this... doesn't suck" dev env, on being able to "dance code".
| We've had such a badly crippling research and industrial
| policy, and profession... "not in my lifetime" I thought. Knock
| on wood, I'm so happy for this chance at being wrong. And also,
| for "let's just imagine for a moment, ignoring the utterly
| absurd resources it would take to create, science education
| content that wasn't a wretched disaster... what might that look
| like?" - here too it's LLMs, or no chance at all.
| RamtinJ95 wrote:
| That is actually a great idea, and I agree it would be very
| useful to have such a catalog/map!
|
| I wonder though if the space is mature enough for such a map
| or if it would become to generic to say anything meaningful.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I can think of few truer identity crises than having a craft
| you have spent years honing and perfecting automated away.
| RamtinJ95 wrote:
| I fully agree with that statement, but I dont agree with the
| premise that, that is whats happening currently.
| muldvarp wrote:
| It's the explicitly stated goal of several of the largest
| companies on the planet which put up a lot of money to try
| to reach that goal. And the progress over the past few
| years has been stunning.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Getting rid of the programmer has always been the wet dream of
| managers, and LLMs are being sold as the solution.
|
| Maybe it is
| commandlinefan wrote:
| This comes up whenever _anything_ is automated: "this is the
| end of programming as a career!" I heard this about Rational
| Rose in the 90's, and Visual Basic in the 80's.
|
| I don't think I'm sticking my head in the sand - an advanced
| enough intelligence could absolutely take over programming
| tasks - but I also think that such an intelligence would be
| able to take over _every_ thought-related task. And that may
| not be a bad thing! Although the nature of our economy would
| have to change quite a bit to accommodate it.
|
| I might be wrong: Doug Hofstadter, who is way, way smarter than
| me, once predicted that no machine would ever beat a human at
| chess unless it was the type of machine that said "I'm bored of
| chess now, I would prefer to talk about poetry". Maybe coding
| can be distilled to a set of heuristics the way chess programs
| have (I don't think so, but maybe).
|
| Whether we're right or wrong, there's not much we can do about
| it except continue to learn.
| pmg101 wrote:
| Visual Basic didn't exist in the 80's. First release was
| 1991.
|
| Thanks for reminding me about Rational Rose though! That was
| a nostalgia trip
| mathieudombrock wrote:
| I found this article really interesting. This is pretty much
| exactly how I feel about LLM programming.
|
| I really enjoy programming and like the author said, it's my
| hobby.
|
| On some level I kind of resent the fact that I don't really get
| to do my hobby for work any more. It's something fundamentally
| different now.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| > Creative puzzle-solving is left to the machines, and we become
| mere operators disassociated from our craft.
|
| For me, at least, this has not been the case. If I leave the
| creative puzzle-solving to the machine, it's gonna get creative
| alright, and create me a mess to clean up. Whether this will be
| true in the future, hard to say. But, for now, I am happy to let
| the machines write all the React code I don't feel like writing
| while I think about other things.
|
| Additionally, as an aside, I already don't think coding is always
| a craft. I think we want it to be one because it gives us the
| aura of craftspeople. We want to imagine ourselves as bent over a
| hunk of marble, carving a masterpiece in our own way, in our
| time. And for some of us, that is true. For most programmers in
| human history though, they were already slinging slop before
| anybody had coined the term. Where is the inherent dignity and
| human spirit on display in the internal admin tool at a second
| tier insurance company? Certainly, there is business value there,
| but it doesn't require a Michalengo to make something that takes
| in a pdf and spits out a slightly changed pdf.
|
| Most code is already industrial code, which is precisely the
| opposite of code as craft. We are dissociated from the code we
| write, the company owns it, not us, which is by definition the
| opposite of a craftsmen and craft mode of production. I think AI
| is putting a finer, sharper point on this, but it was already
| there and has been since the beginning of the field.
| thorn wrote:
| Thank you, author. This essay made my day. It resonates with my
| thinking of last months. I tried to use AI at work, but most of
| times I regrettably scratched whatever it did and did stuff on my
| own. So many points I agree with. Delegating thinking to AI is
| the worst thing I can do to my career. AI at best is mediocre
| text generator.
|
| So funny to read how people attack author using non-related to
| the essay's message criticism.
| cardanome wrote:
| The worst thing for me is that I am actually good at LLM-based
| coding
|
| My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing
| complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks.
| Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know
| software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important
| corner case and so on.
|
| Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being
| neurodivergent has given me decades of practice in working with
| entities that have a different way of thinking that me own. I
| have more mechanical empathy for the LLM because I don't
| confuse it for a human. My coworkers meanwhile get super
| frustrated that the LLM can not read their mind.
|
| That said, LLMs are getting better. My advantage will not last.
| And the more AI slop gets produced the more we need LLMs to
| cope with all the AI slop in our code bases. A vicious cycle.
| No one will actually know what the code does. Soon my job will
| mostly consist of praying to the machine gods.
| interroboink wrote:
| It seems to me that someone like you, seen from the outside
| (e.g. from a code-reviewing colleague), simply appears to be
| getting more productive, with no drop in quality. Maybe some
| stylistic shifts.
|
| I don't think anyone is complaining about that too much. I
| wonder how many people there are like you, where we don't get
| much data. If people don't complain about it, we generally
| don't hear about it, because they're just quietly moving on
| with their work.
|
| Not to be confused with the AI hypesters who are loudly
| touting the benefits with dubious claims, of course (:
| intuitionist wrote:
| A Russell conjugation: my LLM-based coding output, your
| Claude throwaway code, his complete AI slop.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > Creative puzzle-solving is left to the machines, and we become
| mere operators disassociated from our craft.
|
| You could say that about programming languages in general. "Why
| are we leaving all the direct binary programming for the
| compilers?"
| AfterHIA wrote:
| John Von Neumann famously questioned the value of compilers.
| Eventually we get the keyboard kids that have dominated computing
| since the early 70's in some form or another whether in a forward
| thinking way like Dan Ingalls or in an idealic way like the
| gcc/Free Software crowd. In parallel to this you have people like
| Laurel, Sutherland, Nelson who live in lateral thinking land.
|
| The real issue is that we've been in-store for a big paradigm
| shift in how we interact with computers for decades at this
| point. SketchPad let us do competent, constraints based
| mathematics with images. Video games and the Logo language
| demonstrate the potential for programming using, "kinetics." In
| the future we won't code with symbols we'll dance our intent into
| and through the machine.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o
| http://www.squeakland.org/tutorials/ https://vimeo.com/27344103
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Full disclosure: I am old.
|
| When I started programming for Corporate(tm) back 1995, it was a
| wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you
| want about the lunatics running the asylum, but _we_ liked it
| that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack,
| knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the
| shots.
|
| Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every
| other release? Go for it. Like to put your curly braces on a new
| line? Like TABs (good for you)? Go for it. It's your code, you
| own it. (You break it, you fix it.)
|
| No unit tests (we called that parameter checking). No code
| reviews (well, nothing formal -- often, time was spent in co-
| workers offices talking over approaches, white-boarding API...
| Often if a bug was discovered or known, you just fixed it. There
| may have been a formal process beginning, but to the lunatics,
| that was optional.
|
| You can imagine how management felt -- having to essentially just
| trust the devs to deliver.
|
| In the end management won, of course.
|
| When I am asked if I am sorry that I left Apple, I have to tell
| people, no. I miss working at Apple in the _90 's_, but that
| Apple was never coming back. And I hate to say it, but I suspect
| the industry itself will never return to those "cowboy coding"
| days. It was fun while it lasted.
| veegee wrote:
| 100% agreed. It's just full of business assholes and vibe coder
| script kiddies now. Everything has turned to shit.
| dugmartin wrote:
| I started around the same time. No unit tests but we did have
| code reviews because of ISO 9001 requirements. That meant
| printing out the diffs on the laser printer and corralling 3
| people into a meeting room to pour over them and then have them
| literally sign off on the change. This was for an RTOS that ran
| big industrial controls in things like steel plants and
| offshore oil rigs.
|
| Project management was a 40 foot Gantt chart printed out on
| laser printer paper and taped to the wall. The sweet sound of
| waterfall.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Try game dev. It's still like that today.
| toast0 wrote:
| > And I hate to say it, but I suspect the industry itself will
| never return to those "cowboy coding" days. It was fun while it
| lasted.
|
| I don't think the industry will return to it, but I suspect
| there will be isolated environments for cowboys. When I was at
| WhatsApp (2011-2019), we were pretty far on the cowboy side of
| the spectrum... although I suspect it's different now.
|
| IMHO, what's appropriate depends on how expensive errors are to
| detect before production, and how expensive errors are when
| detected after production. I lean into reducing the cost to fix
| errors rather than trying to detect errors earlier. OTOH, I do
| try not to make embarrassing errors, so I try to test for
| things that are reasonable to test for.
| antonymoose wrote:
| Back when I started in the late 2000s you had much clearer
| lines around your career path and speciality.
|
| There was a difference between a sysadmin and a programmer.
| Now, I'm expected to be my own sysadmin-ops guy while also
| delivering features. While I worked on my systems chops for fun
| on the side, I purposely avoided it on the work side, I don't
| usually enjoy how bad vendor documentation, training, etc. can
| be in the real world of Corporate America.
| alganet wrote:
| I believe this sentiment to be a mistake.
|
| The IT world is waiting for a revolution. Only in order to blame
| that revolution for the mistakes of a few powerful people.
|
| I would not be surprised if all this revolutionary sentiment is
| manufactured. That thing about "Luddites" (not a thing that will
| stick by the way), this nostalgic stuff, all of it.
|
| We need to be much smarter than that and not fall for such
| obvious traps.
|
| An identity is a target on your back. We don't need one. We don't
| need to unite to a cause, we're already amongst one of the most
| united kinds of workers there is, and we don't need a galvanizing
| identity to do it.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Ignoring LLMs for a second, some code I write is done in sort of
| full-craft full-diligence mode, where I am only committing
| something where I am very proud of it's structure and of every
| line of code. I know it inside and out, I have reasons for every
| decision, major or minor, and I don't know of any ways to make it
| better. Not only is the code excellent, I've also produced a
| person (me) who is an expert in that code.
|
| Most code is not like that. Most code I want to get something
| done, and so I achieve something quite a bit below that bar. But
| some things I get to write in that way, and it is very rewarding
| to do so. It's my favorite code to write by a mile.
|
| Back to LLMs - I find it is both easier than ever and harder than
| ever to write code in that mode. Easier than ever because, if I
| can actually get and stay in that mode psychologically, I can get
| the result I want faster, and the bar is higher. Even though I am
| able to write MUCH better code than an LLM is, I can write even
| better code with LLM assistance.
|
| But it is harder than ever to get into that mode and stay in that
| mode. It is so easy to just skim LLM-generated code, and it looks
| good and it works. But it's bad code, maybe just a little bit at
| first, but it gets worse and worse the more you let through.
| Heck, sometimes it just starts out as not-excellent code, but
| every time you accept it without enough diligence the next output
| is worse. And by the time you notice it's often too late, you've
| slopped yourself, while also failing to produce an expert in the
| code that's been written.
| emerongi wrote:
| Within the past 2 months, as I've started to use AI more, I've
| had this trajectory: 1. only using AI for small
| things, very impressed by it 2. giving AI bigger tasks
| and figuring out how to use it well for those bigger tasks
| 3. full-agentic mode where AI just does its thing and I review
| the code at the end 4. realising that I still need to
| think through all the code and that AI is not the shortcut I
| was hoping it to be (e.g. where I can give it a high-level plan
| and be reasonably satisfied with the final code) 5. going
| back to giving AI small tasks
|
| I've found AI is very useful for research, proof-of-concepts
| and throwaway code of "this works, but is completely
| unacceptable in production". It's work I tend to do anyway
| before I start tackling the final solution.
|
| Big-picture coding is in my hands, but AI is good at filling in
| the logic for functions and helping out with other small
| things.
| dennisy wrote:
| I absolutely loved this piece.
|
| I also agree with comments on this thread stating that problem
| solving should be the focus and not the code.
|
| However my view is that our ability to solve problems which
| require a specific type of deep thought will diminish over time
| as we allow for AI to do more of this type of thinking.
|
| Purely asking for a feature is not "problem solving".
| akra wrote:
| I think you can enjoy both aspects - both the problem solving
| and the craft. There will be people who agree that of course
| from a rational perspective solving the problem is what
| matters, but for them personally the "fun" is gone. Generally
| people that identify themselves as "programmers" as the article
| does would be the people who enjoy problem
| solving/tinkering/building.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| What if you want to be a better problem solver (in the tech
| domain)? Where should you focus your efforts? That's what is
| confusing to me. There is a massive war between the LLM
| optimists and pessimists. Whenever I personally use LLM
| tools, they are disappointing albeit still useful. The
| optimists tell me I should be learning how to prompt better,
| that I should be spending time learning about agentic
| patterns. The pessimists tell me that I should be focusing on
| fundamentals.
| groby_b wrote:
| OK, but if you can't find out how to use new tools well, how good
| are you really as a craftsperson?
|
| "We've always done it this way" is the path of calcification, not
| of a vibrant craft. And there are certainly many ways you can use
| LLMs to craft better things, without slop and vibecoding.
| bentt wrote:
| Some people code to talk and don't want anything said for them.
| That's okay. Photography and paintings landed in different places
| with different purposes.
|
| But all of Programming isn't the same thing. We just need new
| names for different types of programmers. I'm sure there were
| farmers that lamented the advent of machines because of how it
| threatened their identity, their connection to the land, etc....
|
| but I want to personally thank the farmers who just got after
| growing food for the rest of us.
| strix_varius wrote:
| To me, the most salient point was this:
|
| > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they
| come to the crushing realization that they are now the first
| layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to
| review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions
| that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and
| obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author--who
| clearly only skimmed their "own" code--is taking no
| responsibility, going "whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-
| ha."
|
| LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to
| refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce
| it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert
| developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the
| responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded
| to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human
| intelligence.
|
| As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-
| written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior
| engineers often remove as much code as they add.
| CjHuber wrote:
| I'd say it depends on how coding assistants are used, when on
| autopilot I'd agree, as they don't really take the time to
| reflect on the work they've done before going on with the next
| feature of the spec. But in a collaborative process that's of
| course different as you are pointing out things you want to
| have implemented in a different way. But I get your point, most
| PR's you'd flag as AI generated slop are the ones where someone
| just ran them on autopilot and was somewhat satisfied with the
| outcome, while treating the resulting code as blackbox
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as
| they add
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
| MisterTea wrote:
| "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines
| of code." - Ken Thompson
| Etheryte wrote:
| In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a
| technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If
| someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it
| happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager.
| Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing
| off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're
| responsible.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe the process should have actual two stage pull requests.
| First stage is you have to comment the request and show some
| test cases against it. And only then next person has to take
| a look. Not sure if such flow is even possible with current
| tools.
| oblio wrote:
| Build the PR and run tests against it. Supported by all
| major CI/CD tools.
| tyleo wrote:
| I agree and I'm surprised more people don't get this. Bad
| behaviors aren't suddenly okay because AI makes them easy.
|
| If you are wasting time you may be value negative to a
| business. If you are value negative over the long run you
| should be let go.
|
| We're ultimately here to make money, not just pump out
| characters into text files.
| lezojeda wrote:
| What do you do if the manager enables it?
| Macha wrote:
| The problem is leadership buy in. The person throwing the LLM
| slop at github has great metrics when the leadership are
| looking at cursor usage, lines of code, PR numbers, while the
| person slowing down to actually read wtf the other people are
| submitting is now so drowning in slop that they have less
| time to produce on their own. So the execs look at it as the
| person complaining "not keeping up with the times".
| bloppe wrote:
| If leadership is that inept, then this is likely only 1 of
| many problems they are creating for the organization. I
| would be looking for alternative employment ASAP.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| the issue isn't recognizing malign influence within your
| current organization... it's an issue throughout the
| entire industry, and I think what we're all afraid of is
| that it's becoming more inevitable every day, because
| we're _not_ the ones who have the final say. the luddites
| essentially failed, after all, because the wider world
| was not and is not ready for a discussion about quality
| versus profit.
| lubujackson wrote:
| The solve is just rejecting the commit with a "clean this up"
| message as soon as you spot some BS. Trust is earned!
| crazygringo wrote:
| This a million times. If you do this three times, that's
| grounds for firing. You're literally not doing your job and
| lying that you are.
|
| It's bizarre to me that people want to blame LLMs instead of
| the employees themselves.
|
| (With open source projects and slop pull requests, it's
| another story of course.)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| The problem rather is that you still have to stay somewhat
| agreeable while calling out the bullshit. If you were "socially
| allowed" to treat colleagues like
|
| > All while the author--who clearly only skimmed their "own"
| code--is taking no responsibility, going "whoopsie, Claude
| wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha."
|
| as they really deserve, the problem would disappear really
| fast.
|
| So the problem that you outlined is rather social, and not the
| LLMs per se (even though they very often _do_ produce shitty
| code).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| They should get a clear explanation of the problem and of the
| team expectations the first time it happens.
|
| If it happens a second time? A stern talk from their manager.
|
| A third time? PIP or fired.
|
| Let your manager be the bad guy. That's part of what they're
| for.
|
| Your manager won't do that? Then your team is broken in a way
| you can't fix. Appeal to their manager, first, and if that
| fails put your resume on the street.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Let your manager be the bad guy. That's part of what
| they're for.
|
| > Your manager won't do that? Then your team is broken in a
| way you can't fix.
|
| If you apply this standard, then most teams are broken.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| "A big enough system is always failing somewhere" - can't
| remember who said it
| ge96 wrote:
| I'm working on the second project handed to me that was vibe-
| coded. What annoys me assuming it runs is the high number of
| READMEs which I'm not even sure which one to use/if applicable.
|
| They are usually verbose/include things like "how to run a
| virtual env for python"
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > All while the author--who clearly only skimmed their "own"
| code--is taking no responsibility, going "whoopsie, Claude
| wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha."
|
| Now I don't do code reviews in large teams anymore, but if I
| did and something like that happened, I'd allow it exactly
| once, otherwise I'd try to get the person fired. Barring that,
| I'd probably leave, as that sounds like a horrible experience.
| bloppe wrote:
| Ya, there's not much you can do when leadership is so
| terrible. If this kind of workflow is genuinely blessed by
| management, I would just start using Claude for code reviews
| too. Then when things break and people want to point fingers
| at the code reviewer, I'd direct them to Claude. If it's good
| enough to write code without scrutiny, it's good enough to
| review code without scrutiny.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| You have two options: Burn out because you need to correct
| every stupid line of code, or... Start to not give a damn about
| quality of code and live a happy life while getting paid.
|
| The sane option is to join the cult. Just accept every pull
| request. Git blame won't show your name anyways. If CEOs want
| you to use AI, then tell AIs to do your review, even better.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I feel like I went through this stage ahead of time, a decade
| ago, when I was junior dev, and was starting my days by: first
| reviewing the work of a senior dev who was cramming out code
| and breaking things at the speed of light (without LLMs); and
| then leaving a few dozen comments on pull requests of the
| offshore team. By midday I had enough for the day.
|
| Now that I'm no longer at that company since a few years ago,
| I'm invincible. No LLM can scare me!
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > All while the author--who clearly only skimmed their "own"
| code--is taking no responsibility, going "whoopsie, Claude
| wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha."
|
| After you made your colleagues upset submitting crappy code for
| review, you start to pay attention.
|
| > LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive,
|
| Unless you noticed that code has to be removed, and you
| instruct the LLM to do so.
|
| I don't think LLMs really change the dynamics here. "Good
| programmers" will still submit good code, easy for their
| colleagues to review, whether it was written with the help of
| an LLM or not.
| pjmlp wrote:
| To be honest I already reached that identity crisis even before
| LLMs.
|
| Nowadays many enterprise projects have become placing SaaS
| products together, via low code/no code integrations.
|
| A SaaS product for the CMS, another one for assets, another for
| ecommerce and payments, another for sending emails, another for
| marketing, some edge product for hosting the frontend, finally
| some no code tools to integrate everything, or some serverless
| code hosted somewhere.
|
| Welcome to MACH architecture.
|
| Agents now made this even less about programming, as the
| integrations can be orchestrated via agents, instead of low
| code/no code/serverless.
| kharak wrote:
| I'm in the opposite camp. Programming has never been fun to me,
| and LLMs are a godsend to deal with all the parts I don't care
| for. LLMs have accelerated my learning speed and productivity,
| and believe it or not, programming even started to become fun and
| engaging!
|
| I will never, ever go back to the time before.
| muldvarp wrote:
| I think in a few years, we will realize that LLMs have impacted
| our lives in a deeply negative way. The relatively small
| improvements LLMs bring to my life will be vastly outweighted by
| the negatives.
|
| If LLM abilities stagnate around the current level it's not even
| out of the question that LLMs will negatively impact productivity
| simply because of all of the AI slop we'll have to deal with.
| debo_ wrote:
| As an aside, I've been using copilot code review before handing
| off any of my code to colleagues. It's a bit pedantic, but it
| generally catches all the most stupid things I've done so that
| the final code review tends to be pretty smooth.
|
| I hate to suggest that the fix to LLM slop is more LLMs, but in
| this case it's working for me. My coworkers also seem to
| appreciate the gesture.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's fascinating idea, though, to invert the process and have
| devs develop and LLMs do the code reviews. Might be more
| productive in the long run.
| bloppe wrote:
| I agree that LLMs are great for a cursory review, but
| crucially, when you ask copilot to review your code, _you
| actually read and think about everything copilot tells you_ in
| the response. The biggest issues arise because people will
| blindly submit AI-generated code without reading or thinking
| about it.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Hi op. "Conform or be cast out" ha. Read your article then right
| after got an email announcing Rush tickets going on sale. Must be
| a sign I should go.
|
| I forwarded your article to my son the dev, since your post
| captured the magic of being a programmer so well.
|
| And yes Levy's book Hackers is most excellent.
| apprentice7 wrote:
| Subdivisions is my favourite song of all time and I thought
| about Rush as well while reading that line.
| sharadov wrote:
| Great read, unlike technologies of the past that automated away
| the dangerous/boring/repetitive/soul-sucking jobs, LLM's are an
| assault on our thinking.
|
| Social media already reduced our attention spans to that of
| goldfish, open offices made any sort of deep meaningful work
| impossible.
|
| I hope this madness dies before it devours us.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Probably too late.
| bloppe wrote:
| People have long talked about how reading code is far more
| important than writing code when working as a professional SWE.
| LLMs have only increased the relative importance of code review.
| If you're not doing a detailed code review of every line your LLM
| generates (just like you should have always been doing while
| reviewing human-generated code), you're doing a bad job. Sure,
| it's less fun, but that's not the point. You're a professional.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Truly, the ideas in this essay are reflected in this comment
| section.
|
| It's like that trope of the little angel and demon sitting on the
| protagonist's shoulders.
|
| "I can get more work done"
|
| "But it's not proper work"
|
| "Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's proper work, not everything
| is important"
|
| "But you won't learn the tools"
|
| "Tools are incidental"
|
| "I feel like I'm not close to the craft"
|
| "Your colleagues weren't really reading your PRs anyway"
|
| "This isn't just another tool"
|
| "This is just another tool"
|
| And so on forever.
|
| I'm staying to think that if you don't have both these opposing
| views swirling around in your mind, you haven't thought enough
| about it.
| jamboca wrote:
| I am a programmer. I don't think LLMs will replace/wipe out
| software engineers.
|
| The author sounds like a scribe meditating on the arrival of the
| printing press.
| aeblyve wrote:
| This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for
| the past several centuries. Programming has received a special
| treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that
| HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need
| not.
|
| Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with
| machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the
| software productive process.
|
| It is better to come to terms with this reality sooner rather
| than later in my opinion.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I started writing code in basic on a beige box. My first code
| on windows was a vb6 window that looked like the AOL login
| screen and used open email relays to send me passwords.
|
| I've written a ton of code in my life and while I've been a
| successful startup CTO, I've always stayed in IC level roles
| (I'm in one right now in addition to hobby coding) outside of
| that, data structures and pipelines, keep it simple, all that
| stuff that makes a thing work and maintainable.
|
| But here is the thing, writing code isn't my identity, being a
| programmer, vim vs emacs, mechanical keyboard, RTFM noob, pure
| functions, serverless, leetcode, cargo culting, complexity
| merchants, resume driven dev, early semantic css lunacy, these
| are thing outside of me.
|
| I have explored all of these things, had them be part of my
| life for better or worse, but they aren't who I am.
|
| I am a guy born with a bunch of heart defects who is happy to
| be here and trying new stuff, I want to explore in space and
| abstraction through the short slice of time I've got.
|
| I want to figure stuff out and make things and sometimes that's
| with a keyboard and sometimes that's with a hammer.
|
| I think there are a lot of societal status issues (devs were
| mostly low social status until The Social Network came out) and
| personal identity issues.
|
| I've seen that for 40 years, anything tied to a persons
| identity is basically a thing they can't be honest about, can't
| update their priors on, can't reason about.
|
| And people who feel secure and appreciated don't give much
| grace to those who don't, a lot of callous people out there, in
| the dev community too.
|
| I don't know why people are so fast to narrow the scope of who
| they are.
|
| Humans emit meaning like stars emit photons.
|
| The natural world would go on without us, but as far as we have
| empirically observed we make the maximally complex, multi
| modally coherent meaning of the universe.
|
| We are each like a unique write head in the random walk of
| giving the universe meaning.
|
| There are a ton of issues from a network resilience and
| maximizing the random meaning generation walk where Ai and
| consolidation are extremely dangerous, I think as far as new
| stuff in the pipeline it's between Ai and artificial wombs that
| have the greatest risks for narrowing the scope of human
| discovery and unique meaning expansion to a catastrophic point.
|
| But so many of these arguments are just post-hoc
| rationalizations to poorly justify what at root is this loss of
| self identity, we were always in the business of automating
| jobs out from under people, this is very weak tea and crocodile
| tears.
|
| The simple fact is, all our tools should allow us to have
| materially more comfortable and free lives, the Ai isn't the
| problem, it's the fact that devs didn't understand that tech is
| best when empowering people to think and connect better and
| have more freedom and self determination with their time.
|
| If that isn't happening it's not the codes fault, it's the
| network architecture of our current human power structures
| fault.
| aeblyve wrote:
| Agree, and well said. There are no points for hard work, only
| results -- this is an extremely liberating principle when
| taken to the limit and we should be happy to say goodbye to
| an era of manual software-writing being the norm, even if it
| costs the ego of some guy who spent the last 20 years being
| told SWE made him a demi-god.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| This is so funny to me.
|
| Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?
|
| Did an AI write your post or did you "hand write it"?
|
| Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs
| to do. Auto complete wasn't a huge time saver because writing
| code wasn't the bottleneck then and it definitely is not the
| bottleneck now. How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily
| change the quality or speed of what you produce. Specially if
| you pretend you're just doing "superior prompting with no hand
| coding involved".
|
| LLMs are awesome but the IDE didn't replace the console text
| editor, even if it's popular.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it
| needs to do.
|
| And yet after 3 decades in the industry I can tell you this
| fantasy exists only on snarky HN comments.
|
| > Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?
|
| hand-coding is 100% not the future, there are teams already
| that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore (I help
| with one of them that used to have 19 "hand-coders" :) ). The
| typing for sure will get phased out. it is quite insane that
| it took "AI" to make people realize how silly and wasteful is
| to type characters into IDEs/editors. the sooner you see this
| clearly the better it will be for your career
|
| > How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the
| quality or speed of what you produce.
|
| if it doesn't you need to spend more time and learn and learn
| and learn more. 4/6/8 terminals at a time doing all various
| things for you etc etc :)
| muldvarp wrote:
| I think there is only a very narrow band where LLMs are good
| enough at producing software that "hand-coding" is genuinely
| dead but at the same time bad enough that (expensive) humans
| still need to be paid to be in the loop.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| > This process has been affecting most of the world's workers
| for the past several centuries.
|
| It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which
| never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind
| of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the
| world's jobs obsolete, etc etc.
|
| Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be
| industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do
| you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole
| point.
|
| It's survivorship bias to only look at horses, cars,
| calculators, and whatever other real job market shifting
| technologies occurred in the past and assume that's how it
| always happens. You have to include all predictions which never
| panned out.
|
| As human beings we just tend no to do that.
|
| [EDIT: this being Pedantry News let me get ahead of an
| inevitable reply: 3D printing is used industrially, and it does
| have tremendous value. It enabled new ways of working, it grew
| the economy, and in some cases yes it even replaced processes
| which used to depend on injection molding. But by and large,
| the original predictions of "out with the old, in with the new"
| did not pan out. It was not the automobile to the horse and
| buggy. It was mostly additive, complementary, and turned out to
| have different use cases. That's the distinction.]
| aeblyve wrote:
| > Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be
| industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How
| do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole
| point.
|
| One could have made a reasonable remark in the past about how
| injection molding is dramatically faster than 3D printing,
| scales better for large parts, et cetera. This isn't really
| true for what I'm calling hand-coding.
|
| Obviously nothing about the future can be known for
| certain... but there are obvious trends that need not stop at
| software engineering.
| casey2 wrote:
| Programmer isn't a real thing, all these classes of people are
| made up. The biggesdt difference between an iPad Toddler and
| Dijkstra is that the toddler is much more efficient at
| programming.
|
| Sure you can discover things that aren't intuitively obvious and
| these things may be useful, but that's more scientist than
| anything to do with programming. programming + science = computer
| science programming + engineering = software engineering
| programming + iPad = interactive computing programming + AI =
| vibe coding Don't equate programming with software engineering
| when they are clearly two distinct things. This article would
| more accurately be called the software engineers' identity
| crisis. Maybe some hobby engineers (programming + craft) might
| also be feeling this depending on how many external tools they
| already rely on. What's really shocking is how many software
| engineers claim to put in Herculean effort in their code, but
| ship it on top (or adjacent if you have an API) of "platforms"
| that could scarcely be less predictable. These platforms have to
| work very hard to build trust, but it's all meaningless cause
| users are locked in anyway. When user abuse is rampant people are
| going to look for deus ex machina and some slimy guy will be
| there to sell it to them.
| rafaelero wrote:
| It's honestly not that deep. If AI increases productivity, we
| should accept it. If it doesn't, then the hype will eventually
| fade out. In any case, having attachment to the craft is a bit
| cringe. Technological progress trumps any emotional attachment.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-21 23:01 UTC)