[HN Gopher] We mourn our craft
___________________________________________________________________
We mourn our craft
Author : ColinWright
Score : 369 points
Date : 2026-02-07 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nolanlawson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nolanlawson.com)
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic
| engineering is much more fun.
|
| And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back
| in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get
| paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go
| back.
|
| I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!
| foobarian wrote:
| I had that same epiphany when I discovered AI is great at
| writing complicated shell command lines for me. I had a bit of
| an identity crisis right there because I thought I was an
| aspiring Unixhead neckbeard but in truth I hated the process.
| Especially the scavenger hunt of finding stuff in man pages.
| wesammikhail wrote:
| Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more
| fun, more power to you.
|
| I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to
| think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better
| than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult
| problems is in itself a reward.
| nojito wrote:
| >You get to think through a problem and figure out why
| decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains
| and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
|
| So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about.
|
| Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth
| time?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| (a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing
| out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation
| stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason
| why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working
| on cars, Legos, and so on. (b) it allows you to have some
| time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of
| coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the
| next "hard" section.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Same here i'm a decade plus in this field, writing code was
| by far the number 1 and the discussion surrounding system
| design was a far second. Take away the coding i don't think i
| will make it to retirement being a code/llm PR auditor for
| work. So i'am already planning on exiting the field in the
| next decade.
| mlinhares wrote:
| 1. it isn't that bad
|
| 2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude
| with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i
| provide very specific prompts
|
| 3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay
| your bills every month is something i could do when my parents
| paid my bills
|
| These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't
| match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more
| productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to
| doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do
| it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already
| know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or
| Opus producing the code.
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about
| seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about
| how technology is destroying their jobs. We're _the_ industry of
| "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we
| do it to ourselves...
| zamalek wrote:
| This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a
| passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion,
| the only difference being that many people can appreciate human
| art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the
| code?
| ALoverOfLats wrote:
| Huge tangent but curiosity is killing me: By any chance is
| your username based on the Egyptian football club Zamalek?
| jhickok wrote:
| I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for
| you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that
| everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be
| subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will
| probably always be a heavily diminished demand for
| handcrafted code.
| andai wrote:
| I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from
| the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more
| time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that
| were previously inconceivable!
|
| Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color
| and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing
| how to do the math for any of those things. (My total
| involvement at the source level was fiddling with the
| neighbor distance.)
|
| https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output
|
| Then I turned them into weird proteins
|
| https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output
|
| (As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing"
| overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
| mirsadm wrote:
| Yes but did you learn anything?
| apitman wrote:
| Obviously that matters, but how much does it matter? Does
| it matter if you don't learn anything about computer
| architecture because you only code in JS all day? Very
| situational.
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| There's a subset of people whose identity is grounded in
| the fact that they put in the hard work to learn things
| that most people are unable or unwilling to do. It's a
| badge of honor, and they resent anyone taking "shortcuts"
| to achieve their level of output. Kind of reminds me of
| lawyers who get bent out of shape when they lose a case
| to a pro se party. All those years of law school and
| studying for the bar exam, only to be bested by someone
| who got by with copying sample briefs and skimming
| Westlaw headnotes at a public library. :)
| geetee wrote:
| It's not that our identity is grounded in being
| competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes
| left by people taking shortcuts.
| eslaught wrote:
| It's that, but it's also that the incentives are
| misaligned.
|
| How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced
| unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then
| the effort to produce that code is lauded while the
| nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as
| unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult?
|
| I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming
| easy, even trivial, to be that dysfunctional "10x" coder,
| and dramatically harder to be the competent maintainer.
| And the existence of AI tools will reinforce the culture
| gap rather than reducing it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very
| reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A
| genuine expression of talent and feeling through the
| instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the
| bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies,
| theater. If you were really good you could perform as a
| headliner.
|
| Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants,
| eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and
| soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform
| as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for
| musicians is just gone.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants
|
| It only sounds like music.
| janderland wrote:
| The people outside of us didn't care about your beautiful
| code before. Now we can quickly build their boring
| applications and spend more time building beautiful things
| for our community's sake. Yes, there are economic concerns,
| but as far as "craft" goes, nothing is stopping us from
| continuing to enjoy it.
| zrail wrote:
| Except that's not really true, because the work expands to
| fill the time allotted. Now we can build more boring
| applications with fewer people.
| janderland wrote:
| Yes, it is true that companies are always hungry for
| more. But once again, those same companies never cared
| about beautiful code. They wanted us to build something
| that works as quickly as possible. In my experience, the
| beauty of programming was often enjoyed outside of work
| for this very reason, and we can still enjoy it outside
| of work for it's own sake.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae,
| sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of
| people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has
| been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all
| of it). That's part that I mourn.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Is coding a passion only because other people appreciate it?
|
| Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is
| a passion in itself.
|
| There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a
| passion.
|
| My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in
| themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost
| noone does.
| crvdgc wrote:
| At least for this article it's more about the job, or to be
| precise, the past where job and passion coincided:
|
| > Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a
| family you love, you're going to make your decision.
|
| Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write
| code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people
| won't necessarily pay for it.
|
| The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning),
| considering in other industries, how many people can only
| enjoy what they do outside of work.
| boobsbr wrote:
| I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or
| something that "will automate your job away".
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was
| to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I
| guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.
| thwarted wrote:
| Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some
| people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not
| having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see
| "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to
| take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving
| and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars
| answer that--and the ads for Waymo latch onto this.
|
| Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor
| driving. For me, typing is like playing a musical
| instrument: at some point you stop needing to think about
| how to play and you just play. The interaction and control
| of the instrument just comes out of your body. At some
| point in my life, all the "need to do things around the
| house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by
| doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's
| complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when
| you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for
| taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or
| how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and
| participating in family/household responsibilities (like
| learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to
| clean up). Can you really be effective at directing
| someone/something else without knowing how to do it
| yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil".
|
| For sure.
|
| I idealize a future where people can spend more time
| doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations
| might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of
| Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream.
|
| The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal.
| Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of
| inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces that
| would oppose that elimination.
| thwarted wrote:
| And not just the definition, but the assumption that a
| specific toil is necessarily universal. I've had more
| than one conversation that started with someone else
| saying "using the LLM saves me _soooo_ much time typing,
| think of how much time typing you 'd save by using an
| LLM". But when I examine my processes and where I'm
| spending my time, typing isn't even on my list, so this
| claim is talking right past me and I can't see it all.
| Even when I was a hunt-and-peck typer on the c64 I didn't
| consider the typing to be a/the major factor in how long
| something took to program so much so that I continued
| with two-finger typing until I was forced to take a
| touch-typing class in highschool (back when that was
| still a thing, and we split the exercises between
| typewriters and computers).
|
| "I'm able to put my shirt on so much faster with this
| shirt-buttoning machine, and I don't spend time tediously
| buttoning shirts and maybe having to rebutton when I
| misalign the buttons and buttonholes. You should get one
| to button your shirts, you're wasting time by not using a
| buttoning machine".
|
| "I wear t-shirts."
|
| (Obviously a contrived and simplistic example for fun)
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Computers are definitely on the path to freeing programmers
| from programming
| ares623 wrote:
| For me it's because the same tech is doing it to everyone else
| in a more effective way (i.e. artists especially). I'm an "art
| enjoyer" since I was a child and to see it decimated by people
| who I once looked up to is heartbreaking. Also, if it only
| affected software, I would've been happy to switch to a more
| artistic career, but welp there goes that plan.
| Melonai wrote:
| I feel very similarly, I always thought of software
| engineering as being my future career. I'm young, I just
| really got my foot into the industry in my early twenties. It
| feels like the thing I wanted to do died right when I was
| allowed to start. I also always felt that if I didn't get to
| do development, I would try to get into arts which has always
| been a dream of mine, and now it feels that that died, too. I
| wish I was born just a little bit earlier, so that I had a
| bit more time. :(
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| Yeah, the thing that's different about this technical
| revolution compared to the previous ones is that its not
| only trying to take out multiple industries, but the
| creative process as a whole.
| bobro wrote:
| How do you read this article and hear indigence? It's clearly
| someone grieving something personal about their own
| relationship with the technology.
| AstroBen wrote:
| I'm very confident in saying the majority of developers didn't
| get into it saying "we'll automate your job away"
| nilespotter wrote:
| Per the "About Me" picture, this particular technologist does
| not have any hair to tear out.
| jsrcout wrote:
| "We" might be such an industry, but _I 'm_ not. My focus has
| always been on creating new capabilities, particularly for
| specialists in whatever field. I want to make individuals more
| powerful, not turn them into surplus.
| sprice wrote:
| > I didn't ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that
| of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI
| didn't smuggle something dangerous into production.
|
| This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem
| to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and
| read and listen to.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Do you mean the perspective that he is a "glorified TSA agent"
| or that he doesn't like it? Because in this thread it seems
| that some people agree but they just like it :)
| sprice wrote:
| I disagree the opportunities created for software engineers
| are reduced to those of a "glorified TSA agent".
|
| We now have more opportunity than ever to create more of the
| things we have wanted to. We are able to spend more time
| leaning into our abilities of judgement, creativity, specific
| knowledge, and taste.
|
| Countless programming frustrations are gone. I, and all those
| I talk to are having more fun than they have ever had.
|
| I'm still not sure what analogy fits for me. It's closer to
| product manager/maestro/artist/architect/designer that helps
| a number of amazing systems create great code.
| catlover76 wrote:
| dude needs to chill
|
| also:
|
| > We'll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that
| eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.
|
| no we won't lol wtf
|
| but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the
| LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time
| grahar64 wrote:
| "Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't
| eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| Just a couple more trillion dollars, we are so close!
| Banditoz wrote:
| This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to
| take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it
| for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened
| yet?
|
| Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt
| launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
| wlindley wrote:
| "Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With
| the advent of photography, it was widely believed that
| drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would
| obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with
| television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with
| no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| Just like in "I, Robot?"
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function
| safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has
| accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that
| what the "self driving" promise has been.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and
| due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a
| vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and
| perform exactly like every other waymo.
|
| But that's only because self driving cars are still new
| and incomplete. It's still the transition period.
|
| I already can't buy the car I want with a manual
| transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get
| with one, but the number is both already small and
| getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the
| one I want, even though it was available previously.
|
| I already can't buy _any_ (new) car that doesn 't have a
| permanent internet connection with data collection and
| remote control by people that don't own the car even
| though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone
| the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least
| break the on board internet connection after I buy the
| car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a
| trivial software change away, in software I don't get to
| see or edit.)
|
| It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you
| won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself,
| and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself
| because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or
| straight up fines.
|
| And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right
| out.
| dham wrote:
| My car has driven me back and forth with no issues for 6
| months now. But yes it's been a long time coming.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift
| in capability in the last year has been dramatic.
|
| It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more
| model generations there will be little need to hand code in
| almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT
| ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under
| performing right now.
|
| Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 and "teams
| mode") it already is another step function up in capability.
|
| Teams mode is probably only good for greenfield or "green
| module" development but I'm watching a team of 5 AI's
| collaborating and building out an application module by
| module. This is net new capability for the tool THIS WEEK
| (Yes I am aware of earlier examples).
|
| I don't understand how people can look at this and then be
| dismissive of future progress, but human psychology is a rich
| and non-logical landscape.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| But the sentiment has changed significantly over the last 6
| months. I think this is the biggest step change in sentiment
| since ChatGPT 3.5. Someone who said "wait 6 months" 6 months
| ago would have been "right".
| Kiro wrote:
| Things have progressed much faster than even the most
| optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true.
| Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is
| using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today
| will probably be equally moot in 6 months.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| Maybe we should look at output like quality of software being
| produced instead of discourse on forums where AI companies
| are spending billions to market?
|
| Where is all this new software and increased software quality
| from all this progression?
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. We can't
| even reliably predict the weather a week from now.
| iambateman wrote:
| I do not mourn.
|
| For my whole life I've been trying to make things--beautiful
| elegant things.
|
| When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and
| made images which seemed like magic.
|
| When I was in college, I learned to make websites through
| careful, painstaking effort.
|
| When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others
| to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.
|
| Then I learned software development and practiced the slow,
| methodical process of writing and debugging software.
|
| Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and
| directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery
| while I think about how to make the system wonderful and
| functional and beautiful.
|
| It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making
| something useful for myself and others. And that has never been
| easier.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and
| love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and
| useful things.
|
| This new world makes me more effective at it.
|
| And this new world doesn't prevent me from crafting elegant
| architectures either.
| croes wrote:
| Wait 5 years and your skills are down
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years
| of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code
| yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able
| to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Depends how long you've done it, and how much the
| landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back
| into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't
| done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.
|
| In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I
| don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've
| used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker
| than a new junior because I understand all the concepts
| of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of
| the modern tooling.
| AstroBen wrote:
| How much do you think Linus Torvalds has coded over the
| last decade? Why is he still able to do his job?
| esafak wrote:
| His job is reviewing.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| https://github.com/torvalds
| dham wrote:
| What infrastructure has gone through the last 15 years
| would like a word.
|
| Half the people I work with can't do imperative jQuery
| interfaces. So what I guess. I can't code assembly.
| croes wrote:
| A programming language is still an additional language
| with all the benefits of being multilingual.
|
| AI will kill that.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| In 5 years coding skills will matter as much as being able
| to operate an elevator. (sadly)
| fastasucan wrote:
| >It was, for me, never about the code.
|
| Then it wasn't your craft.
| arduanika wrote:
| No true programmer is excited for the future.
| heliumtera wrote:
| this is so true.
|
| never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for
| metal gear solid psx and gears of wars
| bojan wrote:
| As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can
| tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years.
| I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.
| blibble wrote:
| > I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.
|
| have you used them recently?
|
| terrible, is the word I would use
|
| (as a customer since the 2010s)
| boxedemp wrote:
| And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge
| arduanika wrote:
| Yes, that was the reference!
|
| Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being
| downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by
| pessimists who got it.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Haha, I downvoted you from the first category (until I
| read this comment).
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Most sarcasm worsens discussion. And the comment
| guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or
| status not because they like the process. Which is not an
| issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI
| assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours
| that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting
| exhausting.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't
| even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of
| college when I got an internship at AWS. I constantly
| programmed and read programming texts in my spare time
| growing up, in college, and after work.
|
| I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can
| even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that
| I don't know.
|
| I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best
| practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.
| logicprog wrote:
| That is an insane assumption to make based on the
| grandparents' post. What part of them talking about how
| much they care about the systems thinking and software
| architecture and usefulness and meaningfulness to other
| people of software over the day-to-day drudgery of APIs and
| bugs and typing in syntax indicates to you that they only
| care about money and status? They just care about a
| different part of the process.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > many went into this field for money
|
| I went into this field for _both_! what do i do now, i 'm
| screwed
| stevejb wrote:
| Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come
| out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow
| 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about
| making things.
|
| There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use
| the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and
| some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which
| woodworking is not their craft?
| jstanley wrote:
| The only confusion is in the use of the term "woodworking".
|
| For the power tool user, "woodworking with hand tools"
| isn't their craft.
|
| For the CNC user, "woodworking with manual machines" isn't
| their craft.
| AstroBen wrote:
| It's feeling much closer to hiring a woodworker to make you
| something, not woodworking tools
| terminalbraid wrote:
| The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even
| just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about
| the production process past asking for something and seeing
| if the final result fits the bill.
|
| You get something that looks like a cabinet because you
| asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking
| craft", power tools or otherwise.
| sally_glance wrote:
| I'm pretty sure at least the better woodworking shop
| managers and QA people all have experience with
| woodworking and probably would also consider this their
| craft if asked.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| If it looks like a cabinet, works as a cabinet and
| doesn't fall apart, by all intents and purposes it's a
| cabinet. 99% of people out there won't care if it was a
| "craftsman" or a robot built it. Just like most people
| buy furniture at Ikea.
| gugagore wrote:
| Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it
| is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!
|
| I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood
| that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker
| reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is
| different.
|
| We can _try_ to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with
| wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that
| variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production
| process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust
| to).
|
| But could we imagine an automated woodworking _system_ that
| takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not
| in an aggregate sense (like I 'm painting Ikea to do), but
| in an individual sense? That system would be making
| judgements that are woodworker-like.
|
| The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement
| of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an
| apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...
|
| Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But
| you still need craft in designing the reward function.
|
| Perhaps.
| ori_b wrote:
| The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to
| assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.
|
| There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of
| business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make
| reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their
| money comes from YouTube ads.
|
| There's no shame in just wanting things without going to
| the effort of making them.
| chongli wrote:
| I think a better comparison is painting and photography.
| Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits
| of individuals and families was a real profession. Today
| it's practically unheard of outside of heads of state and
| the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford
| to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick
| session in a photographer's studio is so much cheaper and
| more convenient.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is a different kind of code. Just a lot of programmers
| can't grock it as such.
|
| I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad
| school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it
| has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level.
| Now I'm doing both with AI and it's a lot of fun. It is just
| programming at a higher level.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| That's just gatekeeping.
|
| It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5.
| Like 30 years now.
|
| Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to
| AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the
| biggest AI on the planet.
|
| But my craft was not typing. It's coding.
|
| If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if
| you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your
| life.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Right, there is a non-zero overlap between the VIM Andy's
| and AI nay-sayers.
| kelnos wrote:
| A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing
| the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone
| else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are
| not coding.
|
| I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then
| reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill
| that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it
| is coding.
|
| It's more like super-technical product management, or like
| a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort
| of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior
| and stay as hands-off as possible.
|
| It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you
| do, you are no longer a coder.
|
| You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I
| think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in
| admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where
| you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder
| anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into
| management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at
| it.
|
| (If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've
| done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years
| old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop
| software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my
| passion, and has been for most of my life.)
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Assembling code doesn't require typing. Linking doesn't
| require typing.
|
| Even though once upon a time both did.
|
| Claiming that this isn't coding is as absurd as saying
| that coding is only what you do when you hook up the
| wires between some vacuum tubes.
|
| The LLM is a very smart compiler. That's all.
|
| Some people want to sit and write assembly. Good for
| them. But asserting that unless I assemble my own code
| I'm not a coder is just silly.
| iambateman wrote:
| I'm going to be thinking about this comment for a while---and
| I think you're basically right.
|
| Almost none of the code I wrote in 2015 is still in use
| today. Probably some percentage of people can point to code
| that lasted 20 years or longer, but it can't be a big
| percentage. When I think of the work of a craft, I think of
| doing work which is capable of standing up for a long time. A
| great builder can make a house that can last for a thousand
| years and a potter can make a bowl that lasts just as long.
|
| I've thought of myself as a craftsman of code for a long time
| but maybe that was just wrong.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| so much garbage ego in statements like this. if you _really_
| knew about software, you 'd recognize there are about a
| million ways to be successful in this field
| RGamma wrote:
| AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But
| let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My
| hope is the substance will increase, after all.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| So when you "learned software development and practiced the
| slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it
| wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things
| is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you
| do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important
| part of the process.
|
| It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those
| tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE
| CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a
| surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but
| "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making
| people get better!"
|
| I mean sure yeah but also not really.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy
| are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the
| definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose
| all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI
| especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things
| like:
|
| - infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that
| does x and y.
|
| - porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them
| from 6.14 to 6.17.
|
| - tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that
| fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite
| this from bash to Python.
|
| - fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or
| ansible
|
| - fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build
| failure, what's the "real" issue here?
|
| In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking,
| and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a
| first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which
| can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind
| of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely
| interesting.
|
| Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind
| of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a
| programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard
| work of actually being creative.
|
| Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part
| of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something
| that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?
| nubg wrote:
| What sets you apart from millions of manual programmers?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative
|
| This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I
| say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At
| least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D
| animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work"
| it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when
| "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that
| feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for
| others.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I've been a professional programmer for 8+ years now. I've
| stomached that life. I've made things people used and paid
| for.
|
| If I can do that typing one line at a time, I can do it _way_
| faster with AI.
| boxedemp wrote:
| You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't
| have tell tails
| croes wrote:
| But you don't make.
|
| You order it.
| derektank wrote:
| The transition is from author to editor/publisher. Both play
| an important role in bringing something new into the world.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's true, but ask an author and 99% of them will say they
| don't want to be an editor.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Right.
|
| It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own
| meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal
| chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but
| it's not really the same deal.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in
| charge of 30 cooks.
|
| Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative
| part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience.
| You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the
| thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on
| architecture and design now instead of writing your
| 10,000th list comprehension.
| tatjam wrote:
| Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have
| become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is
| being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sure, but the point is you're now doing the most creative
| and satisfying part. Not the drudgery.
|
| It's _not_ that you 've stopped doing anything at all,
| like the other commenter claimed in their personal chef
| analogy.
| tatjam wrote:
| Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's
| required to actually go and write that algorithm, think
| out all the data ownership relationships, name the
| variables, think the edge cases for the tests?
|
| For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is
| what actually leads to true understanding of the logic,
| in a similar way to how the only way to understand a
| mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not
| doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is
| irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are
| otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.
|
| I believe that coding was one of the few things (among,
| for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process
| of crafting something with your hands where the object
| you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our
| brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal
| mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to
| see it thrown out of the window in the name of a
| productivity that may not even be real.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that
| 's required to actually go and write that algorithm,
| think out all the data ownership relationships, name the
| variables, think the edge cases for the tests?_
|
| For 99% of the functions I've written in my life?
| _Absolutely_ drudgery. They 're barely algorithms. Just
| bog-standard data transformation. This is what I _love_
| having AI replace.
|
| For the other 1% that actually requires original thought,
| truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it
| literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although
| I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the
| unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I
| may have missed.
|
| The point is, LLMs let me spend _more_ time at the higher
| level of abstraction that is more productive. It 's not
| taking it away!
| tatjam wrote:
| I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for
| for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended
| towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical
| higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire
| another developer).
| icedchai wrote:
| I see junior PM types glowing about being able to lead
| teams of agents, doing their bidding without putting up a
| fuss or argument. Short term, developers are in for a
| world of hurt. Long term, we're going to need a lot more
| to clean this crap up.
| icedchai wrote:
| I think there is room for a hybrid approach. You can
| delegate most of the "drudgery" to AI, but keep the parts
| that require creative solutions for yourself. There is
| undoubtedly a lot of crappy work we have to do as
| engineers. This is stuff that _needs_ to be done but has
| also been done many times before.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Because such people are not sincere either to themselves
| about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to
| take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make
| things, not to write code".
|
| Do painters paint because they just like to see the final
| picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an
| artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point
| stand.
|
| Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the
| process.
| logicprog wrote:
| I think unless you're vibe coding, it's pretty clear that
| they're still making it. Just because you aren't literally
| typing 100% of the characters that make up the syntax of the
| programming language you're using doesn't mean you're not
| making the final product in most meaningful sentences if
| you're designing the architecture, the algorithms, the data
| structures, the state machines, the interfaces, etc, and
| thinking about how they interact and whether they'll do
| something that's useful for the people you're making it for.
| eranation wrote:
| I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building
| things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find
| myself miss writing code by hand as much.
|
| I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the
| right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build
| things right".
|
| But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day
| that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have
| the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human
| (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase,
| which is not there yet)
|
| My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while
| now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess,
| teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube
| influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of
| celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player
| will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So
| maybe there is hope.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| > I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the
| right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build
| things right".
|
| I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the
| issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right
| things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to
| copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will
| become even harder than it is today. Success will be
| determined by personal brand, social media presence, social
| connections.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > Success will be determined by personal brand, social
| media presence, social connections.
|
| Always has been. (Meme)
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| For me, photography is the metaphor -
| https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the
| technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for
| close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.
|
| Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio
| star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of
| the podcast.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| While what you're saying is true, I think it is important
| to recognize that painting in a way that generates a
| livable income is mostly a marketing gig.
|
| Likewise, being a podcaster, or "influencer" in general, is
| all about charisma and marketing.
|
| So with value destruction for knowledge workers (and
| perhaps physical workers too once you factor in robotics)
| we may in fact be moving into a real "attention economy"
| where all value is related to being a charismatic marketer,
| which will be good for some people for a while, terrible
| for the majority, but even for the winners it seems like a
| limited reprieve. Historically speaking charismatic
| marketers can only really exist through the patronage of
| people who mostly aren't themselves charismatic marketers.
| Without patrons (who have disposable income to share) the
| charismatic marketers are eventually just as fucked as
| everyone else.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| > will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right
| things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do
| it better than an AI+human
|
| I share this sentiment. It's really cool that these systems
| can do 80% of the work. But given what this 80% entails, I
| don't see a moat around that remaining 20%.
| eranation wrote:
| I can't explain it in a way that will make sense or base it
| on any data, but I do see that moat all the time. For
| example, Microsoft / GitHub somehow taking a 3 year lead
| (with Co-Pilot) and losing it to Cursor in months, and
| still catching up.
|
| Microsoft / GitHub have no real limitation to doing
| better/faster, maybe it's the big company mentality, moving
| slower, fear of taking risks where you have a lot to lose,
| or when the personal incentive for a product manager at
| github is much much lower than the one of a co-founder of a
| seed stage startup. Co-Pilot was a microscopic line item
| for Microsoft as a whole, and probably marginal for GitHub
| too. But for Cursor, this was everything.
|
| This is why we have innovation, if mega-corps didn't
| promote people to their level of incompetence, if
| bureaucracy and politics didn't ruin every good thing, if
| private equity didn't bleed every beloved product to the
| last penny, we would have no chance for any innovation or
| entrepreneurship because these company have practically
| close to unlimited resources.
|
| So my only conclusion from this is - the moat is sometimes
| just the will to do better, to dare to say, I don't care if
| someone has a billion dollars to compete with me, I'll
| still do better.
|
| In other words, don't underestimate the power of big
| companies to make colossal mistakes and build crappy
| products. My only worry is, that AI would not make the same
| mistakes an we'll basically have a handful of companies in
| the world (the makers of models, owner of tokens e.g.
| OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAi), if AI led
| product teams will be able to not make the mistakes of
| modern corporations of ruining everything good that they
| got in their hands, then maybe software related
| entrepreneurship will be dead.
| blargthorwars wrote:
| Computers are better at chess. Humans invented chess and
| enjoy it.
|
| I think humans have the advantage.
| godelski wrote:
| > "build the right things" [vs] "build things right"
|
| I think this (frequent) comparison is incorrect. There are
| times when quality doesn't matter and times that it does.
| _Without that context these discussions are meaningless_.
|
| If I build my own table no one really gives a shit about the
| quality besides me and maybe my friends judging me.
|
| But if I sell it, well then people certainly care[0] and they
| have every right to.
|
| If I build my own deck at my house people do also care and
| there's a reason I need to get permits for this, because the
| danger it can cause to others. It's not a crazy thing to get
| your deck inspected and that's really all there is to it.
|
| So I don't get these conversations because people are just
| talking past one another. Look, no one gives a fuck if you
| poorly vibe code your personal website, or at least it is
| gonna be the same level as building your own table. But if
| Ikea starts shipping tables with missing legs (even if it is
| just 1%) then I sure give a fuck and all the customers have a
| right to be upset.
|
| I really think a major part of this concern with vibe coding
| is about something bigger. It is about slop in general. In
| the software industry we've been getting sloppier and
| sloppier and LLMs significantly amplify that. It really
| doesn't matter if _you_ can vibe code something with no
| mistakes, what matters is what the businesses do. Let 's be
| honest, they're rushing and don't care about quality because
| they have markets cornered and consumers are unable to
| accurately evaluate products _prior to purchase_. That 's the
| textbook conditions for a lemon market. I mean the companies
| outsource tech support so you call and someone picks up who's
| accent makes you suspicious of their real name being "Steve".
| After all, it is the fourth "Steve" you've talked to as you
| get passed around from support person to support person. The
| same companies who contract out coders from poor countries
| and where you find random comments in another language.
| That's the way things have been going. More vaporware. More
| half baked products.
|
| So yeah, when you have no cake the half baked cake is
| probably better than nothing. At home it also doesn't matter
| if you're eating a half baked cake or one that competes with
| the best bakers in the world. But for everyday people who
| can't bake their own cakes, what do they do? All they see is
| a box with a cake in it, one is $1, another for $10, and
| another other is $100. They look the same but they can't know
| until they take a bite. You try enough of the $1 cakes and by
| the time you give up the $10 cakes are all gone. By the time
| you get so frustrated you'll buy the $100 cake they're gone
| too.
|
| I don't dislike vibe coding because it is "building things
| the wrong way" or any of that pretentious notion. I, and I
| believe most people with a similar opinion, care because _"
| the right things" aren't being built_. Most people don't care
| _how_ things were built, but they sure do care about the
| result. Really people only start caring about how the sausage
| is made when they find out that something distasteful is
| being served and concealed from them. It 's why everyone is
| saying "slop".
|
| So when people make this false dichotomy it just feels like
| people aren't listing to what's actually being said.
|
| [0] Mind you, it is much easier for an inexperienced person
| to judge the quality of a table than software. You don't need
| to be a carpenter to know a table's leg is missing or that it
| is wobbly but that doesn't always hold true for more
| sophisticated things like software or even cars. If you
| haven't guessed already, I'm referencing lemon markets:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
| eranation wrote:
| Of course. I mean, my view is that it needs to be "build
| the right things right", vs "build things right and then
| discover if they are the right things". It's a stab at
| premature optimisation, focusing on code elegance more than
| delivering working software. Code simplicity, good design,
| scalability, are super important for maintainability, even
| in the age of AI (maybe even more so).
|
| But considering that AI will more and more "build things
| right" by default, it's up to us humans to decide what are
| the "right things to build".
|
| Once AI knows what are the "right things to build" better
| than humans, this is AGI in my book, and also the end of
| classical capitalism as we know it. Yes, there will still
| be room for "human generated" market, like we have today
| (photography didn't kill painting, but it made it a much
| less of a main employment option)
|
| In a way, AI is the great equality maker, in the past the
| strongest men prevailed, then when muscles were not the
| main means to assert force, it was the intellect, now it's
| just sheer want. You want to do something, now you can, you
| have no excuses, you just need to believe it's possible,
| and do it.
|
| As someone else said, agency is eating the world. For now.
| godelski wrote:
| > it needs to be "build the right things right", vs
| "build things right and then discover if they are the
| right things"
|
| I still think this is a bad comparison and I hoped my
| prior comment would handle this. Frankly, you're always
| going to end up in the second situation[0] simply because
| of 2 hard truths. 1) you're not omniscient and 2) even if
| you were, the environment isn't static. >
| But considering that AI will more and more "build things
| right" by default
|
| And this is something I don't believe. I say a lot more
| here[1] but you can skip my entire comment and just read
| what Dijkstra has to say himself. I dislike that we often
| pigeonhole this LLM coding conversation into one about a
| deterministic vs probabilistic language. Really the
| reason I'm not in favor of LLMs is because I'm not in
| favor of natural language programming[2]. The reason I'm
| not in favor of natural language programming has nothing
| to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do
| with its lack of precision[3].
|
| I'm with Dijkstra because, like him, I believe we
| invented symbolic formalism for a reason. Like him, I
| believe that abstraction is incredibly useful and
| powerful, but it is about the right abstraction for the
| job.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911268
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928421
|
| [2] At the end of the day, that's what they are. Even if
| they produce code you're still treating it as a
| transpiler: turning natural language into code.
|
| [3] Okay, technically it does but that's because
| probability has to do with this[4] and I'm trying to
| communicate better and most people aren't going to
| connect the dots (pun intended) between function mapping
| and probabilities. The lack of precision is inherently
| representable through the language of probability but
| most people aren't familiar with terms like "image" and
| "pre-image" nor "push-forward" and "pull-back". The
| pedantic nature of this note is precisely illustrative of
| my point.
|
| [4] https://www.mathsisfun.com/sets/injective-surjective-
| bijecti...
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right
| things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do
| it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to
| the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)
|
| Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it
| will happen much faster than people think.
|
| Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore.
| When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it
| isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers,
| managers in general or even software companies at all
| anymore.
|
| Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume
| *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them
| disappears and then the justified worrying will begin.
|
| People on the "right things to build" track love to point out
| how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume
| their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing
| liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are
| at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast
| with the human element removed?
|
| Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't
| historically some sort of software designer is going to have
| to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want,
| but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any
| humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people
| just won't really need software as we currently think about
| it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI.
|
| The real question is what happens when the labor market for
| non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all.
| Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of
| economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible
| leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse,
| but I'd love to be wrong.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| > The main question is this - will there be a day that AI
| will know what are "the right things to build"
|
| What makes you think AI already isn't at the same level of
| quality or higher for "build the right things" as it is for
| "building things right"?
| Johnny_Bonk wrote:
| I couldn't agree more.
| voidhorse wrote:
| In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care
| and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same
| level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I
| doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work
| without being _intimately_ familiar with that work. The
| distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the
| output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it,
| sure, but at that point it 's probably _more_ efficient to just
| do things yourself and have complete intimate control.
|
| To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are
| presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass
| production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do
| not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the
| use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is _very_ close
| to the use of automation lines in the production of physical
| goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus
| beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will
| increase, but they 'll all be barely differentiable souless
| replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as
| infinitum.
| mversic wrote:
| only the true artist will survive the advent of LLMs
| bloomca wrote:
| I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and
| you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure
| tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust
| for something where they recognize typical patterns.
|
| With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be
| similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things.
|
| To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much
| forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents
| disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| > For my whole life I've been trying to make things--beautiful
| elegant things.
|
| Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the
| pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software
| products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for
| me.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I _want_ to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP 's
| blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the
| dead". That's all he's asking, I think.
| rdedev wrote:
| Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music
| industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and
| taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One
| example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record
| scratch sound?
|
| https://youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk
| kelnos wrote:
| I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big
| part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy
| like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel
| the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and
| reviewing its output.
|
| If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't
| call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent
| conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I
| wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to
| write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either
| doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in
| this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build
| your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product
| manager, something of that nature.
|
| That said, I never derived joy from _every single second_ of
| coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find
| tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an
| LLM loose on some of those parts.
|
| But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby
| projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to
| write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more
| "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still
| "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| So many people responding to you with snarky comments or
| questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You
| shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a
| personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism
| directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more
| productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster.
|
| To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want
| to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure
| that hitching your _identity_ to hating AI is altogether a good
| idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools
| improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly
| shifts to incorporate them.
|
| Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be
| just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with
| AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor
| force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even
| the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And
| there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to
| help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to
| cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a
| particular way of working in a particular late-20th and
| early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away
| but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still
| do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good
| at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all
| that important in the grand scheme of things.
| ori_b wrote:
| > For my whole life I've been trying to make things--beautiful
| elegant things.
|
| Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the
| process of creating for the immediacy of having. It's paying
| someone to make for you.
|
| Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM,
| and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you
| that's making.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers
| don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.
|
| Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at
| generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali
| Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.
|
| This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI
| clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly
| paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between
| "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything
| that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple
| users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have
| trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| But why would someone pay you for that?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and
| directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery
| while I think about how to make the system wonderful and
| functional and beautiful.
|
| For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of
| you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a
| living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-
| but-one Claude release drops?
|
| Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for
| whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times
| can a person do that? How many times can _you_ do that?
| sosomoxie wrote:
| I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like
| computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever
| before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you
| could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't
| believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun
| computing.
|
| I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something"
| at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's
| not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone
| after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.
| massysett wrote:
| We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.
|
| Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at
| least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The
| only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be
| knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always
| available.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > Now it's always available.
|
| And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try
| again.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't
| sound appealing.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate
| this process
| terminalbraid wrote:
| No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to
| automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a
| problem".
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| You're free to use whatever tools you like.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > You're free to use whatever tools you like.
|
| this is important, i feel like a lot of people are
| falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of
| thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to
| apply an AI helper in software development. You can
| adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you.
| ..or leave it as is.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole"
| doesn't sound appealing._
|
| Then programming may not be the best hobby or career for
| you.
| Jensson wrote:
| When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people
| here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then
| can't check it all.
| dgacmu wrote:
| It is! But you can then verify it via a correct,
| conventional forward dictionary.
|
| The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy
| to check correctness...
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and
| we reach the true problem.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| It's not an analogy.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Is it? I've seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be
| increasingly rare these days.
|
| Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the
| early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but
| also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone
| could put anything on there, and therefore it was
| unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.
|
| 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may
| have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most
| impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer
| in a generation.
| advael wrote:
| I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest
| capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that
| came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in
| results that comes from how that capability is structured
| and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and
| institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most
| reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social
| media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot
| people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable
| mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination
| on a regular basis.
|
| I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like
| crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic
| natural language processing that scales to large corpora.
| That's big. Also, I think the state of the software
| industry that is mostly driving the development,
| deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly
| doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some
| hope that better orgs and distributed communities will
| accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things
| with them over time, but right now the field is bleak,
| not because the technology isn't impressive (although
| somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being
| oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten
| institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that
| brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My
| hope for the new world a technology will bring about will
| never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more
| thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source
| communities that actually build good shit for humanity,
| time and time again
| astrashe2 wrote:
| This is a great description of how I use Claude.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia
| quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852):
|
| > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be
| most fitly and aptly expressed
|
| Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like
| https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language
| input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs.
| (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of
| this comment.)
|
| I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I
| didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a
| lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out
| a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around
| Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough(tm) to find me
| an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get
| the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish
| generating a response.)
|
| There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big
| book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus,
| but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think
| actually _is_ an improvement.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Really?
|
| "What's a word that means admitting a large number of
| uses?"
|
| That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either
| versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those
| are the end points).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook
| Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting
| %20a%20large%2...), and it returned:
|
| > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of
| many different uses
|
| with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-
| use" as the runner-up candidates.
|
| ---
|
| Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus
| existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so
| here's my attempt to look this up manually.
|
| "Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually
| abbreviated to "very useful" ->
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give
| up, use a thesaurus.
|
| https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-
| for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways",
| lists:
|
| > useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction
| adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse
| multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal
| protean general general-purpose [...]
|
| Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is
| greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've
| spuriously rejected "multipurpose" - a decent synonym of
| "versatile [tool]" - but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty
| sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and
| a lot of these words _don 't_ mean "very useful", but
| they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once
| we have versatile, we can put that into an _actual_
| thesaurus:
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But
| none of those really have the same _sense_ as
| "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except
| perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd
| go with "versatile".
|
| Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the
| answer is correct.
|
| By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's
| not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually
| seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at
| least:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous).
| There are certainly contexts where you could use this
| word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set"
| - "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo
| for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
| dgacmu wrote:
| 'multifarious uses' -> the implication would be having
| not just many but also a wide diversity of uses
|
| M-W gives an example use of "Today's Thermomix has become
| a beast of multifarious functionality. -- Matthew
| Korfhage, Wired News, 21 Nov. 2025 "
|
| wordhippo strikes me as having gone beyond the
| traditional paper thesaurus, but I can accept that things
| change and that we can make a much larger thesaurus than
| we did when we had to collect and print. thesaurus.com
| does not offer these results, though, as a reflection of
| a more traditional one, nor does the m-w thesaurus.
| yunwal wrote:
| A thesaurus is not a reverse dictionary
| cess11 wrote:
| "The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books
| and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was"
|
| Did you have trouble with this part?
| Levitating wrote:
| > golden age of computing
|
| I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our
| platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and
| our software is over-engineered garbage.
|
| The same company that develops our browsers and our web
| standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI
| scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all
| software got worse for it.
|
| Our most popular desktop operating system doesn't even have an
| easy way to package and update software for it.
| sosomoxie wrote:
| Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes,
| scale has enabled terrible things.
|
| There are more alternatives than ever though. People are
| still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere.
| Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes
| away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make
| economically viable things, you can make fun things.
|
| I have at least a dozen projects going now that I would have
| never had time or energy for. Any itch, no matter how geeky
| and idiosyncratic, is getting scratched by AI.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's never been easier for you to make a competitor
|
| So what is stopping you other than yourself?
| tock wrote:
| Billions of dollars?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You don't need billions of dollars to write an app. You
| need billions of dollars to create an independent
| platform that doesn't give the incumbent a veto over your
| app if you're trying to compete with them. And _that 's_
| the problem.
| linguae wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but my answer is that there's a big
| difference between building products and building
| businesses.
|
| I've been programming since 1998 when I was in elementary
| school. I have the technical skills to write almost
| anything I want, from productivity applications to
| operating systems and compilers. The vast availability of
| free, open source software tools helps a lot, and despite
| this year's RAM and SSD prices, hardware is far more
| capable today at comparatively lower prices than a decade
| ago and especially when I started programming in 1998. My
| desktop computer is more capable than Google's original
| cluster from 1998.
|
| However, building businesses that can compete against Big
| Tech is an entirely different matter. Competing against Big
| Tech means fighting moats, network effects, and
| intellectual property laws. I can build an awesome mobile
| app, but when it's time for me to distribute it, I have to
| either deal with app stores unless I build for a niche
| platform.
|
| Yes, I agree that it's never been easier to build competing
| products due to the tools we have today. However, Big Tech
| is even bigger today than it was in the past.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Yes. I have seen the better product lose out to network
| effects far too many times to believe that a real mass
| market competitor can happen nowadays.
|
| Look at how even the Posix ecosystem - once a vibrant
| cluster of a dozen different commercial and open source
| operating systems built around a shared open standard -
| has more or less collapsed into an ironclad monopoly
| because LXC became a killer app in every sense of the
| term. It's even starting to encroach on the last standing
| non-POSIX operating system, Windows, which now needs the
| ability to run Linux in a tightly integrated virtual
| machine to be viable for many commercial uses.
| icedchai wrote:
| Oracle Solaris and IBM AIX are still going. Outside of
| enterprises that are die hard Sun/Oracle or IBM shops, I
| haven't seen a job requiring either in decades. I used to
| work with both and don't miss them in the least.
| davidw wrote:
| Yes, this is where it's at for me. LLM's are cool and I can
| see them as progress, but I really dislike that they're
| controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount
| of money to use.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Use local OSS models then? They aren't as good and you need
| beefy hardware (either Apple silicon or nvidia GPUs). But
| they are totally workable, and you avoid your dislikes
| directly.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a
| significant amount of money to use.
|
| is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which
| you work, software that you use to browse the internet,
| read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours
| before and I am not sure I understand it given _everything
| else_ - why does _this_ matter for LLMs and not the phone
| you use etc etc?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Same.
|
| I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97
|
| it's never been easier, better or more accessible time to make
| literally anything - by far.
|
| Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping
| you AND even that is easier.
|
| Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally
| couldn't in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine.
|
| It's not even close.
|
| This "I'm a victim because my software engineering hobby isn't
| profitable anymore" take is honestly baffling.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I'm not going to code by hand if it's 4x slower than having
| Claude do it. Yes, I _can_ do that, but it just feels bad.
|
| The analogy I like is it's like driving vs. walking. We were
| healthier when we walked everywhere, but it's very hard to
| quit driving and go back even if it's going to be better for
| you.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I walk all the time
|
| During the summer I'll walk 30-50 miles a week
|
| However I'm not going to walk to work ever and I'm damn sir
| not going to walk in the rain or snow unless if I can avoid
| it
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| I actually like the analogy but for the opposite reason.
| Cars have become the most efficient way to travel for most
| industrial purposes. And yet enormous numbers of people
| still walk, run, ride bikes, or even horses, often for
| reasons entirely separate from financial gain.
| chasd00 wrote:
| it's an exciting time, things are changing and changing
| beyond "here's my new javascript framework". It's definitely
| an industry shakeup kind of deal and no one knows what lies 6
| months, 1 year, 5 years from now. It makes me anxious seeing
| as i have a wife+2 kids to care for and my income is tied to
| this industry but it's exciting too.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Well you need to learn to adapt quickly if you have that
| much infrastructure to maintain
| crawshaw wrote:
| Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree.
| Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a
| wonderful time to be alive.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I agree with you with the caveat that all the "ease of
| building" benefits, for me, could potentially be dwarfed by job
| losses and pay decreases. If SWE really becomes obsolete, or
| even if the number of roles decrease a lot and/or the pay
| decreases a lot (or even fails to increase with inflation), I
| am suddenly in the unenviable position of not being financially
| secure and being stuck in my 30s with an increasingly useless
| degree. A life disaster, in other words. In that scenario the
| unhappiness of worrying about money and retraining far
| outweighs the happiness I get from being able to build stuff
| really fast.
|
| Fundamentally this is the only point I really have on the
| 'anti-AI' side, but it's a really important one.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI
| programming is.
|
| But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started
| programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better,
|
| I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and
| still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it.
|
| Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to
| remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view
| this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over
| and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a
| thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will
| really change.
| apitman wrote:
| OT but I see your account was created in 2015, so I'm
| assuming very late in your career. Curious what brought you
| to HN at that time and not before?
| jmclnx wrote:
| I did not know it existed before 2015 :)
| querez wrote:
| I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding
| space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we
| wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects
| and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a
| higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But
| suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of
| abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be
| your main concern is suddenly automated away.
|
| If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy
| to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
| imiric wrote:
| > But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level
| of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to
| be your main concern is suddenly automated away.
|
| It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have
| the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher
| level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect.
| You may be working _with_ it today, but whatever you 're
| doing will eventually be done better by the same
| technology. This is just a transition period.
|
| Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools
| can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very
| much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however.
| Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is
| the most mind numbing activity a person can do.
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| I agree with this. At a higher level of abstraction,
| you're still doing the fundamental problem solving. Low-
| level machine language or high-level Java, C++ or even
| Python, the fundamental algorithm design is still
| entirely done by the programmer. LLMs aren't being used
| to just write the code unless the user is directing how
| each line or at least each function is being written,
| often times you can just describe the problem and it
| solves it most of the way if not entirely. Only for
| really long and complex tasks do the better models really
| require hand-holding and they are improving on that end
| rapidly.
|
| That's not a higher level of abstraction, it's having
| someone do the work for you while doing less and less of
| the thinking as well. Someone might resist that urge and
| consistently guide the model closely but that's probably
| not what the collective range of SWEs who use these
| models are doing and rapidly the ease of using these
| models and our natural reluctance to take on mental
| stress is likely to make sure that eventually everyone
| lets LLMs do most or all of the thinking for them. If
| things really go in that direction and spread, I foresee
| a collective dumbing down of the general population.
| apitman wrote:
| In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40
| years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but
| practically none of the software written today will still be
| around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business
| model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS,
| Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies.
| There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin
| it up in 2050 without major work.
|
| One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it
| completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of
| finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or
| will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black
| hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.
| ctmnt wrote:
| I'm not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what
| you're saying.
| apitman wrote:
| A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10
| years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the
| others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and
| having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false
| security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and
| GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that
| if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you
| have to implement all of std.
|
| All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't
| think any of my Go code will survive long term.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on
| the latest Go compiler.
|
| Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn't one of
| them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.
| croes wrote:
| > We're on the precipice of something incredible.
|
| Total dependence on a service?
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible
| now. Something that could benefit all of humanity.
| Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.
| puchatek wrote:
| If that was the final price, no strings attached and
| perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe
| not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer
| in a year or two.
|
| But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted
| by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your
| data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's
| unacceptable.
| hafley66 wrote:
| prefrontal cortex as a service
| slekker wrote:
| yup, all these folks claiming AI is the bees knees are
| delegating their thinking to a roulette that may or may not
| give proper answers. the world will become more and more
| like the movie idiocracy
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The quality of local models has increased significantly since
| this time last year. As have the options for running larger
| local models.
| IhateAI_2 wrote:
| These takes are terrible.
|
| 1. It costs 100k in hardware to run Kimi 2.5 with a single
| session at decent tok p/s and its still not capable for
| anything serious.
|
| 2. I want whatever you're smoking if you think anyone is
| going to spend billions training models capable of
| outcompeting them are affordable to run and then open
| source them.
| icedchai wrote:
| The quality of local models is still abysmal compared to
| commercial SOTA models. You're not going to run something
| like Gemini or Claude locally. I have some "serious"
| hardware with 128G of VRAM and the results are still
| laughable. If I moved up to 512G, it still wouldn't be
| enough. You need serious hardware to get both quality and
| speed. If I can get "quality" at a couple tokens a second,
| it's not worth bothering.
|
| They are getting better, but that doesn't mean they're
| good.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Good by what standard? Compared to SOTA today? No they're
| not. But they are better than the SOTA in 2020, and
| likely 2023.
|
| We have a magical pseudo-thinking machine that we can run
| locally completely under our control, and instead the
| goal posts have moved to "but it's not as fast as the
| proprietary could".
| icedchai wrote:
| My comparison was today's local AI to today's SOTA
| commercial AI. Both have improved, no argument.
|
| It's more cost effective for someone to pay $20 to $100
| month for a Claude subscription compared to buying a 512
| gig Mac Studio for $10K. We won't discuss the cost of the
| NVidia rig.
|
| I mess around with local AI all the time. It's a fun
| hobby, but the quality is still night and day.
| gordonhart wrote:
| On a scale that would make big tobacco blush.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Between the internet, or more generally computers, or even
| more generally electricity, are we not already?
| plagiarist wrote:
| I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly
| to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper
| personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things
| are.
|
| There have been wild technological developments but we've lost
| privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting
| the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable
| devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the
| facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have
| warned us to avoid.
|
| I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult
| technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't
| think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more
| drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984
| corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and
| threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of
| us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is
| for those us, to mourn.
| nradov wrote:
| You're still allowed to program by hand. Even in assembly
| language if you like.
| anonnon wrote:
| > I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost
| something" at all.
|
| We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what
| you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact
| with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly
| remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and
| BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international,
| communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was
| enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.
| icedchai wrote:
| I grew up on 80's and 90's BBSes. The transition from BBSes
| to Usenet and the early Internet was a magical period, a time
| I still look back upon fondly and will never forget.
|
| Some of my best friends IRL today were people I first met
| "online" in those days... but I haven't met anyone new in a
| longggg time. Yeah, I'm also much older, but the environment
| is also very different. The community aspect is long gone.
| munksbeer wrote:
| I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're
| saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There
| were just far fewer people online in those communities in
| those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us
| university students.
|
| But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at
| least 20-30 years ago.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully
| documented systems.
|
| Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions
| it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did.
|
| And software that's open and can be modified.
|
| Instead what we have is:
|
| - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to
| fully reason.
|
| - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used
| to "own".
|
| - hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small
| few who are granted an NDA before hand
|
| - operating systems that are trying harder and harder to
| prevent us from running any software they haven't approved
| because "security"
|
| - and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub,
| CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth.
|
| The only thing special about right now is that we have added
| _yet another_ abstraction on top of an already overly complex
| software stack to allow us to use natural language as
| pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but
| it's not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems
| with modern computing.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can
| literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in
| this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it.
| It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially
| in the time frame we're talking about.
|
| If GenAI could _only_ write documentation it would still be a
| game changer.
| orwin wrote:
| But it write mostly useless documentation Which take time
| to read and decipher.
|
| And worse, if you are using it for public documentation,
| sometimes it hallucinate endpoints (i don't want to say too
| much here, but it happened recently to a quite used B2B
| SaaS).
| throwup238 wrote:
| Loop it. Use another agent (from a different company
| helps) to review the code and documentation and call out
| any inconsistencies.
|
| I run a bunch of jobs weekly to review docs for
| inconsistencies and write a plan to fix. It still needs
| humans in the loop if the agents don't converge after a
| few turns, but it's largely automatic (I baby sat it for
| a few months validating each change).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The problems about documentation I described wasn't about
| the effort of writing it. It was that modern chipsets are
| trade secrets.
|
| When you bought a computer in the 80s, you'd get a
| technical manual about the internal workings of the
| hardware. In some cases even going as far as detailing what
| the registers did on their graphics chipset or CPU.
|
| GenAI wouldn't help here for modern hardware because GenAI
| doesn't have access to those specifications. And if it did,
| then it would already be documented so we wouldnt need
| GenAI to write it ;)
| fragmede wrote:
| > perpetual subscription services for the same software we
| used to "own".
|
| In another thread, people were looking for things to build.
| If there's a subscription service that you think shouldn't be
| a subscription (because they're not actually _doing_ anything
| new for that subscription), disrupt the fuck out of it. Rent
| seekers about to lose their shirts. I pay for eg Spotify
| because there 's new music that has to happen, but Dropbox?
|
| If you're not adding new whatever (features/content) in order
| to justify a subscription, then you're only worth the
| electricity and hardware costs or else I'm gonna build and
| host my own.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| People have been building alternatives to MS Office, Adopt
| Creative Suite, and so on and so forth for literally
| decades and yet they're still the de facto standard.
|
| Turns out it's a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Actually this makes me think of an interesting point. We DO
| have too many layers of software.. and rebuilding is always
| so cost prohibative.
|
| Maybe an iteresting route is using LLMs to flatten/simplify..
| so we can dig out from some of the complexity.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've heard this argument made before and it's the only side
| of AI software development that excites me.
|
| Using AI to write yet another run-of-the-mill web service
| written in the same bloated frameworks and programming
| languages designed for the lowest common denominator of
| developers really doesn't feel like it's taking advantage
| leap in capabilities that AI bring.
|
| But using AI to write native applications in low level
| languages, built for performance and memory utilisation,
| does at least feel like we are bringing some actual quality
| of life savings in exchange for all those fossil fuels
| burnt to crunch the LLMs tokens.
| davidhyde wrote:
| My take on the difference between now and then is "effort".
| All those things mentioned above are now effortless but the
| door to "effort" remains open as it always has been. Take the
| first point for example. Those little black boxes of AI can
| be significantly demystified by, for example, watching a
| bunch of videos (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html) and
| spending at least 40 hours of hard cognitive effort learning
| about it yourself. We used to purchase software or write it
| ourselves before it became effortless to get it for free in
| exchange for ads and then a subscription when we grew tired
| of ads or were tricked into bait and switch. You can also
| argue that it has never been easier to write your own
| software than it is today.
|
| Hostile operating systems. Take the effort to switch to
| Linux.
|
| Undocumented hardware, well there is far more open source
| hardware out there today and back in the day it was fun to
| reverse engineer hardware, now we just expect it to be open
| because we couldn't be bothered to put in the effort anymore.
|
| Effort gives me agency. I really like learning new things and
| so agentic LLMs don't make me feel hopeless.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've worked in the AI space and I understand how LLMs work
| as a principle. But we don't know the magic contained
| within a model after it's been trained. We understand how
| to design a model, and how models work at a theoretical
| level. But we cannot know how well it will be at inference
| until we test it. So much of AI research is just trial and
| error with different dials repeated tweaked until we get
| something desirable. So no, we don't understand these
| models in the same way we might understand how an hashing
| algorithm works. Or a compression routine. Or an encryption
| cypher. Or any other hand-programmed algorithm.
|
| I also run Linux. But that doesn't change how the two major
| platforms behave and that, as software developers, we have
| to support those platforms.
|
| Open source hardware is great but it's not on the same
| league of price and performance as proprietary hardware.
|
| Agentic AI doesn't make me feel hopeless either. I'm just
| describing what I'd personally define as a "golden age of
| computing".
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from
| Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who
| recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software
| controller. And who was just blown away.
| https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for...
|
| Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video
| though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This
| stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are
| talking about:
|
| > The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away
| something that was human and making it a robot. We've been
| forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is
| turning that around.
|
| I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the
| ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but
| computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has
| eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is
| over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going
| away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help
| those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in
| & explore.
| busterarm wrote:
| We definitely have lost something. I got into computers because
| they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people.
|
| Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst
| qualities of people.
|
| My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have
| to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to
| how this affects me.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming.
|
| If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you
| should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that
| natural language is not as precise as a programming language.
|
| But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth
| more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after
| all.
|
| So here we're seeing yet another text about how the world of
| software was solved by AI and being a developer is an artifact of
| the past.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > we have formal languages for a reason
|
| Right? At least on HN, there's a critical mass of people loudly
| ignoring this these days, but no one has explained to me how
| replacing formal language with an english-language-specialized
| chatbot - or even multiple independent chatbots (aka "an
| agent") - is good tradeoff to make.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's "good" from the standpoint of business achieving their
| objectives more quickly. That may not be what we think of as
| objectively good in some higher sense, but it's what matters
| most in terms of what actually happens in the world.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You're right, of course, but you should consider that all
| formal language starts as an informal language idea in the mind
| of someone. Why shouldn't that "mind" be an LLM vs. a human?
| flowerbreeze wrote:
| I think mostly because an LLM is not a "mind". I'm sure
| there'll be an algorithm that could be considered a "mind" in
| the future, but present day an LLM is not it. Not yet.
| flowerbreeze wrote:
| This is in my opinion the greatest weakness of everything LLM
| related. If I care about the application I'm writing, and I
| believe I should if I bother doing it at all, it seems to me
| that I should want to be precise and concise at describing it.
| In a way, the code itself serves as a verification mechanism
| for my thoughts and whether I understand the domain
| sufficiently.
|
| English or any other natural language can of course be concise
| enough, but when being brief they leave much to imagination.
| Adding verbosity allows for greater precision, but I think as
| well that that is what formal languages are for, just as you
| said.
|
| Although, I think it's worth contemplating whether the modern
| programming languages/environments have been insufficient in
| other ways. Whether by being too verbose at times, whether the
| IDEs should be more like databases first and language parsers
| second, whether we could add recommendations using far simpler,
| but more strict patterns given a strongly typed language.
|
| My current gripes are having auto imports STILL not working
| properly in most popular IDEs or an IDE not finding referenced
| entity from a file, if it's not currently open... LLMs
| sometimes help with that, but they are extremely slow in
| comparison to local cache resolution.
|
| Long term I think more value will be in directly improving the
| above, but we shall see. AI will stay around too of course, but
| how much relevance it'll have in 10 years time is anybody's
| guess. I think it'll become a commodity, the bubble will burst
| and we'll only use it when sensible after a while. At least
| until the next generation of AI architecture will arrive.
| sgsjchs wrote:
| Does it really matter that English is not as precise if the
| agent can make a consistent and plausible guess what my
| intention is? And when it occasionally guesses incorrectly, I
| can always clarify.
| oytis wrote:
| Write a blog post promoting inevitability of AI in software
| development while acknowledging feelings of experienced software
| engineers.
| slibhb wrote:
| I get where this is coming from. But at the same, AI/LLMs are
| such an exciting development. As in "maybe I was wrong and the
| singularity wasn't bullshit". If nothing else, it's an
| interesting transition to live through.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I agree, in the sense that any major change is "interesting".
| Doesn't mean they are all good though, many major changes have
| been bad historically. The overall net effect has been
| generally good, but you never know with any individual change.
| cfloyd wrote:
| I fall in the demographic discussed in the article but I've
| approached this with as much pragmatism as I can muster. I view
| this as a tool to help improve me as a developer. Sure there will
| be those of us who do not stay ahead (is that even possible?) of
| the curve and get swallowed up but technology has had this affect
| on many careers in the past. They just change into something
| different and sometimes better. It's about being willing to
| change with it.
| zkmon wrote:
| This makes me think about the craftsmen whose careers vanished or
| transformed through the ages due to industries, machines etc.
| They did not have online voices to write 1000's of blogs
| everyday. Nor did they have people who can read their woes
| online.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Maybe not 1000s and not online, but we do have journals,
| articles, essays, and so on written by such people throughout
| history. And they had similar sentiments.
| ai_critic wrote:
| > We'll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding
| it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor.
|
| Oh _come on_. 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React
| components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.
| paulhebert wrote:
| For what it's worth I've followed the author for a long time
| and that does not describe the type of work he has done
| Applejinx wrote:
| This. People are way too easily impressed. I don't think this
| easily-impressedness will generalize to most people in the real
| world.
|
| If you really buy all that you'd be part of the investor class
| that crashed various video game companies upon seeing Google
| put together a rather lame visual stunt and have their AI say,
| and I quote because the above-the-fold AI response I never
| asked for has never been more appropriate to consult...
|
| "The landscape of AI video game generation is experiencing a
| rapid evolution in 2025-2026, shifting from AI-assisted asset
| creation to the generation of entire interactive, playable 3D
| environments from text or image prompts. Leading initiatives
| like Google DeepMind's Project Genie and Microsoft's Muse are
| pioneering "world models" that can create, simulate physics,
| and render games in real-time."
|
| And then you look at what it actually is.
|
| Suuuure you will, unwanted AI google search first response.
| Suuure you will.
| coolness wrote:
| Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn
| new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has
| changed from something that required skill and understanding to
| complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem
| being solved more.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > Programming was always a tool
|
| This is the narrow understanding of programming that is the
| whole point of contention.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I wonder whether, in the end, it was simply poor accessibility
| that made programmers special, and whether it is that what some
| of them are missing. Being special by "talking" a special
| language their customers can't comprehend.
|
| Sure, they are still needed for debugging and for sneering at all
| those juniors and non-programmers who will finally be able to
| materialise their fantasies, but there is no way back anymore,
| and like riding horses, you can still do it while owning a car.
| unholyguy001 wrote:
| The thing he has spent his whole career doing unto others he
| finally did into himself
| aavci wrote:
| LLMs have made a lot of coding challenges less painful:
| Navigating terrible documentation, copilot detecting typos,
| setting up boilerplate frontend components, high effort but
| technically unchallenging code completions. Whenever I attempted
| LLMs for tools I'm not familiar with I found it to be useful with
| setting things up but felt like I had to do good old learning the
| tool and applying developer knowledge to it. I wonder if senior
| developers could use LLMs in ways that work with them and not
| against them. I.e create useful code that has guardrails to avoid
| slop
| thor-rodrigues wrote:
| I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said
| will still exist and keep on existing.
|
| Nothing will prevent you from typing "JavaScript with your
| hands", from "holding code in our hands and molding it like
| clay...", and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of
| it.
|
| What certainly will change is the way professional code will be
| produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very
| well-paid remuneration, to write software line-by-line.
|
| I'll not pretend that I don't get the point, but it feels like
| the lamentation of a baker, tailor, shoemaker, or smith, missing
| the days of old.
|
| And yet, most people prefer a world with affordable bread,
| clothes, footware, and consumer goods.
|
| Will the world benefit the most from "affordable" software? Maybe
| yes, maybe not, there are many arguments on both sides. I am more
| concerned the impact on the winners and losers, the rich will get
| more rich and powerful, while the losers will become even more
| destitute.
|
| Yet, my final point would be: it is better or worse to live in a
| world in which software is more affordable and accessible?
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > All the things the author said will still exist and keep on
| existing.
|
| Except the community of people who, for whatever reason, had to
| throw themselves into it and had critical mass to both
| distribute and benefit from the passion of it. This has already
| been eroded by the tech industry coopting programming in
| general and is only going to diminish.
|
| The people who discovered something because they were forced to
| do some hard work and then ran with it are going to be steered
| away from that direction by many.
| paulhebert wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple. A couple of examples:
|
| Food:
|
| A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us
| unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than
| they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many
| environmental externalities.
|
| Consumer goods:
|
| It has become difficult to find things like reliable
| appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year.
| The repairman said it would cost more to fix than to buy a new
| one. I asked him if there was a more reliable model and he said
| no: they all break quickly.
|
| Clothing:
|
| Fast fashion is terrible for the environment. Do we need as
| many clothes as we have? How quickly do they end up in
| landfills?
|
| Would we be better off as a society repairing shoes instead of
| buying new ones every year?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I would also add:
|
| Cars make people unhealthy and lead to city designs that hurt
| social engagement and affordability, but they are so much
| more efficient that it's hard not to use them.
|
| And then the obvious stuff about screens/phones/social media.
| ahepp wrote:
| It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make
| them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to
| improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child
| mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply.
|
| If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower
| than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle
| to argue
|
| If your worries are about ecology and sustainability I agree
| that is a concern we need to address more effectively than we
| have in the past. Technology will almost certainly be part of
| that solution via things like fusion energy. Success is not
| assured and we cannot just sit back and say "we live in the
| best of all possible worlds with a glorious manifest
| destiny", but I don't think that the future is particularly
| bleak compared to the past
| paulhebert wrote:
| Sure, it's complicated.
|
| I worry that humanity has a track record of diving head
| first into new technologies without worrying about
| externalities like the environment or job displacement.
|
| I wish we were more thoughtful and focused more on
| minimizing the downsides of new technologies.
|
| Instead it seems we're headed full steam towards huge
| amounts of energy use and job displacement. And the main
| bonus is rich people get richer.
|
| I'm not sure if having software be cheaper is beneficial.
| Is it good for malware to be easier to produce? I'd
| personally choose higher quality software over more
| software.
|
| I'm not convinced cheaper mass produced clothing has been a
| net positive. Will AI be a positive? Time will tell. In the
| short term there are some obvious negatives.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| This just in: people who expect things to stay the same should
| steer clear of careers in technology. Art, too, come to think of
| it.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| LLMs and AI more broadly certainly seem to have upended (or
| have the potential to upend) a lot of white-collar work outside
| of technology and art. Translators are one obvious example.
| Lawyers might be on the chopping block if they don't ban the
| use of AI for practicing law. Both seem about as far as you can
| get from "careers in technology," and in fact writing has
| pretty much always been framed as being on the opposite end of
| the spectrum from tech jobs, but is clearly vulnerable to
| technological progress.
|
| Right now I can think of very few white-collar jobs that I
| would feel comfortable training 4+ years for (let alone
| spending money or taking on debt to do so). It is far from a
| guarantee that almost any 4-year degree you enroll in today
| will have any value in four years. That has basically never
| before been true, even in tech. Blue collar jobs are clearly
| safer, but I wouldn't say safe. Robotics is moving fast too.
|
| I really can't imagine the social effects of this reality being
| positive, absent massive and unprecedented redistribution of
| the wealth that the productivity of AI enables.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| C came out in ~1972. Some people have been coding in C the
| entire time since then. There's no inherent reason that
| software hasn't stayed the same for a long time :).
| faccacta wrote:
| I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about
| how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and
| think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen.
| Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and
| think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at
| something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think:
| This was written entirely by people.
| anonnon wrote:
| At least with physical works (for now, anyway), the methods the
| artisans employ leave tell-tale signs attesting to the manner
| of construction, so that someone at least has the choice of
| going the "hand made" route, and others, even lay people
| without special tooling, can tell that it indeed was hand made.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot
| them pretty easily after a bit. Of course it doesn't really
| matter for the business goals, as long as it works correctly.
| Just like 99% of people don't care if their clothing was
| machine made vs. handmade. It's going to be a tiny minority
| that care about handmade software.
| anonnon wrote:
| > Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can
| spot them pretty easily after a bit.
|
| For now. Though I suspect the commit history would probably
| still be pretty telling.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| lol.. the AI actually writes detailed commit message.
| Unlike me... "Fixed issue with timeout"
| ok123456 wrote:
| This is romanticising the past.
|
| The modal person just trying to get their job done wasn't a
| software artisan; they were cutting and pasting from Stack
| Overflow, using textbook code verbatim, and using free and
| open-source code in ways that would likely violate the letter
| and spirit of the license.
|
| If you were using technology or concepts that weren't either
| foundational or ossified, you found yourself doing development
| through blog posts. Now, you can at least have a stochastic
| parrot that has read the entire code and documentation and can
| talk to it.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| I'll believe it when I start seeing examples of good and useful
| software being created with LLMs or some increase in software
| quality. So far it's just AI doom posting, hype bloggers that
| haven't shipped anything, anecdotes without evidence, increase in
| CVEs, increase in outages, and degraded software quality.
| bgar wrote:
| Well, on the surface it may seem like there's nothing being
| created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed
| stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and
| the like to produce software. At this point, most software you
| touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The
| difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance
| is staggering.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| > every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using
| claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software
|
| > The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI
| assistance is staggering.
|
| Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something
| quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts
| are telling you.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major
| tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code.
| Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the
| evidence you need.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| > Every major tech company is using AI for a significant
| % of their code
|
| It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities,
| windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react
| native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers
| at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers
| are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this
| amazing new software and software quality or increased
| productivity from them?
| bgar wrote:
| Why quantitative? I have friends at most major tech
| companies and I work at a startup now. You shouldn't write
| by hand what can be prompted. Doesn't mean the hard parts
| shouldn't be done with the same care as when everything was
| handwritten, but a lot of minutiae are irrelevant now.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Like the new features in Windows 11? They've just anointed a
| "software quality czar" and I suspect this is not
| coincidence.
| Mtinie wrote:
| It would be helpful if you could define "useful" in this
| context.
|
| I've built a number of team-specific tools with LLM agents over
| the past year that save each of us tens of hours a month.
|
| They don't scale beyond me and my six coworkers, and were never
| designed to, but they solve challenges we'd previously worked
| through manually and allow us to focus on more important tasks.
|
| The code may be non-optimal and won't become the base of a new
| startup. I'm fine with that.
|
| It's also worth noting that your evidence list (increased CVEs,
| outages, degraded quality) is exclusively about what happens
| when LLMs are dropped into existing development workflows.
| That's a real concern, but it's a different conversation from
| whether LLMs create useful software.
|
| My tools weren't degraded versions of something an engineer
| would have built better. They're net-new capability that was
| never going to get engineering resources in the first place.
| The counterfactual in my case isn't "worse software"--it's "no
| software."
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| It really shouldn't be this hard to just provide one piece of
| evidence. Is anecdotes of toy internal greenfield projects
| that could probably be built with a drag and drop no-code
| editor really the best from this LLM revolution?
| Mtinie wrote:
| What is your bar for "useful"? Let's start there and we'll
| see what evidence can be offered.
|
| User count? Domain? Scope of development?
|
| You have something in mind, obviously.
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| If you're asking me to define a very clear bar, it's
| obvious nothing cleared it.
|
| Anything that proves that LLMs increase software quality.
| Any software built with an LLM that is actually in
| production, survives maintenance, doesn't have 100 CVEs,
| that people actually use.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| At my work ~90% of code is now LLM generated. It's not "new"
| software in the sense that you're describing but it's new
| features, bug fixes, and so on to the software that we all work
| on. (Although we are working on something that we can hopefully
| open source later this year that is close to 100% LLM
| generated, and I can say, as someone that has been reviewing
| most of the code, is quite high quality)
| tigerlily wrote:
| There's a commercial building under construction next to my
| office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping
| young men are digging with their big excavators they've been
| using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer.
|
| Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right
| sized tools. They ain't stupid.
| danny_codes wrote:
| I think OP is coming at this more from an artisan angle.
| Perhaps there were shoveler artisans who took pride in the
| angle of their dirt-shoveling. Those people perhaps do lament
| the advent of excavators. But presumably the population who
| find code beautiful vs the art of shoveling are of different
| sizes
| dragonelite wrote:
| Them using excavator and trucks etc to move dirt. Is the same
| as us using a compiler to compile code into an executable.
|
| LLM would be if the digging and hauling of the dirt happened
| without any people involved except the planning of logistics.
| koiueo wrote:
| > LLM would be if
|
| you'd sometimes discover a city communication line destroyed
| in the process; or the dirt hauled on top of a hospitals,
| killing hundreds of orphaned kids with cancer; or kittens
| mixed into concrete instead of cement.
|
| And since you clicked "agree" on that Anthropic EULA, you
| can't sue then for it, so you now hire 5 construction workers
| to constantly overlook the work.
|
| It's still net positive... for now at least... But far from
| being "without any people". And it'll likely remain this way
| for a long time.
| keynesyoudigit wrote:
| This is the right take IMO, so thanks for a balanced comment.
|
| I would add a nuance from OPs perspective sorta: a close friend
| of mine works in construction, and often comments on how
| projects can be different. On some, everyone in the entire
| building supply chain can be really inspired to work on a
| really interesting project because of either its usefulness or
| its craftsmanship (the 2 of which are related), and on some,
| everyone's, just trying to finish the project is cheaply
| quickly as possible.
|
| It's not that the latter hasn't existed in tech, but it does
| appear that there is a way to use LLMs to do more of the
| latter. It's not "the end of a craft", but without a
| breakthrough (and something to check the profit incentive) it's
| also not a path to utopia (like other comments seem to be
| implying)
|
| Craftsmanship doesn't die, it evolves, but the space in between
| can be a bit exhausting as markets fail to understand the
| difference at first.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| I'm that 40 year old now. Been writing code since grade 5. Loved
| it so much I got a PhD, was an academic, then moved into
| industry.
|
| I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous
| generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages.
|
| The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done.
| Seeing my ideas have impact.
|
| What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better
| at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type
| the code in anymore.
|
| Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now.
|
| I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think.
| Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm
| already delivering things that were on the roadmap for
| engineering months worth of effort.
|
| I can think about abstractions, architecture, math,
| organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame
| compiler thinks about my code.
|
| And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then
| we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at
| all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are
| astronomically more productive than juniors.
| localghost3000 wrote:
| This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss
| the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code
| sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world
| we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things:
|
| Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either
| the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and
| rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art.
| The tide comes in and its gone.
|
| Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized
| that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I
| selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always.
| Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with
| it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape
| of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written
| to solve.
|
| Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now.
| I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I
| sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and
| feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure.
| That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the
| craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software
| development.
| codazoda wrote:
| "Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and it's
| gone."
|
| I'm putting that on my wall.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Interesting, I still have code I wrote 20 years ago being used
| in production.
| localghost3000 wrote:
| Theres always exceptions. Congrats!
| blibble wrote:
| > Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years.
|
| maybe this say something more about your career decisions than
| anything else?
| localghost3000 wrote:
| Maybe? I wasn't just speaking of myself however.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best
| spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas
| through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would
| teach people something, but apparently not.
|
| Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything
| is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money.
|
| I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a
| moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up
| and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do?
| One less adversary.
|
| I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating
| together... but he's acting against those interests and he's
| doomering and I have no more time for that.
| andai wrote:
| _Ephemeralization: the ability thanks to technological
| advancement to do "more and more with less and less until
| eventually you can do everything with nothing." --Buckminster
| Fuller_
| rtkakh wrote:
| > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don't
| believe me, wait six months.
|
| No they cannot, And an AI bro squeezing every talking point into
| a think piece while pretending to have empathy doesn't change
| that. You just want an exit, and you want it fast.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Also:
|
| > and if you don't believe me, wait six months
|
| This reads as a joke nowadays.
| codazoda wrote:
| "We'll miss creating something we feel proud of"
|
| I still feel proud when skillfully guiding a set of AI agents to
| build from my imagination. Especially when it was out of my reach
| just 6-months ago.
|
| I'm a 49 year old veteran who started at just 10 years old and
| have continued to find pure passion in it.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I wonder if this is just a matter of degree. In a few years (or
| less) you may not have to "skillfully guide" anything. The
| agents will just coordinate themselves and accomplish your
| goals after you give some vague instruction. Will you still
| feel proud? Or maybe a bit later then agents will come up with
| their own improvements and just ship them without any input at
| all. How about then?
| reactordev wrote:
| I'm in my 40 something and it's game over for my career. The grey
| in my hair makes it so that I never get past the first round. The
| history on my resume makes it so I'm lucky to get a round. The
| GPT's and Claude have fundamentally changed how I view work and
| frankly, I'm over it.
|
| I'm in consulting now and it's all the same crap. Enterprises
| want to "unleash AI" so they can fire people. Maximize profits.
| My nephews who are just starting their careers are blindly using
| these tools and accepting the PR if it builds. Not if it's
| correct.
|
| I'm in awe of what it can do but I also am not impressed with the
| quality of how it does it.
|
| I'm fortunate to not have any debt so I can float until the world
| either wises up or the winds of change push me in a new
| direction.
|
| I liked the satisfaction of building something "right" that was
| also "useful". The current state of Opus and Codex can only
| pretend to do the latter.
| anonnon wrote:
| I'm surprised so many people are only waking up to this _now_. It
| should have been obvious as soon as ChatGPT came out that even
| with only incremental improvements, LLMs would kill programming
| as we knew it. And the fact that these utterances, however
| performative, from developers expressing grief or existential
| despair have become commonplace tells me as much about the power
| of these systems than whatever demo Anthropic or OpenAI has
| cooked up.
|
| I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts,
| still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role
| of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will
| change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I
| doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of
| software development becomes something akin to googling--just
| typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box
| gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at
| least, we don't pay them very much.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Dunno, LLMs writing code still feels like they memorized a bunch
| of open source code and vomited them out in worse condition.
|
| It's not that impressive that Claude wrote a C compiler when
| GitHub has the code to a bunch of C compilers (some SOTA) just
| sitting there.
|
| I'm using an LLM to write a compiler in my spare time (for fun)
| for a "new" language. It feels more like a magical search engine
| than coding assistant. It's great for bouncing ideas from, for
| searching the internet without the clutter of SEO optimized sites
| and ads, it's definitely been useful, just not that useful for
| code.
|
| Like, I have used some generated code in a very low stakes
| project (my own Quickshell components) and while it kind of
| worked, eventually I refactored it myself into 1/3 of the lines
| it produced and had to squash some bugs.
|
| It's probably good enough for the people who were gluing React
| components together but it still isn't on the level where I'd put
| any code it produces into production anywhere I care about.
| codazoda wrote:
| That is my experience from a year ago but I no longer feel that
| way. I write a few instructions, guide an agent to create a
| plan, and rarely touch the code myself. If I don't like
| something, I ask the agent to fix it.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Agree, there was a huge step change with Claude Code + Opus
| 4.5 (maybe 4.6 is even better?). Anyone dealing with earlier
| models as their basis should probably try the newest stuff
| and see if it changes their minds.
| andai wrote:
| Some code is worth transcribing by hand -- an ancient practice in
| writing, art and music.[0] Some isn't even worth looking at.
|
| I find myself, ironically, spending more time typing out great
| code by hand now. Maybe some energy previously consumed by tedium
| has been freed up, or maybe the wacky machines brought a bit of
| the whimsy back into the process for me.
|
| [0] And in programming, for the readers of Zed Shaw's books :)
| webdevver wrote:
| it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out
| there.
|
| fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was
| objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore.
| knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it
| has very questionable utility.
|
| a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get
| retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job
| is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a
| digital archive-brain.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| Yeah, I notice a lot of the optimism is from people who have
| been in the field for decades. I'm newish to the field, half a
| decade out of undergrad. It definitely feels like almost all of
| what I learned has been (or will soon be) completely devalued.
| I'm sure this stuff feels a lot less threatening if you've had
| decades to earn a great salary and save a bunch of money. If
| money wasn't a concern I'd be thrilled about it too.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Agree with the author. I like the process of writing code, typing
| method names and class definitions while at the same time
| thinking ahead about overall architecture, structure, how much
| time given function would run for, what kind of tests are
| necessary.
|
| I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that
| they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into
| this field for seemingly very different reasons.
|
| I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe
| coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to
| its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel
| almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know
| the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any
| of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I
| usually have when working on codebase myself.
| dham wrote:
| It's not so much the writing of the code (which I did like),
| it's the aesthetic of the code. It's solving a problem with the
| right code and the right amount of code (for now). That's still
| the case, even with AI writing most of the code. You have to
| steer it constantly because it has very bad instincts, because
| most people in the profession aren't good at it, so it has bad
| training data. Mainly because the "learn to code" movement and
| people getting into this profession just for the money and not
| the love. Those people are probably screwed.
| lukekim wrote:
| Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture
| making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to
| mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully
| automated production.
|
| The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP
| added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job.
|
| This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true
| craftsmen will be even more valuable (overseeing farm automation,
| high end handmade furniture, small organic farms), and the
| factory worker masses (ZIRP enabled tech workers) will move on to
| more fulfulling work.
| sidibe wrote:
| Where do people find this optimism? I reckon when the software
| jobs fall everything else will follow shortly too. That's just
| the first target because it's what we know and the manual stuff
| is a little harder for now. The "good news" is everyone might
| be in the same boat so the system will have to adapt,
| danny_codes wrote:
| That's not how it goes for the worker. If you are a capitalist
| then it doesn't matter, you own the means of production. The
| laborer, however, has to learn new skills, which take time and
| money. If your profession no longer exists, unless you have
| enough capital to retool/be a capitalist, then you will
| personally get poorer.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| I'm not sure comparing artisanal software to woodworking or
| organic farming is possible.
|
| With woodworking and farming you get as a result some physical
| goods. Some John Smith that buys furniture can touch nice
| cherry paneling, appreciate the joinery and grain. With farming
| you he can taste delicious organic tomatoes and cucumbers, make
| food with it.
|
| Would this John Smith care at all about how some software is
| written as long as it does what he wants and it works reliably?
| I'm not sure.
| karmasimida wrote:
| > If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me.
|
| I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun
| but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| By that logic prompting an AI is also labour.
|
| It's not even always a more efficient form of labour. I've
| experienced many scenarios with AI where prompting it to do the
| right thing takes longer and requires writing/reading more text
| compared to writing the code myself.
| killerstorm wrote:
| I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable
| buggy bloatware actually dies.
|
| Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make
| software which actually works without a need to weekly patching
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be
| the solution to this problem.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Humans are also non-deterministic code generators though. It
| can be possible that an LLM is more deterministic or
| consistent at building reliable code than a human.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I do not mourn typing in code.
|
| But I am still quite annoyed at the slopful nature of the code
| that is produced when you're not constantly nagging it to do
| better
|
| We've RLed it to produce code that works by hook or by crook,
| putting infinity fallback paths and type casts everywhere rather
| than checking what the semantics should be.
|
| Sadly I don't know how we RL taste.
| d357r0y3r wrote:
| I thought I'd miss all the typing and syntax, but I really don't.
| Everyone has their own relationship with coding, but for me, I
| get satisfaction out of the end product and putting it in front
| of someone. To the extend that I cared about the code, it mainly
| had to do with how much it allowed the end product to shine.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Yes, there's clearly a big split in the community where perhaps
| ~50% are like OP and the other ~50% are like you. But I think
| we should still respect the views of the other side and try to
| empathize.
| henning wrote:
| > They can write code better than you or I can
|
| Speak for yourself. They produce shit code and have terrible
| judgment. Otherwise we wouldn't need to babysit them so much.
| iafan wrote:
| It makes me sad to read posts like this. If it is a necessary
| step for you on the journey from denial to acceptance to
| embracing the new state of the world, then sure, take your time.
|
| But software engineering is the only industry that is built on
| the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping
| ourselves to new levels of abstraction so that we don't repeat
| ourselves and make each next step even more powerful.
|
| Just yesterday we were pair programming with a talented junior AI
| developer. Today we are treating them as senior ones and can work
| with several in parallel. Very soon your job will not be pair
| programming and peer reviewing at all, but teaching a team of
| specialized coworkers to work on your project. In a year or two
| we will be assembling factories of such agents that will handle
| the process from taking your requirements to delivering and
| maintaining complex software. Our jobs are going to change many
| more times and much more often than ever.
|
| And yet there will still be people finding solace in hand-
| crafting their tools, or finding novel algorithms, or adding the
| creativity aspect into the work of their digital development
| teams. Like people lovingly restoring their old cars in their
| garage just for the sake of the process itself.
|
| And everything will be just fine.
| apitman wrote:
| > software engineering is the only industry that is built on
| the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and
| bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction
|
| Not sure I agree. I think most programming today looks almost
| exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. You could even have
| gotten away with never learning a new language. AI feels like
| the first time a large percentage of us may be forced to
| fundamentally change the way we work or change careers.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's true, unless you have always been working on FOTM
| frontend frameworks, you could easily be doing the same thing
| as 20/30/40 years ago. I'm still using vim and coding in C++
| like someone could have 30+ years ago (I was too young then).
| Or at least, I was until Claude code got good enough to
| replace 90% of my code output :)
| iafan wrote:
| One may still write C code as they did 40 years ago, but they
| still use the power of numerous libraries, better compilers,
| Git, IDEs with syntax highlighting and so on. The only true
| difference -- to me -- is the speed of change that makes it
| so pronounced and unsettling.
| oooyay wrote:
| You know who else mourned the loss of craft? People that don't
| like PHP and Wordpress because they lower the barrier to entry to
| creating useful stuff while also leaving around a fair amount of
| cruft and problems that the people that use them don't understand
| how to manage.
|
| Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a
| means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of
| software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases,
| ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to
| produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling
| that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating
| useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly
| how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the
| age of AI.
|
| All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is
| changing as it always has. The _only_ constant I 've ever
| experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that
| when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change
| then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for
| me.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think it's a bit different when you can opt out. If you
| didn't want to use PHP you didn't have to. But it's getting
| increasingly hard to opt out of AI.
| bloppe wrote:
| The acceleration of AI has thrown into sharp relief that we have
| long lumped all sorts of highly distinct practices under this
| giant umbrella called "coding". I use CC extensively, and yet I
| still find myself constantly editing by hand. Turns out CC is
| really bad at writing kubernetes operators. I'd bet it's equally
| bad at things like database engines or most cutting edge systems
| design problems. Maybe it will get better at these specific
| things with time, but it seems like there will always be a
| cutting edge that requires plenty of human thought to get right.
| But if you're doing something that's basically already been done
| thousands of times in slightly different ways, CC will totally do
| it with 95% reliability. I'm ok with that.
|
| It's also important to step back and realize that it goes way
| beyond coding. Coding is just the deepest tooth of the jagged
| frontier. In 3 years there will be blog posts lamenting the
| "death of law firms" and the "death of telemedicine". Maybe in 10
| years it will be the death of everything. We're all in the same
| boat, and this boat is taking us to a world where everyone is
| more empowered, not less. But still, there will be that cutting
| edge in any field that will require real ingenuity to push
| forward.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think there's clearly a difference in opinion based on what
| you work on. Some people were working on things that pre-CC
| models also couldn't handle and then CC could, and it changed
| their opinions quickly. I expect (but cannot prove of course)
| that the same will happen with the area you are describing. And
| then your opinion may change.
| bloppe wrote:
| I expect it to, eventually. But then the cutting edge will
| have simply moved to something else.
|
| I agree that it's very destabilizing. It's sort of like
| inflation for expertise. You spend all this time and effort
| saving up expertise, and then those savings rapidly lose
| value. At the same time, your ability to acquire new
| expertise has accelerated (because LLMs are often excellent
| private tutors), which is analogous to an inflation-adjusted
| wage increase.
|
| There are a ton of variables. Will hallucinations ever become
| negligible? My money is on "no" as long as the architecture
| is basically just transformers. How will compiling training
| data evolve with time? My money is on "it will get more
| expensive". How will legislators react? I sure hope not by
| suppressing competition. As long as markets and VC are
| functioning properly, it should only become easier to become
| a founder, so outsized corporate profits will be harder to
| lock down.
| skybrian wrote:
| "Glorified TSA agent" is a rather gloomy, low-agency take on it.
| You both ask for what you want and verify the results.
| tintor wrote:
| You can still do your craft as you did it before, but you can't
| expect to be paid for it as much as before.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| If you want to build a house you still need plans. Would you
| rather cut boards by hand or have a power saw. Would you rather
| pound nails, pilot hole with a bit and brace and put in flat head
| screws... or would you want a nail gun and an impact driver.
|
| And you still need plans.
|
| Can you write a plan for a sturdy house, verify that it meets the
| plan that your nails went all the way in and in the right places?
|
| You sure can.
|
| Your product person, your directors, your clients might be able
| to do the same thing, it might look like a house but its a fire
| hazard, or in the case of most LLM generated code a security one.
|
| The problem is that we moved to scrum and agile, where your
| requirements are pantomime and postit notes if your lucky,
| interpretive dance if you arent. Your job is figuring out how to
| turn that into something... and a big part of what YOU as an
| engineer do is tell other people "no thats dumb" without hurting
| their feelings.
|
| IF AI coding is going to be successful then some things need to
| change: Requirements need to make a come back. GOOD UI needs to
| make a comeback (your dark pattern around cancelation, is now
| going to be at odds with an agent). Your hide the content behind
| a login or a pay wall wont work any more because again, end users
| have access too... the open web is back and by force. If a person
| can get in, we have code that can get in now.
|
| There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, more than ever,
| stop looking back and start looking forward, because once you get
| past the hate and the hype there is a ton of potential to right
| some of the ill's of the last 20 years of tech.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In
| that case you're likely _already_ obsoleted by outsourced staff
| who can do your job much cheaper.
|
| If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or
| not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above
| to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not _replacing_
| you here - they can _augment_ you in certain situations.
|
| The perks of a senior is also knowing when _not_ to use an LLM
| and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty
| good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep
| for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to
| focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free
| time).
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is
| coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if
| it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that
| away then the remaining part of the job is just not very
| appealing anymore.
|
| It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings,
| design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to
| actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt
| the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very
| satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead"
| or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying
| out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll
| still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to
| prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.
| AstroBen wrote:
| There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being
| poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing
| forward
|
| I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too
| long
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Until they can magically increase context length to such a
| size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're
| safe.
|
| It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs
| replacing every office worker, rather than any _action_ to
| that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous)
| limitations that make this unlikely.
| esafak wrote:
| Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory,
| and neither do you. You both search for what you need.
| Models can already memorize more than you !
| Jensson wrote:
| > Models do not need to hold the whole code base in
| memory, and neither do you
|
| Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase,
| that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to
| speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they
| do they need the entire thing in context.
|
| And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't
| enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be
| smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem
| that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job.
| That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a
| while.
| esafak wrote:
| Getting up to speed is a human problem. Computers are so
| fast they can 'get up to speed' from scratch for every
| session, and we help them with AGENTS files and newer
| things like memories; e.g.,
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory
|
| It is not perfect yet but the tooling here is improving.
| I do not see a ceiling here. LSPs + memory solve this
| problem. I run into issues but this is not a big one for
| me.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'll believe it when coding agents can actually make
| concise & reusable code instead of reimplementing 10
| slightly-different versions of the same basic thing on
| every run (this is not a rant, I would _love_ for agents
| to stop doing that, and I know how to make them - with
| proper AGENTS.md that serves as a table of contents for
| where stuff is - but my point is that as a human I don't
| need this and yet they still do for now).
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| In my experience they can definitely write concise and
| reusable code. You just need to say to them "write
| concise and reusable code." Works well for Codex, Claude,
| etc.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Writing reusable code is of no use if the next iteration
| doesn't know where it is and rewrites the same (reusable)
| code again.
| munksbeer wrote:
| I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think
| can be done better, I either just do it myself or point
| it in the right direction.
|
| It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas
| ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This
| thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my
| creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant,
| which is the part I love.
|
| As far as I can tell, what's not to love about that?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you're repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual
| retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about
| translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English)
| language into a terse (programming) language. It's
| generally much faster for me to write the terse language
| directly than play a game of telephone with an
| intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe)
| translate my intentions into the terse language.
|
| In your example, you mention that you prompt the AI and
| if it outputs sub-par results you rewrite it yourself.
| That's my point: over time, you learn what an LLM is good
| at and what it isn't, and just don't bother with the LLM
| for the stuff it's not good at. Thing is, as a senior
| engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn't be stuff
| that an LLM is good at to begin with. That's not the LLM
| replacing you, that's the LLM _augmenting_ you.
|
| Enjoy your sensible use of LLMs! But LLMs are not the
| silver bullet the billion dollars of investment
| desperately want us to believe.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > the smartest minds in the world
|
| Dunning-Kruger is everywhere in the AI grift. People who
| don't know a field trying to deploy some AI bot that solves
| the easy 10% of the problem so it looks good on the surface
| and assumes that just throwing money (which mostly just buys
| hardware) will solve it.
|
| They aren't "the smartest minds in the world". They are slick
| salesmen.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language
| is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate
| level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what
| I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI
| writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code.
|
| AI is getting better at picking up some important context from
| other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles
| away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't
| always present.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Yes. And I'm excited as hell.
|
| But I also have no idea how people are going to think about
| what code to write when they don't write code. Maybe this is
| all fine, is ok, but it does make me quite nervous!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That is definitely a problem, but I would say it's a problem
| of hiring and the billion-dollars worth of potential market
| cap resting on performative bullshit that encourages
| companies to not hire juniors to send a signal to capture
| some of those billions regardless of actual impact on
| productivity.
|
| LLMs _benefit_ juniors, they do not replace them. Juniors can
| learn from LLMs just fine and will actually be _more_
| productive with them.
|
| When I was a junior my "LLM" was StackOverflow and the senior
| guy next to me (who no doubt was tired of my antics), but I
| would've loved to have an actual LLM - it would've handled
| all my stupid questions just fine and freed up senior time
| for the more architectural questions or those where I wasn't
| convinced by the LLM response. Also, at least in my case, I
| learnt a lot more from _reading_ existing production code
| than writing it - LLMs don't change anything there.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who
| enjoys painting can do so even after the camera
| apitman wrote:
| But you have to admit it loses a certain shine in the cases
| where you know that what you're doing is no longer solving a
| problem that could be solved simpler and cheaper another way.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| But understanding _how_ it solves the problem, and knowing
| you found the solution yourself might/will be something to
| strive for.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| As you probably know, painting changed quite a bit after
| cameras became common. I wonder if handcrafted code will have a
| similar shift, becoming more "artistic" :)
| kaffekaka wrote:
| It surely will.
| pron wrote:
| Some people say that working with an agent or an agents
| orchestrator is like being a technical lead. But I've been a
| technical lead for quite a while, and the experience of working
| with an agent doesn't even come close. I think that when people
| talk about the agents' coding abilities they're talking about the
| _average_ ability. But as a team lead, I don 't care about
| average ability. I care only about the worst case. If I have any
| doubt that someone might not complete a task, or at least
| accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with at least 95%
| certainty, I won't assign them the task. If I have any doubt that
| the code they produce might not be up to snuff, I don't assign
| them the task. I don't need to review their code; they review
| each others'. When I have to review code I'm no longer a team
| lead but a programmer.
|
| I often have one programming project I do myself, on the side,
| and recently I've been using coding agents. Their average ability
| is no doubt impressive for what they are. But they also make
| mistakes that not even a recent CS graduate with no experience
| would _ever_ make (e.g. I asked the agent for it 's guess as to
| why a test is failing; it suggested it might be due to a race
| condition with an operation that is started _after_ the failing
| assertion). As a lead, if someone on the team is capable of
| making such a mistake even once, then that person can 't really
| code, regardless of their average performance (just as someone
| who sometimes lands a plane in the wrong airport or even crashes
| without their being a catastrophich condition outside their
| control can't really fly regardless of their average
| performance). "This is more complicated than we though and would
| take longer than we expected" is something you hear a lot, but
| "sorry, I got confused" is something you never hear. A report by
| Anthropic last week said, "Claude will work autonomously to solve
| whatever problem I give it. So it's important that the task
| verifier is nearly perfect, otherwise Claude will solve the wrong
| problem." Yeah, that's not something a team lead faces. I wish
| the agent could work like a team of programmers and I would be
| doing my familiar role of a project lead, but it doesn't.
|
| The models do some things well. I believe that programming is an
| interesting mix of inductive and deductive thinking
| (https://pron.github.io/posts/people-dont-write-programs), and
| the models have the inductive part down. They can certainly
| understand what a codebase does faster than I can. But their
| deductive reasoning, especially when it comes to the details, is
| severely lacking (e.g. I asked the agent to document my code. It
| very quickly grasped the design and even inferred some important
| invariants, but when it saw an `assert` in one subroutine it
| documented it as guarding a certain invariant. The intended
| invariant was correct, it just wasn't the one the assertion was
| guarding). So I still (have to) work as a programmer when working
| with coding assistants, even if in a different way.
|
| I've read about great successes at using coding agents in
| "serious" software, but what's common to those cases is that the
| people using the agents (Mitchell Hashimoto, antirez) are experts
| in the respective codebase. At the other end of the spectrum,
| people who aren't programmers can get some cool programs done,
| but I've yet to see anything produced in this way (by a non
| programmer) that I would call serious software.
|
| I don't know what the future will bring, but at the moment, the
| craft isn't dead. When AI can really program, i.e. the experience
| is really like that of a team lead, I don't think that the death
| of programming would concern us, because once they get to that
| point, the agents will also likely be able to replace the team
| lead. And middle management. And the CTO, the CFO, and the CEO,
| and most of the users.
| apitman wrote:
| > If I have any doubt that someone might not complete a task,
| or at least accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with
| at least 95% certainty, I won't assign them the task
|
| It gets hard to compare AI to humans. You can ask the AI to do
| things you would never ask a human to do, like retry 1000 times
| until it works, or assign 20 agents to the same problem with
| slightly different prompts. Or re-do the entire thing with
| different aesthetics.
| pron wrote:
| No doubt, I'm just saying that working with a coding agent is
| not even remotely similar to being a team lead. If a member
| of your team can't complete a task and can't accurately
| explain what the difficulty is, you're in trouble.
| nubg wrote:
| To the people who are against AI programming, honest question:
| why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you"
| "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?
|
| This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your
| justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI
| programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction
| level higher.
|
| I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single
| justification that would not fit both scenarios.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm all for AI programming.
|
| But I've seen this conversation on HN already 100 times.
|
| The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic
| and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not.
|
| I personally don't agree at all, in the sense I don't think
| that matters. I've run into compiler bugs, and more library
| bugs than I can count. The real world is just as messy as LLMs
| are, and you still need the same testing strategies to guard
| against errors. Development is always a slightly stochastic
| process of writing stuff that you eventually get to work on
| your machine, and then fixing all the bugs that get revealed
| once it starts running on other people's machines in the wild.
| LLMs don't write perfect code, and neither do you. Both require
| iteration and testing.
| haolez wrote:
| I just answered exactly that. I think that AI agents code
| better than humans and are the future.
|
| But the parent argument is pretty bad, in my opinion.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to.
| I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few
| months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at
| best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec
| defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles,
| architecture patterns.
| godelski wrote:
| > The answer they always give is that compilers are
| deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are
| not.
|
| I don't see this as a frequent answer tbh, but I do
| frequently see claims that this is the critique.
|
| I wrote much more here[0] and honestly I'm on the side of
| Dijkstra, and it doesn't matter if the LLM is deterministic
| or probabilistic It may be illuminating to
| try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the
| start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for
| the input into and the output from our information processing
| equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a
| sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would
| consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from
| there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. We would
| need all the intellect in the world to get the interface
| narrow enough to be usable, and, in view of the history of
| mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do
| the job well enough would require again a few thousand years.
| - Dijkstra: On the foolishness of "natural language
| programming"
|
| His argument has _nothing_ to do with the deterministic
| systems[1] and all to do with the precision of the language.
| His argument comes down to "we invented symbolic languages
| for a good reason".
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928421
|
| [1] If we want to be more pedantic we can actually codify his
| argument more simply by using some mathematical language, but
| even this will take some interpretation: natural language
| naturally imposes a one to many relationship when processing
| information.
| haolez wrote:
| Compilers are deterministic.
| zajio1am wrote:
| There is no requirement for compilers to be deterministic.
| The requirement is that a compiler produces something that is
| valid interpretation of the program according to the language
| specification, but unspecified details (like specific
| ordering of instructions in the resulting code) could in
| principle be chosen nondeterministically and be different in
| separate executions of the compiler.
| koiueo wrote:
| We are not talking about deterministic instructions, we are
| talking about deterministic behavior.
|
| UB is actually a big deal, and is avoided for a reason.
|
| I couldn't in my life guess what CC would do in response to
| "implement login form". For all I know CC's response could
| depend on time of day or Anthropic's electricity bill last
| month more, than on the existing code in my app, and the
| specific wording I use.
| TJTorola wrote:
| I'm not particularly against AI programming but I don't think
| these two things are equivilent. A compiler translates code to
| specifications in a deterministic way, the same compiler
| produces the same output from the same code, it is all
| completely controlled. AI is not at all deterministic,
| temperature is built into LLMs and furthermore the lack of
| specificity in prompts and our spoken languages. The difference
| in control is significant enough to me not to put compilers and
| AI coding agents into the same catagory even though they are
| both taking some text and producing some other text/machine
| code.
| koiueo wrote:
| There's a big difference between deterministic abstraction over
| machine code, and probabilistic translation of ambiguous
| language into machine code.
|
| Compiler is your interface.
|
| If you treat LLM as your interface... Well, I wouldn't want
| sharing codebase with you.
| rdedev wrote:
| Even if you are not coding in assembly you still need to think.
| Replace llm with a smart programmer. I don't like the other guy
| to do all the thinking for me. Much better if it's a
| collaborative process even if the other guy could have coded
| the perfect solution without my help. Like otherwise why am I
| even in the picture?
| pornel wrote:
| A chef can cook a steak better than a robo-jet-toaster, even
| though neither of them has raised the cow.
|
| It's not about having abstraction levels above or below (BTW,
| in 21st century CPUs, the machine code itself is an abstraction
| over much more complex CPU internals).
|
| It's about writing a more correct, efficient, elegant, and
| maintainable code at whichever abstraction layer you choose.
|
| AI still writes messier, sloppier, buggier, more redundant code
| than a good programmer can when they care about the _craft_ of
| writing code.
|
| The end result is worse to those who care about the quality of
| code.
|
| We mourn, because the quality we paid so much attention to is
| becoming unimportant compared to the sheer quantity of
| throwaway code that can be AI-generated.
|
| We're fine dining chefs losing to factory-produced junk food.
| deredede wrote:
| I know how to review code without looking at the corresponding
| assembly and have high confidence in the behavior of the final
| binary. I can't quite say the same for a prompt without looking
| at the generated code, even with temperature 0. The difference
| is explainability, not determinism.
| tines wrote:
| For me, the whole goal is to achieve Understanding:
| understanding a complex system, which is the computer and how
| it works. The beauty of this Understanding is what drives me.
|
| When I write a program, I understand the architecture of the
| computer, I understand the assembly, I understand the compiler,
| and I understand the code. There are things that I don't
| understand, and as I push to understand them, I am rewarded by
| being able to do more things. In other words, Understanding is
| both beautiful and incentivized.
|
| When making something with an LLM, I am disincentivized from
| actually understanding what is going on, because understanding
| is very slow, and the whole point of using AI is speed. The
| only time when I need to really understand something is when
| something goes wrong, and as the tool improves, this need will
| shrink. In the normal and intended usage, I only need to
| express a desire to achieve a result. Now, I can push against
| the incentives of the system. But for one, most people will not
| do that at all; and for two, the tools we use inevitably shape
| us. I don't like the shape into which these tools are forming
| me - the shape of an incurious, dull, impotent person who can
| only ask for someone else to make something happen for me.
| Remember, The Medium Is The Message, and the Medium here is,
| Ask, and ye shall receive.
|
| The fact that AI use leads to a reduction in Understanding is
| not only obvious, but also studies have shown the same. People
| who can't see this are refusing to acknowledge the obvious, in
| my opinion. They wouldn't disagree that having someone else do
| your homework for you would mean that you didn't learn
| anything. But somehow when an LLM tool enters the picture, it's
| different. They're a manager now instead of a lowly worker. The
| problem with this thinking is that, in your example, moving
| from say Assembly to C automates tedium to allow us to reason
| on a higher level. But LLMs are automating reasoning itself.
| There is no higher level to move to. The reasoning you do now
| while using AI is merely a temporary deficiency in the tool.
| It's not likely that you or I are the .01% of people who can
| create something truly novel that is not already sufficiently
| compressed into the model. So enjoy that bit of reasoning while
| you can, o thou Man of the Gaps.
|
| They say that writing is God's way of showing you how sloppy
| your thinking is. AI tools discourage one from writing. They
| encourage us to prompt, read, and critique. But this does not
| result in the same Understanding as writing does. And so our
| thinking will be, become, and remain vapid, sloppy,
| inarticulate, invalid, impotent. Welcome to the future.
| godelski wrote:
| > why do you not program in assembly?
|
| There's a balance of levels of abstraction. Abstraction is a
| great thing. Abstraction can make your programs faster, more
| flexible, and more easy to understand. But abstraction can also
| make your programs slower, more brittle, and incomprehensible.
|
| The point of code is to write specification. That is what code
| is. The whole reason we use a pedantic and somewhat cryptic
| schema is that natural language is too abstract. This is the
| exact reason we created math. It really is even the same reason
| we created things like "legalese".
|
| Seriously, just try a simple exercise and be adversarial to
| yourself. Describe how to do something and try to find
| loopholes. Malicious compliance. It's hard, to defend and
| writing that spec becomes extremely verbose, right? Doesn't
| this actually start to become easier by using coding
| techniques? Strong definitions? Have we not all forgotten the
| old saying "a computer does exactly what you tell it to, not
| what you intend to tell it to do"? Vibe coding only adds a
| level of abstraction to that. It becomes "a computer does what
| it 'thinks' you are telling it to do, not what you intend to
| tell it to do". Be honest with yourself, which paradigm is
| easier to debug?
|
| Natural language is awesome because the abstraction really
| compresses concepts, but it requires inference of the listener.
| It requires you to determine what the speaker _intends_ to say
| rather than what the speaker _actually_ says.
|
| Without that you'd have to be pedantic to even describe
| something as mundane as making a sandwich[1]. But inference
| also leads to misunderstandings and frankly, that is a major
| factor of why we talk past one another when talking on large
| global communication systems. Have you never experienced
| culture shock? Never experienced where someone misinterprets
| you and you realize that their interpretation was entirely
| reasonable?[2] Doesn't this knowledge also help resolve
| misunderstandings as you take a step back and recheck
| assumptions about these inferences? > using
| temperature 0.0
|
| Because, as you should be able to infer from everything I've
| said above, the problem isn't actually about randomness in the
| system. Making the system deterministic only has one realistic
| outcome: a programming language. You're still left with the
| computer doing what you tell it to do, but have made this more
| abstract. You've only turned it into the PB&J problem[1] and
| frankly, I'd rather write code than instructions like those
| kids are. Compared to the natural language the kids are using,
| code is more concise, easier to understand, more robust, and
| more flexible.
|
| I really think Dijkstra explains things well[0]. (I really do
| encourage reading the entire thing. It is short and worth the 2
| minutes. His _remark_ at the end is especially relevant in our
| modern world where it is so easy to misunderstand one
| another...) The virtue of formal texts is that
| their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy
| only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of
| it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of
| nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost
| impossible to avoid. Instead of regarding the
| obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard
| the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them,
| school children can learn to do what in earlier days only
| genius could achieve.
|
| [0]
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI
|
| [2] Has this happened to you and you've been too stubborn to
| realize the interpretation was reasonable?
| leecommamichael wrote:
| > Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.
|
| Your craft is not my craft.
|
| It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and
| Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated
| with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do
| not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general...
|
| If you are making something that exists, or something that is
| very similar to something that exists, odds are that an LLM can
| be made to generate code which approximates that thing. The LLM
| encoding is lossy. How will you adjust the output to recover the
| loss? What process will you go through mentally to bridge the
| gap? When does the gap appear? How do you recognize it? In the
| absolute best case you are given a highly visible error. Perhaps
| you've even shipped it, and need to provide context about the
| platform and circumstances to further elucidate. Better hope that
| platform and circumstance is old-hat.
| alex_young wrote:
| Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety,
| bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse.
|
| Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is
| understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of
| punch card programming. Sure, why not.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Your entire brain's model of the world is an abstraction over
| its sensory inputs. By this logic we might as well say you
| shouldn't mourn anything since all it means is a minor
| difference in the sensory inputs your brain receives.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| December a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT I did Advent of Code in
| Rust. It was very difficult, had never done the full month
| before, barely knew Rust and kept getting my ass kicked by it. I
| spent a full Saturday afternoon solving one of the last problems
| of the month, and it was wonderful. My head hurt and I was
| reading weird Wikipedia articles and it was a blast. Nothing is
| stopping me from doing that sort of thing again, and I feel like
| I might need to, to counteract the stagnation I feel at times
| mentally when it comes to coding. That spark is still in there I
| feel, buried under all the slop, and it would reappear if I gave
| it the chance, I hope. I have been grieving for the last years I
| think and only recently have I come to terms with the changes to
| my identity that llm's have wrought.
| koiueo wrote:
| > We'll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that
| eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.
|
| I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but
| because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying
| to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me.
|
| We'll still be sitting till 2am.
|
| > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don't
| believe me, wait six months.
|
| I've been hearing this for the last two years. And yet, LLMs,
| given abstract description of the problem, still write worse code
| than I do.
|
| Or did you mean type code? Because in that case, yes, I'd agree.
| They type better.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I am not confident that AI tooling can diagnose or fix this
| kind of bug. I've pointed Claude Opus at bugs that puzzle me
| (with only one code base involved) and, so far, it has only
| introduced more bugs in other places.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I don't mourn coding for itself, since I've always kinda disliked
| that side of my work (numerical software, largely).
|
| What I do mourn is the reliability. We're in this weird limbo
| where it's like rolling a die for every piece of work. If it
| comes up 1-5, I would have been better off implementing it
| myself. If it comes up 6, it'll get it done orders of magnitude
| faster than doing it by hand. Since the overall speedup is
| worthwhile, I have to try it every time, even if most of the time
| it fails. And of course it's a moving target, so I have to keep
| trying the things that failed yesterday because today's models
| are more capable.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| And all that time spent doing leetcode? Yeah, THAT was time Well
| Spent.... ;-)
| daedrdev wrote:
| I feel like we are long into the twilight of mini blogs and
| personal sites. Its like people trying to protect automotive
| jobs, the vas majority were already lost
|
| Perhaps Im a cynic but I don't know
| namuol wrote:
| The death of a means to an end is the birth of an end itself.
|
| When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of
| fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for
| many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of
| programming/computing is going to be interesting.
| internetguy wrote:
| how elitist
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very
| flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the
| Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and
| LISP) instead of using assembly language.
|
| We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| A non-deterministic, slow, pay to use, compiler for a language
| that is not precise enough for software. What an amazing
| abstraction!
| jryio wrote:
| These comments are comical. How hard is it to understand that
| human beings are experiential creatures. Our experiences matter,
| to survival, to culture, and identity.
|
| I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past
| because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience.
|
| Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any
| form of human creation?
|
| Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes.
|
| Should he mourn the loss of our craft. Also yes.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Very well put.
|
| Two things are true at the same time, this makes people uneasy.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| In fact, contrary things are so very often both true at the
| same time, in different ways.
|
| Figuring out how to live in the uncomfortableness of non-
| absolutes, how to live in a world filled with dualisms, is
| IMO one of the primary and necessary maturities for surviving
| and thriving in this reality.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Yes. Unwillingness to accept contradicting data points is
| holding many people back. They have an unconscious need to
| always pick one or the other, and that puts them at a
| disadvantage. "I know what I think." But no, you do not.
| ertucetin wrote:
| That's why I'll only read source code written until 2024.
| codeduck wrote:
| I on the other hand await the coming of the Butlerian Jihad.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > wait six months.
|
| I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise
| that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers
| will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh
| yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen
| months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months
| away!"
|
| I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was
| revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games,
| chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my
| desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I
| could see and experience the value of the internet immediately.
| It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be
| compelled to use it--I was _eager_ to use it of my own volition
| as often as possible.
|
| LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's
| a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to
| "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-
| nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but
| ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are
| useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved."
| It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go
| over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs--and there
| are _always_ bugs.
|
| Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.
| levzettelin wrote:
| Well said!
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| The state of the art is moving so rapidly that, yeah, Copilot
| by Microsoft using gpt-5-mini:low is not going to be very good.
| And there are many places where AI has been implemented poorly,
| generally by people who have the distribution to force it upon
| many people. There are also plenty of people who use vibe
| coding tools and produce utterly atrocious codebases. That
| doesn't preclude the existence of effective AI tools, and
| people who are good at using them.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will
| come to fruition...
|
| Nobody credible is promising you a perfect future. But, a
| better future, yes! If you do not see it, then know this. You
| have your head firmly planted in the sand and are intentionally
| refusing to see what is coming. You may not like it. You may
| not want it. But it is coming and you will either have to adapt
| or become irrelevant.
|
| Does Copilot spit out useless PR comments. 100% yes! Are there
| tools that are better than Copilot? 100% yes! These tools are
| not perfect. But even with their imperfections, they are very
| useful. You have to learn to harness them for their strengths
| and build processes to address their weaknesses. And yes, all
| of this requires learning and experimentation. Without that,
| you will not get good results and you will complain about these
| tools not being good.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or
| become irrelevant.
|
| I heard it will be here in six months. I guess I don't have
| much time to adapt! :)
| onion2k wrote:
| This feels right when you're looking forwards. The perfect AI
| bot is definitely not 6 months away. It'll take a lot longer
| than that to get something that doesn't get things wrong a lot
| of the time. That's not especially interesting or challenging
| though. It's obvious.
|
| What's much more interesting is looking _back_ 6, 12, 18, or 24
| months. 6 months ago was ChatGPT 5, 12 months ago was GPT 4.5,
| 18 months ago was 4o, and 24 months ago ChatGPT 3.5 was
| released (the first one). If you 've been following closely
| you'll have seen _incredible_ changes between each of them. Not
| to get to perfect, because that 's not really a reasonable
| goal, but definite big leaps forward each time. A couple of
| years ago one-shotting a basic tic tac toe wasn't really
| possible. Now though, you can one-shot a fairly complex web
| app. It won't be perfect, or even _good_ by a lot of measures
| compared to human written software, but it will work.
|
| I think the comparison to the internet is a good one. I wrote
| my first website in 1997, and saw the rapid iteration of
| websites and browsers back then. It felt amazing, and _fast_.
| AI feels the same to me. But given the fact that browsers still
| aren 't _good_ in a lot of ways I think it 's fair to say AI
| will take a similarly long time. That doesn't mean the
| innovations along the way aren't freaking cool though.
| strange_quark wrote:
| ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was
| supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5
| was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened
| to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when
| Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping
| it up as much as they are now.
|
| It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and
| there isn't a lot of evidence that shipping a better harness
| and post-training on using said harness is going to get us to
| the magical place where all SWE is automated that all these
| CEOs have promised.
| tibbar wrote:
| Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning
| models, though? 4.5 was slower and moderately better than
| 4o, o3 was _dramatically_ stronger than 4o and GPT5 was
| basically a light iteration on that.
|
| What's happening now is training models for long-running
| tasks that use tools, taking hours at a time. The latest
| models like 4.6 and 5.3 are starting to make good on this.
| If you're not using models that are wired into tools and
| allowed to iterate for a while, then you're not getting to
| see the current frontier of abilities.
|
| (EG if you're just using models to do general knowledge
| Q&A, then sure, there's only so much better you can get at
| that and models tapered off there long ago. But the vision
| is to use agents to perform a substantial fraction of
| white-collar work, there are well-defined research
| programmes to get there, and there is stead progress.)
| strange_quark wrote:
| > Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of
| reasoning models, though?
|
| o1 was something like 16-18 months ago. o3 was kinda
| better, and GPT 5 was considered a flop because it was
| basically just o3 again.
|
| I've used all the latest models in tools like Claude code
| and codex, and I guess I'm just not seeing the
| improvement? I'm not even working on anything
| particularly technically complex, but I still have to
| constantly babysit these things.
|
| Where are the long-running tasks? Cursor's browser that
| didn't even compile? Claude's C compiler that had gcc as
| an oracle and still performs worse than gcc without any
| optimizations? Yeah I'm completely unimpressed at this
| point given the promises these people have been making
| for years now. I'm not surprised that given enough
| constraints they can kinda sorta dump out some code that
| resembles something else in their training data.
| onion2k wrote:
| Fair enough, I guess I'm misremembering the timeline, but
| saying "It's taken 3 years, not 2!" doesn't really change
| the point I'm making very much. The road from what ChatGPT
| 3.5 could do to what Codex 5.3 can do represents an amazing
| pace of change.
|
| I am not claiming it's perfect, or even particularly good
| at some tasks (pelicans on bicycles for example), but
| anyone claiming it isn't a mind-blowing achievement in a
| staggeringly short time is just kidding themselves. It is.
| IhateAI wrote:
| Yeah, but humans still had to work to create those websites,
| it increased jobs, didn't replace them (this is happening).
| This will devalue all labor that has anything to do with i/o
| on computers, if not outright replace a lot of it. Who cares
| if it can't write perfect code, the owners of the software
| companies never cared about good code, they care about making
| money. They make plenty of money off slop, and they'll make
| even more if they don't have to have humans create the slop.
|
| The job market will get flooded with the unemployed (it
| already is) with fewer jobs to replace the ones that were
| automated, those remaining jobs will get reduced to minimum
| wages whenever and wherever possible. 25% of new college
| grads cannot find employment. Soon young people will be so
| poor that you'll beg to fight in a war. Give it 5-10 years.
|
| This isn't a hard future to game theory out, its not pretty
| if we maintain this fast track of progress in ML that
| minimally requires humans. Notice how the ruling class has
| increased the salaries for certain types of ML engineers,
| they know what's at stake. These businessmen make decisions
| based on expected value calculated from complex models, they
| aren't giving billion dollar pay packages to engineers
| because its trendy. We should use our own mental models to
| predict where this is going, and prevent it from happening
| however possible.
|
| _THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt
| to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the
| nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human
| factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known
| President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower
| prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent
| power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate
| CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are
| completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that
| way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go
| on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes
| every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the
| time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to
| watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the
| curves of research and development in artificial
| intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge.
| Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the
| biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be
| caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good
| Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live
| so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however
| minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised
| song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw
| clear identification between the first Luddites and our own
| revolutionary origins. It begins:_[0]
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r.
| ..
| charcircuit wrote:
| >It's utility was never "six months away,"
|
| 6 months ago is when my coding became 100% done by AI. The
| utility already has been there for a while.
|
| >I didn't have to be compelled to use it--I was eager to use it
| of my own volition as often as possible.
|
| The difference is that you were a kid then with an open mind
| and now your world view has fixed into a certain way the world
| works and how things should be done.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > your world view has fixed into a certain way the world
| works
|
| Yeah, it's weird. I'm fixated on not having bugs in my code.
| :)
| charcircuit wrote:
| AI can help with that too by automatically fixing bugs.
| esafak wrote:
| If you've only experienced MS Copilot I invite you to try the
| latest models through Codex (free deals ongoing), Claude Code,
| or Opencode. You may be surprised, for better or worse. What
| kind of software do you do?
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| > LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this.
|
| Maybe you're just older.
| stack_framer wrote:
| Older than whom?
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Than your younger self that got all excited about the
| Internet.
| stack_framer wrote:
| Truer words were never spoken. You have imparted wisdom
| upon me today. :)
| davnicwil wrote:
| Something I'm finding odd is this seemingly perpetually
| repeating claim that the latest thing that came out actually
| works, unlike the last thing that obviously didn't _quite_
| work.
|
| Then next month, of course, latest thing becomes last thing,
| and suddenly it's again obvious that actually it didn't quite
| work.
|
| It's like running on a treadmill towards a dangling carrot or
| something. It's simultaneously always here in front of our
| faces but also not here in actual hand, obviously.
|
| The tools are good and improving. They work for certain things,
| some of the time, with various need for manual stewarding in
| the hands of people who really know what they're doing. This is
| real.
|
| But it remains an absolutely epic leap from here to the idea
| that writing code per se is a skill nobody needs any more.
|
| More broadly, I don't even really understand what that could
| possibly mean on a practical level, as code is just
| instructions for what the software should do. You can express
| instructions on a higher level, and tooling keeps making that
| more and more possible (AI and otherwise), but in the end what
| does it mean to abstract fully away from the instruction in the
| detail? It seems really clear that will never be able to result
| in getting software that does what you want in a precise way
| rather than some probabilistic approximation which must be
| continually corrected.
|
| I think the real craft of software such that there is one is
| constructing systems of deterministic logic flows to make
| things happen in precisely the way we want them to. Whatever
| happens to tooling, or what exactly we call code or whatever,
| that won't change.
| ivanbalepin wrote:
| that's a good take
|
| > getting software that does what you want
|
| so then we become PMs?
| guytv wrote:
| you're probably not doing it right.
|
| I've been programming since 1984.
|
| OP basically described my current role with scary precision.
|
| I mostly review the AI's code, fix the plan before it starts,
| and nudge it in the right direction.
|
| Each new model version needs less nudging -- planning,
| architecture, security, all of it.
|
| There's an upside.
|
| There's something addictive about thinking of something and
| having it materialize within an hour.
|
| I can run faster and farther than I ever could before.
|
| I've rediscovered that I just like building things -- imagining
| them and watching them come alive -- even if I'm not laying
| every brick myself anymore.
|
| But the pace is brutal.
|
| My gut tells me this window, where we still get to meaningfully
| participate in the process, is short.
|
| That part is sad, and I do mourn it quite a bit.
|
| If you think this is just hype, you're doing it wrong.
| Lerc wrote:
| Can you point to the most optimistic six month projections that
| you have seen?
|
| I have encountered a lot of people say it will be better in six
| months, and every six months It has been.
|
| I have also seen a few predictions that say 'in a year or two
| they will be able to do a job completely. I am sceptical, but I
| would say such claims are rare. Dario Amodei has been about the
| only prominent voice that I have encountered that puts such
| abilities on a very short timeframe, and he still points to
| more than a year.
|
| The practical use of AI has certainly increased a lot in the
| last six months.
|
| So I guess what I'm asking is more specifics on what you feel
| was claimed, by whom, and how much did they fall short?
|
| Without that supporting evidence you could just be being
| annoyed by the failure of claims that exist in your
| imagination.
| godelski wrote:
| > it's still just six months away
|
| Reminds me of another "just around the corner" promise...[0]
|
| I think it is one thing for the average person to buy into the
| promises but I've yet to understand why that happens here. Or
| why that happens within our community of programmers. It is one
| thing for non-experts to fall for obtuse speculative claims,
| but it is another for experts. I'm excited for autonomous
| vehicles, but in 2016 is was laughable to think they're around
| the corner and only 10 years later does such a feat seem to
| start looking like it's actually a few years away.
|
| Why do we only evaluate people/claims on their hits and not
| their misses? It just encourages people to say anything and
| everything, because eventually one will be right. It's 6 months
| away because _eventually_ it will actually be 6 months away.
| But is it 6 months away because it is actually 6 months away or
| because we want it to be? I thought the vibe coder 's motto is
| "I just care that it works." Honestly, I think that's the
| problem. Everyone care's about if it works or not and that's
| the primary concern of all sides of the conversation here. So
| is it 6 months away because it is 6 months away or is it 6
| months away because you've convinced yourself it is 6 months
| away. You got good reasons for believing that, you got the
| evidence, but evidence for a claim is meaningless without
| comparing to evidence that counters the claim.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
| dlvhdr wrote:
| Another post saying 6 more months.. i'm so tired of these
| tormeh wrote:
| Quick questionnaire. Please reply with how much you like/use AI
| and what kind of programming you do.
|
| I wonder if there are some interesting groupings.
| Folcon wrote:
| I suspect my comment will not be well received, however I notice
| in myself that I've passed the event horizon of being a believer
| and am past the honeymoon period and I'm beginning to think about
| engineering
|
| My headspace is now firmly in "great, I'm beginning to understand
| the properties and affordances of this new medium, how do I
| maximise my value from it", hopefully there's more than a few
| people who share this perspective, I'd love to talk with you
| about the challenges you experience, I know I have mine, maybe we
| have answers to each others problems :)
|
| I assume that the current set of properties can change, however
| it seems like some things are going to be easier than others, for
| example multi modal reasoning still seems to be a challenge and
| I'm trying to work out if that's just hard to solve and will take
| a while or if we're not far from a good solution
| willguest wrote:
| We have CNC machines, and we still have sculptors.
|
| Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting
| code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we
| need to look at these things like adversaries.
|
| I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be
| quite something.
| linguae wrote:
| Two years ago I decided to give up my career as an industry
| researcher to pursue a tenure-track professor position at a
| community college. One of the reasons I changed careers is
| because I felt frustrated with how research at my company changed
| from being more self-directed and driven by longer-term goals to
| being directed by upper management with demands for more
| immediate productization.
|
| I feel generative AI is being imposed onto society. While it is a
| time-saving tool for many applications, I also think there are
| many domains where generative AI needs to be evaluated much more
| cautiously. However, there seems to be relentless pressure to
| "move fast and break things," to adopt technology due to its
| initial labor-saving benefits without fully evaluating its
| drawbacks. That's why I feel generative AI is an imposition.
|
| I also resent the power and control that Big Tech has over
| society and politics, especially in America where I live. I
| remember when Google was about indexing the Web, and I first used
| Facebook when it was a social networking site for college
| students. These companies became successful because they provided
| useful services to people. Unfortunately, once these companies
| gained our trust and became immensely wealthy, they started
| exploiting their wealth and power. I will never forget how so
| many Big Tech leaders sat at Trump's second inauguration, some of
| whom got better seats than Trump's own wife and children. I
| highly resent OpenAI's cornering of the raw wafer market and the
| subsequent exorbitant hikes in RAM and SSD prices.
|
| Honestly, I have less of an issue with large language models
| themselves and more of an issue with how a tiny handful of
| powerful people get to dictate the terms and conditions of
| computing for society. I'm a kid who grew up during the personal
| computing revolution, when computation became available to the
| general public. I fell for the "computers for the rest of us,"
| "information at your fingertips" lines. I wanted to make a
| difference in the world through computing, which is why I pursued
| a research career and why I teach computer science.
|
| I've also sat and watched research industry-wide becoming
| increasingly driven by short-term business goals rather than by
| long-term visions driven by the researchers themselves. I've seen
| how "publish-and-perish" became the norm in academia, and I also
| saw DOGE's ruthless cuts in research funding. I've seen how Big
| Tech won the hearts and minds of people, only for it to leverage
| its newfound power and wealth to exploit the very people who made
| Big Tech powerful and wealthy.
|
| The tech industry has changed, and not for the better. This is
| what I mourn.
| bytefish wrote:
| To me, it's super exciting to play ping pong with ideas up until
| I arrive at an architecture and interfaces, that I am fine with.
|
| My whole life I have been reading other people's code to
| accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of
| developers start with reading documentation, I have always
| started with reading code.
|
| And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up
| as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the
| whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.
|
| That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years.
| And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal
| knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure,
| that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn't
| even know about.
|
| Actually most of my time isn't put into software development at
| all. It's about trying to know the users and colleagues I work
| with, understand their background and understand how my software
| supports them in their day to day job.
|
| I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way
| to go to reach empathy.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think
| the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor
| demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of
| the situation, and that reality means that the _craft_ of
| programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it
| was just a few years ago.
|
| As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm
| someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind
| toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this
| trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my
| profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this
| is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess
| over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is
| veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-
| to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe
| this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is
| "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the
| profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.
|
| If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I
| was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where
| my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a
| century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding
| programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the
| profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with
| detail and craft is again a huge asset.
| Animats wrote:
| Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car
| turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the
| homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been
| printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had
| been secure for a century were just - gone.
|
| That's the future for maybe half of programmers.
|
| Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just
| getting started.
| jsrcout wrote:
| From valued professional to surplus inventory just like that.
| Where does this process end? Because right now it's only
| accelerating.
| levzettelin wrote:
| I don't mourn our craft.
| peheje wrote:
| I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it.
|
| After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work
| more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but
| more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews,
| broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The
| cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted.
|
| My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles
| because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation
| in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has
| moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to
| absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the
| knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my
| confusion.
|
| Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation
| is free, judgment becomes priceless.
|
| We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now,
| which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But
| I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design,
| tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach.
|
| This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we
| traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and
| just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder,
| rather than just for coordinates.
| guygurari wrote:
| Programming brings me joy in two different ways.
|
| 1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct
| abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs.
| Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and
| robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a
| pleasure to read. It's an art.
|
| 2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to
| myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world.
| It's engineering.
|
| These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto
| themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding
| agents depends on how much you care about these two things.
|
| AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has
| amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet:
| It will get to 100x this year.
|
| I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to
| value building things much more highly. 20yo me would've been
| devastated.
| IhateAI wrote:
| I love paying some billionaire $0.0001 to use his thinking
| machine / Think for me SaaS. I love my competency and speed being
| rented from a billionaire, removing all value of my labor and
| agency. I really feel sorry for all of you LLM pilled people. You
| need to be shamed. This is going to be used as a weapon to
| devalue every working persons agency in this world and remove all
| of the working class's bargaining chips.
|
| You think its just SWE? It will be accountants, customer service,
| factory workers, medical assistance basically anyone who doesn't
| work with their hands directly, and they'll try to solve that
| here soon too and alienate them too.
|
| Look at who's in charge, do you think they're going to give us
| UBI? No, they're going to sign us up to go fight wars to help
| them accumulate resources. Stop supporting this, they're going to
| make us so poor young men will beg to fight in a war. Its the
| same playbook from the first half of the 20th Century.
|
| You think I'm paranoid, give it 5 years.
|
| We are at all time high's in the stock market/equities and
| they've laid off 400k SWE's in the last 16 months. While going on
| podcasts to tell us we are going to have more time to create and
| do what we love. We have to work to pay our bills. We don't want
| whats coming, but they're selling us some lie that this will
| solve all our problems, it will solve the ruling classes problems
| that will be it. You will have no bargaining chips and you will
| be forced to take whatever morsels given to you.
|
| Your competency will be directly correlated 1:1 to the quantity
| and quality of tokens that you can afford, given access too (or
| loaned??) We're literally at the beginning of a black mirror
| episode before it gets dark.
|
| People that grew up in the Capitalist West have been brainwashed
| since they were 10 years old they they can be a billionaire too,
| no you can't there's 2k-3k of them and 8 billion of us.
|
| These automation tools are the ultimate weapon for the ruling
| class to strip all value of you from your labor, and you're
| embracing that as a miracle. Its not, your life is in the process
| of being torn of all meaning.
|
| Good luck to everyone who agrees, we're going to need it.. Anyone
| supporting these companies or helping enhance these model's
| capabilities, you're a class traitor and soon to be slave.
|
| Required reading:
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
| k33n wrote:
| This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination
| that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x
| engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left
| in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working
| at the moment.
|
| The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually
| all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like
| "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete
| applications and systems" is able to propagate.
|
| The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred
| of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way
| yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their
| businesses.
|
| I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten
| for breakfast.
| frays wrote:
| The majority of the code currently running in production for my
| company was written 5+ years ago. This was all "hand-written" and
| much lower quality than the AI generated code that I am
| generating and deploying these days.
|
| Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed
| actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best.
|
| If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working
| on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much
| higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code
| and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to
| rewrite this code myself all over again.
| whyenot wrote:
| For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job
| where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money.
| That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is
| still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open
| source projects that would love to have your help, but the days
| of making big money may be drawing to a close.
|
| Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a
| small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I
| haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is
| utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to
| update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked.
| That's kind of amazing.
| kruipen wrote:
| This discussion is like the discourse about work from home/return
| to office.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| From a blog post last month by the same author:
|
| > Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by
| Claude Code. The rest of the time, I'm mostly touching up its
| work or doing routine tasks that it's slow at, like refactoring
| or renaming.
|
| > I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the
| sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes,
| and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused,
| or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it.
| Maybe it's because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded
| everybody's judgment, or maybe it's because we inhabit different
| worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still
| don't think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there's just a
| lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I'm tired of
| it.
|
| https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/
|
| If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI
| hype), might want to go read that post.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| > "I didn't ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece
| of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could
| make money off of it."
|
| I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little
| bit shallow.
|
| If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully
| regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have
| simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it
| nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more
| thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real
| difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the
| scraping is different than that done by a search engine.
|
| But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less
| emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some
| works and presumably did so that people could consume that
| content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and
| for what purpose.
|
| It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is
| that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from
| himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and
| use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work
| has.
|
| Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but
| trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that
| commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit
| disingenuous.
|
| If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some
| content for others to consume and someone else took that content
| as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and
| don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your
| "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| My ability to ask questions & hone in on good answers is _far_
| better than it ever was. My ability to change course & iterate
| is far faster than it ever has been. I'm making far more informed
| decisions, far more able to make forays and see how things turn
| out, with low cost.
|
| I could not be having a better time.
|
| I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I
| would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow,
| and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so
| hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a
| weekend.
|
| But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I
| wanted to be doing. I feel _incredibly_ relieved, feel such
| enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little
| Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it
| 's way to the rest of the world, possibly.
|
| Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that.
| But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so
| unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with
| incredible raw excitement and possibility before me.
|
| That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following
| pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long
| term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people
| working really hard together to build amazing systems.
| teeray wrote:
| > because they're wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you're
| still riding around on a fixie bike
|
| Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my
| bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect
| of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might
| get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state
| lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds
| of toxic gas along the way.
| pzo wrote:
| I didn't come in IT for money - back in the days it wasn't as
| well paid as today - nevertheless if this craft was very poorly
| paid I probably wouldn't choose this profession either. And I
| assume many people here wouldn't as well unless you are already
| semi-retired or debt free.
|
| I mourn a little bit that in 20 years possibly 50% of software
| jobs will get axed or unless you are elite/celebrity dev salary
| will stagnate. I mourn that in the future upward mobility and
| moving up into upper middle class will be harder without trying
| to be entrepreneur.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don't
| believe me, wait six months.
|
| You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a
| programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you
| should work on improving your own programming skills.
|
| People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and
| while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still
| appears to be plateauing.
|
| It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be
| a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You
| better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not...
| then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I am feeling this loss. I spent most of mu career scrupulously
| avoiding leadership positions because what I really like is the
| simple joy of making things with my own two hands.
|
| Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I
| think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own
| multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a
| better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most
| people are nowadays.
|
| And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are -
| like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making
| software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least,
| soon enough it won't be. I can fret about deskilling all I like,
| but it seems that soon enough these skills won't be particularly
| valuable except as a form of entertainment.
|
| Perhaps the coding agents won't be able to make certain things or
| use certain techniques. That was the case for textile
| manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will
| simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of
| course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for
| enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we
| see it in each others' work.
|
| It's not a terrible future, I suppose, in a long enough view. The
| world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial
| Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and
| other similar points in history, not until after we get through
| another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and
| control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era
| of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won't start quite so
| many wars while they enjoy their power trips.
| brandensilva wrote:
| I'm probably a minority, but I've never loved dealing with
| syntax. The code itself always felt like a hindrance to me that
| reminded me that my brain was slowed down by my fingers. I get it
| though, it was tactical and it completed the loop. It was
| essential for learning I felt like despite eventually getting to
| a point where it slows you down the more senior you get.
|
| AI has a ways to go before it's senior level if it ever reaches
| that level, but I do feel bad for juniors that survive this who
| never will have the opportunity to sculpt code by hand.
| clarity_hacker wrote:
| The blacksmith analogy is poetic but misleading. Blacksmithing
| was replaced by a process that needed no blacksmith at all.
| What's happening with code is closer to what synthesizers did to
| music -- the instrument changed, the craft didn't die.
|
| Musicians mourned synthesizers. Illustrators mourned Photoshop.
| Typesetters mourned desktop publishing. In every case the people
| who thrived weren't the ones who refused the new tool or the ones
| who blindly adopted it. They were the ones who understood that
| the tool absorbed the mechanical layer while the taste layer
| became more valuable, not less.
|
| The real shift isn't from hand-coding to AI-coding. It's from "I
| express intent through syntax" to "I express intent through
| constraints and review." That's still judgment. Still craft. Just
| a different substrate.
|
| What we're actually mourning is the loss of effort as a signal of
| quality. When anyone can generate working code, the
| differentiator moves upstream to architecture, to knowing what to
| build, to understanding why one approach fails at scale and
| another doesn't. Those are harder skills, not easier ones.
| cheevly wrote:
| Oh no, my engineering profession requires me to use new
| engineering techniques due to advancements produced by
| engineering. Quality cringe.
| padjo wrote:
| Thanks to the person who wrote this. It resonates very strongly
| with me.
| clutter55561 wrote:
| Many have mentioned woodworking as an analogy from a personal
| perspective, but for me the important perspective is that of
| consumers.
|
| Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your
| kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse,
| chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a
| carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room.
| The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the
| wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn't
| do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower.
| I use handsaws simply because I'm afraid of circular saws, but I
| digress.
|
| A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and
| prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality.
| We scream "it is not the same". It indeed isn't for us. But the
| consumers will get better value for money. Not quality,
| necessarily, but better value.
|
| How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka
| engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers).
| And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.
|
| But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture
| that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway
| because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is
| when the craft will die.
|
| The world will just become less technical, as is the case with
| other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion
| engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing
| machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear
| before cars became iPads on wheels.
|
| As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked.
| Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation
| will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in
| history.
| BojanTomic wrote:
| The king is dead; long live the king.
| twelve40 wrote:
| I found my love for programming in high school, dreaming of
| helping the world with my beautiful craftsmanship, but now i
| really really need the fokken money. Both are true!
|
| So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less
| Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix
| its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed
| a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well,
| then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess
| mirawelner wrote:
| These posts make me feel like I'm the worst llm prompter in
| existence.
|
| I'm using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab
| into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly
| reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the
| llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn't be using
| an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than
| me at C++ because I'm halfway through my first ever book on it.
| What LLMs are these people using?
|
| The code I'm translating isn't even that complex - it runs
| analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude's new
| diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the
| algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out
| works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work
| on its output. I'm doing all the hard design work myself.
|
| I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send
| the code to an LLM. But I can't because they suck so I gotta
| learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn't eat up all my
| pc's memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them
| my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world
| do you live in?? Let me in!
| themacguffinman wrote:
| A lot of people are using Claude Code which many consider to be
| a noticeably better for coding than the other models.
|
| I think also they tend to be generating non-C++ code where
| there are more guardrails and less footguns for LLMs to run
| into. Eg they're generating Javascript or Python or Rust where
| type systems and garbage collection eliminates entire classes
| of mistakes that LLMs can run into. I know you said you don't
| use it for Python because you know the language but even
| experienced Python devs still see value in LLM-generating
| Python code.
| mirawelner wrote:
| That's funny bc I linked my post to a server I'm on and I
| also was told to use an agent.
|
| My worry about an agent is I'm trying to translate the math
| with full fidelity and an agent might take liberties with the
| math rather than full accuracy. I'm already having issues
| with 0 to 1 indexing screwing up some of the algorithm.
|
| But I will try an agent - can't hurt to try
| bytearray wrote:
| I understand the sentiment and I've been involved in software
| engineering in various roles for the last 25+ years. The thing
| that gives me hope is that never once in that time has the
| problem ever been that we didn't have more work to do.
|
| It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm
| just getting a lot more done.
| gob_blob wrote:
| "They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don't
| believe me, wait six months." They've been saying that for years.
| Stop believing it.
| fiala__ wrote:
| Also, it's always six months from now, because otherwise you
| could just point at the hundred ways they're wrong right now.
| It's nothing but the ol' dotcom "trust me, bro" kind of
| marketing.
| IhateAI_2 wrote:
| If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option,
| please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up
| when the response is bad.
|
| Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them
| whenever we can.
| mrandish wrote:
| As a very old school programmer who taught myself assembler in
| 1982 on an 8-bit 4K micro, I don't see much to mourn here.
|
| * People still craft wood furniture from felled trees entirely
| with hand tools. Some even make money doing it by calling it
| 'artisanal'. Nothing is stopping anyone from coding in any
| historical mode they like. Toggle switches, punch cards, paper
| tape, burning EPROMs, VT100, whatever.
|
| * OP seems to be lamenting he may not be paid as much to expend
| hours doing "sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually
| relents to the debugger at 2 AM." I've been there. Sometimes I'd
| feel mild satisfaction on solving a rat-hole problem but more
| often, it was significant relief. I never much liked that part of
| coding and began to see it as a failure mode. I found I got
| bigger bucks - and had more fun - the better I got at avoiding
| rat-hole problems in the first place.
|
| * My entire journey creating software from ~1983 to ~2020 was
| about making a thing that solved someone's problem better,
| cheaper or faster - and, on a good day, we managed all three at
| once. At various times I ended up doing just about every aspect
| of it from low-level coding to CEO and back again, sometimes in
| the same day. Every role in the journey had major challenges.
| Some were interesting, a few were enjoyable, but most were just
| "what had to get done" to drag the product I'd dreamt up kicking
| and screaming into existence.
|
| * From my first teenage hobby project to my first cassette-tape
| in-a-baggie game to a $200M revenue SaaS for F100, every
| improvement in coding from getting a floppy disk drive to an
| assembler with macros to an 80 column display to version control,
| new languages, libraries, IDEs and LLMs just helped "making the
| thing exist" be easier, faster and less painful.
|
| * Eventually, to create even harder, bigger and better things I
| had to add others coding alongside me. Stepping into the player-
| coach role amplified my ability to bring new things into
| existence. It wasn't much at first because I had no idea how to
| manage programmers or projects but I started figuring it out and
| slowly got better. On a good day, using an LLM to help me "make
| the thing exist" feels a lot like when I first started being a
| player-coach. The frustration when it's 'two steps forward, one
| back' feels like deja vu. Much like current LLMs, my first part-
| time coding helpers weren't as good as I was and I didn't yet
| know how to help them do their best work. But it was still a net
| gain because there were more of them than me.
|
| * The benefits of having more coders helping me really started
| paying off once I started recruiting coders who were _much_
| better programmers than I ever was. Getting there took a little
| ego adjustment on my part but what a difference! They had more
| experience, applied different patterns, knew to avoid problems I
| 'd never seen and started coming up with some really good ideas.
| As LLMs get better and I get better at helping them help me - I
| hope that's were we're headed. It doesn't feel directionally
| different than the turbo-boost from my first floppy drive, macro-
| assembler, IDE or profiler but the impact is already greater with
| upside potential that's much higher still - and that's exciting.
| dazhbog wrote:
| I dont get the hype.. And I dont think we will reach peak AI
| coding performance any time soon.
|
| Yes, watching an LLM spit out lots of code is for sure
| mesmerizing. Small tasks usually work ok, code kinda compiles, so
| for some scenarios it can work out.. BUT anyone serious about
| software development can see how piece of CRAP the code is.
|
| LLMs are great tools overall, great to bounce ideas, great to get
| shit done. If you have a side project and no time, awesome.. If
| your boss/company has a shitty culture and you just want to get
| the task done, great. Got a mundane coding task, hate coding, or
| your code wont run in a critical environment? please, LLM that
| shit over 9000..
|
| Remember though, an LLM is just a predictor, a noisy, glorified
| text predictor. Only when AI reaches a point of not optimizing
| for short term gains and has built-in long term memory
| architecture (similar to humans) AND can produce some linux
| kernel level code and size, then we can talk..
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I have junior people on my team using Cursor and Claude, it's
| not all great. Several times they've checked in code that also
| makes small yet breaking changes to queries. I have to watch
| out for random (unused) annotations in Java projects and then
| explain why the tools are wrong. The Copilot bot we use on
| GitHub slows down PR reviews by recommending changes that look
| reasonable yet either don't really work or negatively impact
| performance.
|
| Overall, I'd say AI tooling has maybe close to doubled the time
| I spend on PR reviews. More knowledgeable developers do better
| with these tools but they also fall for the toolings false
| confidence from time to time.
|
| I worry people are spending less time reading documentation or
| stepping through code to see how it works out of fear that
| "other people" are more productive.
| orange-tourist wrote:
| > will end up like some blacksmith's tool in an archeological dig
|
| guy who doesn't realize we still use hammers. This article was
| embarrassing to read.
| etamponi wrote:
| > So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior
| colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because
| they're wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you're still riding
| around on a fixie bike. Eventually your boss will start asking
| why you're getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues' salary to
| produce a tenth of the code.
|
| I might be mistaken, but I bet they said the same when Visual
| Basic came out.
| apublicfrog wrote:
| I cannot empathise. If you love writing code, there is nothing
| stopping you writing code. I write code for fun with no
| commercial intent all the time, and have for decades. Very few
| oil painters had a salary.
|
| This is a complaint someone is making about their job propspects
| thinly wrapped in floral language. I know for some people (it
| seems especially prominent in Americans I've found) their
| identity is linked to their job. This is a chance to work on
| this. You can decouple yourself and redefine yourself as a
| person.
|
| Who knows? Once you're done you may go write some code for fun
| again.
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