[HN Gopher] I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and t...
___________________________________________________________________
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I
loved has changed
Author : jamesrandall
Score : 543 points
Date : 2026-02-10 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jamesdrandall.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jamesdrandall.com)
| towndrunk wrote:
| I know exactly how you feel. I don't know how many hours I sat in
| front of this debugger (https://www.jasik.com) poking around and
| trying to learn everything at a lower level. Now its so
| different.
| jamesrandall wrote:
| Yeah. Different is the word. In many ways it's just another
| abstraction but we're not machines and this, to me at least,
| just gives a very different feel.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they
| consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're
| crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill
| another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.
| jamesrandall wrote:
| If you bothered to read it you'd find that I am embracing the
| tools and I still feel there is craft. It's just different.
|
| But snark away. It's lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I think the Oxide computer LLM guidelines are wise on this
| front:
|
| > Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract
| of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and
| the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater
| intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write
| than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they
| struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the
| writer themselves understands it -- and it is the least a
| reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
|
| https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
|
| The heavy use of LLMs in writing makes people rightfully
| distrustful that they should put the time in to try to read
| what's written there.
|
| Using LLMs for coding is different in many ways from writing,
| because the proof is more there in the pudding - you can run
| it, you can test it, etc. But the writing _is_ the writing,
| and the only way to know it's correct is to put in the work.
|
| That doesn't mean you didn't put in the work! But I think
| it's why people are distrustful and have a bit of an allergic
| reaction to LLM-generated writing.
| mkozlows wrote:
| I agree with that for programming, but not for writing. The
| stylistic tics are obtrusive and annoying, and make for bad
| writing. I think I'm sympathetic to the argument this piece
| is making, but I couldn't make myself slog through the
| LinkedIn-bot prose.
| einr wrote:
| Why should anyone bother to read what nobody wrote?
| 6510 wrote:
| AI?
| 6510 wrote:
| This seems to be what is happening bots are posting
| things and bots are reading it. It's a bit like our
| wonderful document system (www) turned into an
| application platform. We gained the later but lost the
| former.
| fwip wrote:
| Having an LLM write your blog posts is also lazy, and it's
| damn tedious to read.
| coldtea wrote:
| "But snark away. It's lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious."
|
| Looks like this comment is embracing the tools too?
|
| I'd take cheap snark over something somebody didn't bother to
| write, but expect us to read.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Speaking directly, if I catch the scent of ChatGPT, it's
| over.
|
| People put out AI text, primarily, to run hustles.
|
| So its writing style is a kind of internet version of
| "talking like a used car salesman".
|
| With some people that's fine, but anyone with a healthy
| epistemic immune system is not going to listen to you.
|
| If you want to save a few minutes, you'll just have to accept
| that.
| NiloCK wrote:
| What's your target false positive rate?
|
| I mean, obviously you can't know your actual error rates,
| but it seems useful to estimate a number for this and to
| have a rough intuition for what your target rate is.
|
| Did chatGPT write this response?
| recursive wrote:
| This is how LLMs poison the discourse.
| tavavex wrote:
| If you feel so strongly about your message, why would you
| outsource writing out your thoughts to such a large extent
| where people can feel how reminiscent it sounds of LLM
| writing instead of your own? It's like me making a blogpost
| by outsourcing the writing to someone on Fiverr.
|
| Yes it's fast, it's more efficient, it's cheap - the only
| things we as a society care about. But it doesn't convey any
| degree of care about what you put out, which is probably
| desirable for a personal, emotionally-charged piece of
| writing.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm weird about this, I choose to use AI to get feedback on my
| writing, but refuse to just copy and paste the AIs words. I
| only do it if its a short work email and I really dont care
| about its short lived lifespan, if its supposed to be an email
| where the discussion continues, then I refine it. I can write a
| LOT. If HN has edit count logs, I've probably got the high
| score.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Imagine if people were complex creatures, feeling different
| emotions for different things, shocking right?
|
| I can hate LLMs for killing my craft while simultaneously using
| it to write a "happy birthday" message for a relative I hate or
| some corpo speak.
| einr wrote:
| At least then you're being honest about you hating your
| intended audience, and not proudly posting the slop vomited
| forth from your algorithmic garbage machine as if it were
| something that deserved the time, thought and consideration
| of your equals.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| This is not either of those. This is the equivalent of a
| eulogy to a passion and a craft. Using an LLM to write it:
| entire sections, headers, sentences - is an insult to the
| craft.
|
| The post in the same vain, "We mourn our craft", did a much
| better job at this communicating the point without the AI
| influence.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Fair enough, agree on your second paragraph.
| raphman wrote:
| The author admits that they used AI but I found it not _that_
| obvious. What are telltale signs in this case? While the
| writing style is a little bit over-stylized (exactly three
| examples in a sentence, Blade Runner reference), I might write
| in a similar style about a topic that im very emotional about.
| The actual content feels authentic to me.
| dgacmu wrote:
| (1) The pattern "It's not just a X---It's a Y" is super
| common in LLM-generated text for some reason. Complete with
| em dash. (I like em dashes and I wish LLMs weren't ruining
| them for the rest of us)
|
| "Upgrading your CPU wasn't a spec sheet exercise -- it was
| transformative."
|
| "You weren't just a user. You were a systems engineer by
| necessity."
|
| "The tinkerer spirit didn't die of natural causes -- it was
| bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."
|
| And in general a lot of "It's not <alternative>, it's
| <something else>", with or without an em dash:
|
| "But it wasn't just the craft that changed. The promise
| changed."
|
| it's really verbose. One of those in a piece might be eye-
| catching and make someone think, but an entire blog post made
| up of them is _tiresome_.
|
| (2) Phrasing like this seems to come out of LLMs a lot,
| particularly ChatGPT:
|
| "I don't want to be dishonest about this. "
|
| (3) Lots of use of very short catch sentences / almost
| sentence fragments to try to "punch up" the writing. Look at
| all of the paragraphs after the first in the section "The era
| that made me":
|
| "These weren't just products. " (start of a paragraph)
|
| "And the software side matched." (next P)
|
| "Then it professionalised."
|
| "But it wasn't just the craft that changed."
|
| "But I adapted." (a few paragraphs after the previous one)
|
| And .. more. It's like the LLM latched on to things that were
| locally "interesting" writing, but applies them globally,
| turning the entire thing into a soup of "ah-ha! hey! here!"
| completely ignorant of the terrible harm it does to the
| narrative structure and global readability of the piece.
| raphman wrote:
| Thanks a lot, I really appreciate that you took the time
| for this detailed explanation.
| tavavex wrote:
| > And .. more. It's like the LLM latched on to things that
| were locally "interesting" writing, but applies them
| globally, turning the entire thing into a soup of "ah-ha!
| hey! here!" completely ignorant of the terrible harm it
| does to the narrative structure and global readability of
| the piece.
|
| It's like YouTube-style engagement maximization. Make it
| more punchy, more rapid, more impactful, more dramatic -
| regardless of how the outcome as a whole ends up looking.
|
| I wonder if this writing style is only relevant to ChatGPT
| on default settings, because that's the model that I've
| heard people accuse the most of doing this. Do other models
| have different repetitive patterns?
| zahlman wrote:
| Out of curiousity, for those who were around to see it: was
| writing on LinkedIn commonly like this, pre-chatGPT? I've
| been wondering what the main sources were for these idioms
| in the training data, and it comes across to me like the
| kind of marketing-speak that would make sense in those
| circles.
|
| (An explanation for the emoji spam in GitHub READMEs is
| also welcome. Who did that before LLMs?)
| lbrito wrote:
| I felt the same. I resonate with the message, but it really
| rings hollow with so much AI directing.
|
| I'd wish people would stop doing that. AI writing isn't even
| particularly good. Its not like it makes you into Dostoevsky,
| it just sloppifies your writing with the same lame mannerisms
| ("wasn't just X -- it was Y"), the same short paragraphs, the
| same ems.
| almosthere wrote:
| 11 and now 45. I am still interested in it, but I feel like in my
| 20s I would get a dopamine rush when a row showed up in a
| database. In my 30s I would get that only if a message passed
| through a system and updated on-screen analytics within 10
| seconds. Thank god for LLMs because all of it became extremely
| boring, I can't stand having to get these little milestones each
| new company or each new product I'm working on. At least with
| LLMs the dopamine hit comes from being in awe of the code that
| gets generated and realizing it found every model, every
| messaging system interface, every API, and figuring out how to
| make it backwards compatible, updating the UI - something that
| would take half a day, now in 5 minutes or less.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Same, but it changed when I was 17 and again when I was 27 and
| then 37 and so on. It has always been changing dramatically, but
| this latest leap is just so incredibly different that it seems
| unique.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what's
| happening. The abstraction ship sailed decades ago._
|
| Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no
| mere incremental change. And the almost natural language
| interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over
| assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and
| the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart,
| and no, microcode and low level abstractions are not a real
| counter-argument to that). Even less so if agents turn autonomous
| and you just herd them onto completion.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This LLM stuff is a little weird. Previously we had Python
| which was pretty close to pseudocode but you could run it
| directly. Now, these LLMs are one step more abstract, but their
| outputs aren't runnable directly, they produce possibly
| incorrect code-like-text. Actually this seems like good news
| for programmers since you have to read the code in the lower-
| level language that gets produced.
| sho_hn wrote:
| My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these
| tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a
| smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with
| AI.
|
| My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the
| quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the
| quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An
| inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while
| a great dev can produce great results.
|
| The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary
| as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have
| taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of
| your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just
| right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and
| exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding
| background queues of agents with other tasks.
|
| I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool
| revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal
| time management.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will
| remain a smart dev with AI.
|
| I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least
| it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really
| enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I resonate with that. I also find writing code super
| pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the
| focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with
| a giddy high.
|
| What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools
| into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing
| that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach.
| The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires
| being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is
| better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay
| confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop.
|
| It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of
| coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and
| sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit
| from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent
| result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises
| (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in
| writing code, feelings-wise.
| bearfox wrote:
| I'm in the enjoy writing code camp and do see merits of the
| hybrid approach, but I also worry about the (mental) costs.
|
| I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully
| engaged with both the problem itself and an additional
| problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more
| taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged
| those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring
| frustration.
|
| In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality
| I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only
| now without coding sessions to clear my brain.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is
| so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your
| mental model of the code.
|
| Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very
| taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're
| incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty
| modest pace.
|
| LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans
| can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces
| something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly
| need to build mental models of the system to keep up with
| the changes.
|
| Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it
| always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is
| pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost
| of other mental capabilities.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Hope: I want to become a stronger dev.
|
| Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or
| clout or the reward of mentoring.
| organsnyder wrote:
| > ...the reward of mentoring.
|
| I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever
| correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to
| codify it in the prompt.
|
| And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the
| curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I
| do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm
| contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-
| of-the-art of the industry.
| rurp wrote:
| LLMs are similar in a lot of ways to the labor outsourcing
| that happened a generation or two ago. Except that instead
| of this development lifting a billion people out of poverty
| in the third world a handful of rich people will get even
| more rich and everyone else will have higher energy bills.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the
| historical meaning, not the derogatory slang).
|
| I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know
| full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My
| skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first
| only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but
| it's obviously not going to stop there.
|
| If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I
| would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
|
| For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply
| hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to
| retire (or switch careers).
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The historical luddites are literally the human death drive
| externalized. Reject them and all of their garbage ideas
| with extreme prejudice.
|
| Related, the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book which
| was extremely critical of the whole concept. AI thankfully
| destroys it. Good riddance, don't let the door hit your ass
| on the way out.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
| mbgerring wrote:
| You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless,
| for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and
| what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real
| craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best
| of luck
| takklob wrote:
| I bet you're one of the same dumbasses who fell hook,
| line and sinker for the cold fusion fraud a few years
| back lmao.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Either you're thinking of the "room temperature semi-
| conductor" thing out of Korea, or you're some boomer who
| forgot that cold fusion was in the 80s.
| goatlover wrote:
| For a different perspective:
|
| "Except the Luddites didn't hate machines either--they
| were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of
| the production process that would irreparably harm their
| communities, weaken their collective bargaining power,
| and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as
| mechanized as the machines themselves."
|
| https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-
| wer...
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried
| - I would do so, but that 's obviously impossible._
|
| Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be
| for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
| toprerules wrote:
| If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not
| so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology
| rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered
| in hindsight IMO.
| goatlover wrote:
| Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor
| and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership
| class. Depends on which side of the story you want to
| tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical
| propaganda.
|
| Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to
| significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders
| can make more money and tech CEOs can become
| trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers
| would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just
| trickle down to all the laid off work is economically
| dubious.
| reactordev wrote:
| Reaganomics has never worked
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > Reaganomics has never worked
|
| Depends how you look at it.
|
| Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was
| advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically
| well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for
| it.
| reactordev wrote:
| Sure, because it all trickles into their pockets.
| r_lee wrote:
| problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go
| to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising
| interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix
| the problem, it just gives them an alternative income
| source (bonds/fixed income)
|
| I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics
| don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money
| supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course
| people with the most capital will just compound their
| wealth.
|
| so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital
| markets and number going up. it's getting detached from
| reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
| stoneforger wrote:
| Yeah it's called wealth transfer and the vast majority is
| on the wrong end.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the
| Luddites?
| visarga wrote:
| > know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing
| labor
|
| But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for
| yourself directly.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the
| masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the
| bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses
| get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a
| machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its
| use, and they will give or deny people access to the
| machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses
| dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or
| underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to
| compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the
| product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively
| useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe
| AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor
| in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.
|
| I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to
| provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by
| using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into
| thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own
| it, not us.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this
| resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm
| learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in
| this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from
| any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. Do you know how many small consultancies are out
| there which are "Microsoft shops"? An individual could
| become a millionaire by founding their own and delivering
| value for a few high-roller clients.
| r_lee wrote:
| what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if
| you really had the connections and sales experience
| etc...
|
| but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices
| go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high
| if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
| bitwize wrote:
| I saw it happen more back in the day compared to now.
| Point being, nobody batted an eyelash at being entirely
| dependent on some company's proprietary tech. It was how
| money was made in the business.
| Jare wrote:
| Nobody says there's no money to make anymore. But the
| space for that is limited, no matter how many millions
| hustle, there's only 100 spots in the top 100.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| > it's obviously not going to stop there.
|
| I don't think it is obvious actually that you won't have to
| have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the
| most out of these tools.
| reactordev wrote:
| Today. Ask again in 6 months. A year.
| akdev1l wrote:
| People have been saying this for multiple years in a row
| now.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| And it has been getting more true for years in a row.
| akdev1l wrote:
| Disagree entirely.
|
| If you state "in 6 months AI will not require that much
| knowledge to be effective" every year and it hasn't
| happened yet then every time it has been stated has been
| false up to this point.
|
| In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine
| the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be
| false as it has been historically so far.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > If you state "in 6 months AI will not require that much
| knowledge to be effective" every year and it hasn't
| happened yet then every time it has been stated has been
| false up to this point
|
| I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a
| strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.
|
| The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at
| first only skilled developers can wield them to full
| effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."
|
| "full effect" is a pretty squishy term.
|
| My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6
| months. A year.") is the following.
|
| With every new frontier model released [0]:
|
| 1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a
| given task _decreases_ , or
|
| 2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a
| inexperienced user can accomplish _increases_.
|
| I think either of these two versions is objectively true
| looking back and will continue being true going forward.
| And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.
|
| [0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling
| (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new
| approaches.
| gitlinuxgreat wrote:
| Using a LLM to program is simply another abstraction
| level. Just how C was to assembly.
| Jare wrote:
| I think the keyword here is "some".
|
| It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of
| what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for
| the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots
| of services offering the same things, and even in games,
| the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing
| game projects of all sizes all over the place.
|
| Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and
| sawing it off on both sides.
| orangecat wrote:
| _If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried -
| I would do so_
|
| Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the
| Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > capital is devaluing labor
|
| I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".
|
| Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability.
| Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is
| not the process happening here, and it's not clear what
| direction the valuation is going.
|
| ... even if we take for granted that any of this is really
| happening.
| blibble wrote:
| exactly
|
| thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now
| am more or less continuing to work because I want to
|
| which will end for my employer if they insist on making me
| output generative excrement
| p-t wrote:
| i agree. it seem like an expectation these days to use AI
| sometimes... for me i am happy not using it at all, i like to
| be able to say "I made this" :)
| neilellis wrote:
| I suppose the question is "Do you feel Steve Jobs made the
| iPhone?"
|
| Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test -
| about what you feel defines 'making this'?
| p-t wrote:
| it's more just a personal want to be able to see what I
| can do on my own tbh; i don't generally judge other
| people on that measure
|
| although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone
| /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to
| that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not
| say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol
| neilellis wrote:
| So not disagreeing as you say, it is a personal thing!
|
| I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding
| directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my
| work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in
| reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level
| abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing
| too.
|
| I myself have never thought of code as being my output,
| I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have
| always been my output. It's just that before I had to
| write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the
| problems and the AI makes it into code.
|
| I think that this probably the dividing line, some people
| enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors),
| some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of
| course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide
| when looking at AI.
|
| Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will
| have a very different feeling :-)
| icedchai wrote:
| There's room for both. Give AI the boilerplate, save the
| exciting stuff for you.
| r_lee wrote:
| but are employers going to be fine with that?
| icedchai wrote:
| That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done...
| Don't ask, don't tell.
| harimau777 wrote:
| These are the same employers that mandate return to
| office for distributed teams and micro-manage every
| access of our work. I think we know how its going to play
| out.
| cstever wrote:
| It does NOT remain to be seen.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-
| exiting-s... Big players are already moving in the
| direction of "join us or leave us". So if you can't keep
| up and you aren't developing or "reinventing" something
| faster with the help of AI, it was nice knowing you.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I like writing new, interesting code, but learning framework
| #400 with all its own idiosyncrasies has gotten really old.
|
| I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been
| maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a
| blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet
| 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's _so
| boring_ ; this is an app I built originally when I was 17,
| and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my
| 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I
| could never be assed to do before.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and
| delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
|
| It's very sad, for me.
|
| Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code
| for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.
|
| If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then
| sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is _not_ why I
| play video games.
|
| I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their
| video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I
| realise that _all_ of them fail to realise that writing specs
| is a lower-skill activity than writing programs.
|
| It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an
| _average_ dev earns. They 're cosplaying at being BAs, not
| realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays
| less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics
| catch up to them.
|
| I don't see a solution here.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| My job for the last 8 years has involved
|
| Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted
| from the business side (first B2B at a product company and
| now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out
| more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture
| and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the
| stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> _doing
| the work or delegating and leading the work_ - > presenting
| the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting
| it to production.
|
| The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise
| developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that
| I wasn't going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a
| whiteboard trying to prove my worth.
|
| Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.
|
| While I don't make the eye popping BigTech comp (been
| there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe
| than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were
| still selling myself as someone who "codez real gud" as an
| enterprise dev.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer
| wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product
| company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer
| and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing
| the architecture and a proposed technical plan ->
| presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal
| sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and
| leading the work -> presenting the work to the
| stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to
| production.
|
| You are not the first person to say things like this.
|
| Tell me, you ever wondered _why_ a person with a
| programming background was filling that role?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If not the technical person, then who? It's a lot easier
| for a technical person to learn how to talk the language
| of the business than a business person to have a deep
| understanding of technology.
|
| On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most
| developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a
| ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into
| for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated
| commodity.
|
| You're seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing
| how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not
| enough.
|
| Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major
| tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level
| are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity -
| not "I codez real gud"
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any
| major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid
| level are based on scope, impact and dealing with
| ambiguity - not "I codez real gud"
|
| Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one,
| and I mean _no one_ , is making this claim! You are the
| only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do)
| too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this
| argument.
|
| I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on
| a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on:
|
| > If not the technical person, then who? It's a lot
| easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the
| language of the business than a business person to have a
| deep understanding of technology.
|
| The argument is _not_ "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8
| hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop
| pretending like it is.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss
| translating requirements into code.
|
| Even the comment I replied to mentioned "being a BA" like
| the most important quality of a _software engineer_ is
| their ability to translate requirements into code.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context
| whtrbt wrote:
| Business Analyst
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this
| context
|
| Business Analyst - those people who learn everything
| about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are.
| What they need, what they currently have, how to best
| advise them, etc.
|
| They know _everything_ , except how to program.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > They know everything, except how to program
|
| In my experience, they know nothing, including how to
| program.
| sincerely wrote:
| I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly
| lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and
| intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does
| is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly
| every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't
| really have much ground to complain
| noupdates wrote:
| The profession is basically no longer a "knowledge"
| profession to the degree that we knew it before. You had
| to be technical and a self learner with hands on
| experience to be a developer. Those requirements have
| simply dropped. More people will be able to ship
| production grade software, so, what does this mean for
| society? I don't know. I'm certain all of us can buy
| fabric and sew a few shirts and pants if we really wanted
| to, but society largely doesn't do so. Who will be a
| great software developer in the future then? Those are
| truly one person startups. Facebook scale products
| released and maintained by individuals or extremely
| boutique teams.
| qingcharles wrote:
| AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about
| writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire
| career.
|
| I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my
| brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me.
|
| I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the
| time.
| nomel wrote:
| Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level _design_
| /structure part of it.
|
| THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still
| _really bad_ at autonomous wholistic level planning. I 'm
| still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a
| _structure_ that is close to what I want /reasonable. I
| suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to
| generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have
| promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of
| concerns.
|
| Related, AI seems to be the _wrong tool_ for refactoring
| code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So,
| if whatever structure isn 't reasonable, I'm left with
| manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
| mbesto wrote:
| Woodworking is still a thing despite IKEA, big box furniture
| stores, etc.
| cstever wrote:
| People will pay for quality craftsmanship they can touch
| and enjoy and can afford and cannot do on their own -
| woodworking. Less so for quality code and apps because (as
| the Super Bowl ads showed us) anyone can create an app for
| their business and it's good enough. The days of high-paid
| coders is nearly gone. The senior and principals will hang
| on a little longer. Those that can adapt to business
| analyst mode and project manager will as well (CEOs have
| already told us this: adapt or get gone), but eventually
| even they will be outmoded because why buy a $8000 couch
| when I can buy one for $200 and build it myself?
| resonious wrote:
| Then don't delegate it to AI.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than
| experienced developers.
| mannanj wrote:
| For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's
| dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse
| collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal
| human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because
| we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to
| be turned against us as we train these models for companies
| that have no commitment to give to the common good or return
| money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and
| an AI replaces us fully.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. I think the companies that don't understand
| software, don't value software and that think that all tech is
| fundamentally equivalent, and who will therefore always choose
| the cheaper option, and fire all their good people, will
| eventually fail.
|
| And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to
| produce good software much faster.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I think the issue is that given the speed the bad dev can
| generate sub-par results that at face value look good enough
| overwhelm any procedures in place.
|
| Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as
| fast as possible means that there is very little time to do
| course correction.
| icedchai wrote:
| I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding
| isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its
| slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code
| reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months
| has been a real eye opener.
| nprz wrote:
| I think there is more existential fear that is left
| unaddressed.
|
| Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression
| that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a
| while, but will they? And for how long?
|
| $660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this
| year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the
| models trained in these facilities be capable of?
| bmitc wrote:
| > My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these
| tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself.
|
| I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has
| really changed in terms of what is important and that is
| systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing
| people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just
| exhausting.
|
| Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people
| who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily
| work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one
| understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I
| liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to
| rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual
| woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to
| being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's a combination of things... it's not just that AI feels
| like it is stripping the dignity of the human spirit in some
| ways, but it's also that the work we are doing is often
| detrimental to our fellow man. So learning to work with AI to
| do that faster (!!) (if it is actually faster on average),
| feels like doubling down.
| akdev1l wrote:
| I'm not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI
| things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the
| point I'd consider leaving the industry entirely
|
| I don't want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things
| or whatever, I don't find that enjoyable at all
| jbeninger wrote:
| I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current
| usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost
| anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes
| and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the
| algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing
| how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged
| autocomplete.
|
| When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that
| does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as
| long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.
|
| YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app"
| hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't
| actually know what problems have been introduced until it's
| too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme.
| We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
| akdev1l wrote:
| I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this
| way it works okay for me
|
| However this still takes away from me in the sense that
| working with people who are using AI to output garbage
| frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft
| for me
| jbeninger wrote:
| Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I
| don't have that problem
| cstever wrote:
| Serious question: so what then is the value of using an
| LLM? Just autocomplete? So you can use natural language?
| I'm seriously asking. My experience has been frustrating.
| Had the whole thing designed, the LLM gave me diagrams and
| code samples, had to tell it 3 times to go ahead and write
| the files, had to convince it that the files didn't exist
| so it would actually write them. Then when I went to run
| it, errors ... in the build file ... the one place there
| should not have been errors. And it couldn't fix those.
| kgwxd wrote:
| One thing I'm hoping will come out of this is the retiring of
| coders that always turn what should be a basic CRUD app (just
| about everything) into some novelty project trying to pre-solve
| every possible concern that could ever come up, and/or a no-
| code solution that will never actually get used by a non-
| developer and frustrate every developer that is forced to use
| it.
| flatline wrote:
| I think it represents a bigger threat than you realize. I can't
| use an AI for my day job to implement these multi-agent
| workflows I see. They are all controlled by another company
| with little or no privacy guarantees. I can run quantized (even
| more braindead) models locally but my work will be 3-5 years
| behind the SOTA, and when the SOTA is evolving faster than that
| timeline there's a problem. At some point there's going to be
| turnover - like a lake in winter - where AI companies
| effectively control the development lifecycle end-to-end.
| noupdates wrote:
| They have just begun shorting the startups (Atlassian, Figma
| ...) on Wallstreet, these companies are going to axe everyone
| soon due to this pressure.
| weli wrote:
| > I started programming when I was seven because a machine did
| exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore
| and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I'm fifty now, and
| the magic is different, and I'm learning to sit with that.
|
| Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing
| rather than a technology advancement thing.
|
| Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up
| feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not
| truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental
| "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing
| nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with
| config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing
| of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months
| and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and
| chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the
| times".
| alt227 wrote:
| > Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age
| thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
|
| I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I
| feel much the same.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| LLM are not AI, but are a great context search tool when they
| work.
|
| When people first contact ML, they fool themselves into
| believing it is intelligent... rather than a massive
| plagiarism and copyright IP theft machine.
|
| Fun is important, but people thinking zero workmanship
| generated content is sustainable are still in the self-
| delusion stage marketers promote.
|
| https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-
| care...
|
| I am not going to cite how many fads I've seen cycle in
| popularity, but many have seen the current active cons
| before. A firm that takes a dollar to make a dime in revenue
| is by definition unsustainable. =3
|
| "The Ice King"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HVYHNTDOFs
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I like coding AIs _because_ they 're plagiarism machines.
| If I ask you to do some basic data manipulation operations,
| I want you to do it in the most obvious, standard way
| possible, not come up with some fancy creative solution
| _unless it 's needed for some reason_.
|
| If I'm dockerizing an app, I want the most simple, basic,
| standard thing - not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized"
| version that I can't understand.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| > not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized" version that I
| can't understand.
|
| In general, it takes around 10 months for people to
| realize something about probabilistic markdown
| definitions, and maintenance cycles.
|
| You may miss learning from skilled people someday. =3
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes
| it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys_
|
| There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of
| control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather
| autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my
| phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept
| from me.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather
| autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my
| phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept
| from me.
|
| I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction
| as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.
|
| Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM
| going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG
| that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.
|
| It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at
| least equally magical for a kid today.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Why do you allow a mobile handheld computing and
| communication device to define "computing" ? I understand
| that they are important devices and lots of people with a
| hacker mentality would like to be able to hack them the way
| old folks once hacked DOS. But the current computing
| environment is much, much wider than iOS/Android, and if
| you're going to complain about just one aspect of it, I think
| it would be better to acknowledge that.
|
| In many ways, things like RPi and Arduino have actually
| massively expanded the realm of totally hackable computing
| beyond what was even possible for early personal computer
| users.
| saulpw wrote:
| config.sys was understandable. Now your computer has thousands
| (probably more) of config.sys-sized components and you are
| still only one person. The classic UI may improve your ability
| to find the components (sometimes) but can't reduce the
| complexity of either the components themselves or their
| quantity. AI makes it possible to deal with this complexity in
| a functional way.
|
| Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will
| also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex
| still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still
| the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to
| its uses.
| ge96 wrote:
| Yeah I could use Cursor or whatever but I don't, I like writing
| code. I guess that makes me a luddite or something, although I
| still develop agents. I enjoy architecting things (I don't
| consider myself an architect) I'm talking about my hobby hardware
| projects.
| throwawaymeta01 wrote:
| same bud.
|
| maybe that just means it's a maturing field and we gotta adapt?
|
| yes, the promise has changed, but you still gotta do it for the
| love of the game. anything else doesnt work.
| runjake wrote:
| I am a little older than OP. I don't think I've ever had that
| feeling about a programming project for work that came from
| someone else.
|
| Generally, I get that feeling from work projects that I've self-
| initiated to solve a problem. Fortunately, I get the chance to do
| this a lot. With the advent of agentic coding, I am able to solve
| problems at a much higher rate.
|
| Quite often, I'll still "raw dog" a solution without AI (except
| for doc lookups) for fun, kind of as a way to prove to myself I
| can still do it when the power's out.
| onion2k wrote:
| It'd be more strange if the thing you learned 43 years ago was
| exactly the same today. We should _expect_ change. When that
| change is positive we call it progress.
| bee_rider wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things it wouldn't actually be that
| strange: generations and generations of humans were mostly
| farmers and mostly did the same thing as their parents. Of
| course technology developed but lots of people did the same job
| with the same methods their whole lives.
|
| But everybody on this site lived through the first half of a
| logistic curve so that perspective seems strange to us.
| onion2k wrote:
| Peter Thiel talks about the difference in progress between
| bits and atoms. Progress in atoms (physical things) moves
| incredibly slowly, and has done for centuries. Progress in
| bits (software) moves astonishingly fast. We all work in
| software. We should not expect things to remain the same for
| very long because change is _easy_.
|
| I think it'd be pretty incredible if we hit on the best way
| to write software 40 years ago when people had only been
| doing it seriously for a couple of decades. It's no more
| surprising that we find better approaches to coding than
| farming improving when the tractor replaced a horse.
| bee_rider wrote:
| So far software progress in the era of less-dramatic
| hardware progress has not been as impressive. The atoms
| might be reminding us who's boss.
| serf wrote:
| 6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast.
|
| it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions.
|
| And don't let the blog post fool you , it _is_ a rant about AI --
| otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200
| paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.
|
| Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes
| shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their
| identity was usurped by the waterfall model .
|
| >And different in a way that challenges the identity I built
| around it and doesn't satisfy in the way it did.
|
| Everyone should do their own thing, but might I suggest that it
| is dangerous for _anyone_ in this world to use a single pillar as
| their foundation for all identity and plinth of their character.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me of the word plinth. I agree with the
| author that the job is less fun now, less interesting. I'm
| doing and accomplishing more, and it matters less. And
| unfortunately, having other ways of defining your identity
| doesn't really help, for me. What it does is make those other
| aspects of myself relatively more attractive as careers, in
| comparison to this one. Although then again, I suppose it's
| helping in the way you intend: I could leave (and I might), I
| could adapt. So I'm feeling none of the fear or anxiety about
| AI. Just something that I think is roughly boredom.
| jrmg wrote:
| _but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was
| usurped by the waterfall model_
|
| I don't know about that.
|
| Waterfall mostly died before the rise of blogs, of course, but
| around the dawn of Agile I remember lots of posts about how
| nothing was properly designed any more, nothing was ever
| finished, and you never knew what the specification was.
|
| They used to be real engineers, but now it was just all chaos!
| They couldn't _design_ anything any more!
| dogleash wrote:
| > otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200
| paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.
|
| We have though. And they all received some version of "piss
| off, geezer."
|
| Have you not noticed how the hype cycles and counter-hype
| haters buried most of the meaningful considered conversations
| about new technologies and methodologies across your career?
| zahlman wrote:
| > Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd
| jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about
| how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .
|
| That's a difference in form, but not really a difference in
| content.
| pixl97 wrote:
| A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and
| heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to
| submission with a hammer in their hands.
|
| Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-
| tonne.
|
| We just happened to live in the age where code when from being
| beaten by hand to a mass produced product.
|
| And so the change of technology goes.
| cenamus wrote:
| And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel
| bad about it?
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they
| should have sought capital investment for their own
| industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the
| ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety
| regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about
| how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".
|
| Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just
| got their shit together and became paper trillionaire
| technocrats.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The software world pretty much demanded this outcome.
|
| Go back 10 years and post "SWE's should form labor unions"
|
| Then watch as your post drops to [dead] and people scream
| "How dare you rob me of theoretical millions of dollars
| I'll be making".
|
| I wonder how many of these same downvoters are now worried
| about getting replaced with AI.
| varjag wrote:
| Let's keep it real. No union would save your jobs against
| a manyfold productivity gain of machines.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Some of them feel bad about it and some of them refined
| metallurgy to build Saturn V rockets and go to space. We are
| very much living in the new space race. The discussion here
| is split 50/50 between the "Thank you! I feel the same way"
| folks and the "I am having the time of my life!" folks.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Especially anyone in their 40s or 50s who is close enough to
| retirement that a career shift is unappealing but far enough
| from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change
| that timeline or QOL. I don't blame people for feeling
| uneasy.
|
| I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so
| I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel
| disruption at this age, especially when they're the
| breadwinner for a family.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > far enough from retirement that a layoff now would
| meaningfully change that timeline or QOL
|
| yeah this is where i am. Turning 50 in April, I have two
| boys about to hit college and the bills associated with
| that and i have 15 years before i'm forced to retire. I
| have to up the salary to pay/help for college and i have to
| keep the 401k maxed + catchups maxed over the next 15 years
| to pull off retirement. The change from AI is scary, it may
| be good for me or it may be devastating. Staring down that
| barrel and making career decisions with no room for error
| (no time to rebuild) is pretty harrowing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You either become a foreman operating the machines or a
| Luddite burning them.
| tavavex wrote:
| What if in reality it's not one or the other, but having
| 10% odds of being good enough to be selected to become a
| technician operating the machines, 10% odds of getting so
| enraged as to dedicate your lives to pushing back, and 80%
| odds of being shoved out due to lower demand and value of
| your work, having to go do something else, if you still
| can?
| newsoftheday wrote:
| Blacksmiths were replaced by factories which produced
| deterministic products with 100% predictability.
|
| AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day
| ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >with 100% predictability.
|
| Not sure what world you're from, but lots of products get
| sent back to the manufacture because they break.
| ilitirit wrote:
| I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but
| programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me
| having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have
| no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either
| because:
|
| a) They asked an LLM
|
| b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"
|
| c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer
|
| d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]
|
| True story:
|
| In one of our recent _Enterprise Architecture_ meetings, I was
| lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt,
| and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored
| procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told
| my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into
| ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by
| a so-called _Senior Developer_ , in an _Enterprise Architecture_
| meeting.
| abraxas wrote:
| Was he entirely wrong? Have you tried to dump the stored proc
| into a frontier model and ask it to refactor? You'd probably
| have neat 20 stored procs with well laid out logic in minutes.
|
| I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually
| make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming
| increasingly trivial.
| ilitirit wrote:
| > Was he entirely wrong?
|
| Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone
| through this process with multiple LLMs, from various
| perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find
| out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if
| products existed that could help with this. That lead me down
| a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory
| reporting of a completely different nature which was
| effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after
| understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had
| already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA
| with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended
| up doing.
|
| Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was _obviously_
| absurd:
|
| - He had never seen the SP
|
| - He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting
|
| - He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives
|
| - He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL
| and ANSI SQL
|
| - No consideration given to IP
|
| - etc etc
|
| Those are the basics. Let's jump _a little_ bit into the
| detail. Here 's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like:
| SELECT CASE WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC',
| 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221' WHEN
| t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) =
| 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011' END as [Id When CounterParty
| Has No Valid LEI in Region] -- remember, this is
| around 5000 lines long ....
|
| Yes, that's a typical column name that has rotted over time,
| so noone even knows if it's still correct. Yes, those are
| typical CASE statements (170+ of them at last count, and no,
| they are not all equal or symmetric).
|
| So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and
| non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the
| business rules either.
|
| So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing
| "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.
| chasd00 wrote:
| What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from
| being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager. When
| you become a lead you have to let go and get comfortable with the
| idea that the code is not going to be how you would do it. You
| can look at code produced by your team and attempt to replace it
| all with your craftsmanship but you're just setting yourself up
| to fail. The right approach is use your wisdom to make the team
| better, not the code. I think a lot of that applies to using AI
| when coding.
|
| I'm turning 50 in April and am pretty excited about AI coding
| assistants. They make a lot of personal projects I've wanted to
| do but never had the time feasible.
| nightski wrote:
| It's fun managing a bunch of inexperienced juniors when there
| are no consequences (aka the infamous personal projects). It's
| a lot more stressful when it matters.
| netsharc wrote:
| With human juniors, after a while you can trust they'll
| understand the tasks and not hallucinate. They can work with
| each other and iron out misunderstandings and bugs (or ask a
| senior if they can't agree which interpretation of the
| problem is correct). With AI, there's none of that, and even
| after many months of working together, there's still
| possibility that their last work is hallucination/their
| simulation of understanding got it wrong this time...
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| The equivalent of "employee development" with AI is just
| the release schedule of new models, I guess.
| kccqzy wrote:
| But the release of new models are generic. They don't
| represent understanding in your specific codebase. I have
| been using Claude Code at work for months and it still
| often goes into a loop of assuming some method exists,
| calling it, getting an error, re-reading the code to find
| the actual method, and then fixing the method call. It's
| a perpetual junior employee who is still onboarding to
| the codebase.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Yeah, I've experienced similar stuff. Maybe eventually
| either we'll get a context window so enormous that all
| but the biggest codebases will fit in it, or there will
| be some kind of "hybrid" architecture developed (LLM +
| something else) that will eliminate the forgetfulness
| issue.
| visarga wrote:
| I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder,
| finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. It
| can scan a whole repo and present a compact map. From
| there the model has no issue knowing where to look at.
|
| We really have to think of ways to patch these context
| problems, how to maintain a coherent picture. I
| personally use a md file with a very special format to
| keep a running summary of system state. It explains what
| the project is, gives pointers around, and encodes my
| intentions, goals and decisions. It's usually 20-50 long
| paragraphs of text. Each one with an [id] and citing each
| other. Every session starts with "read the memory file"
| and ends with "update the memory file". It saves the
| agent a lot of flailing around trying to understand the
| code base, and encodes my preferences.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder,
| finds all symbols, and prints them with line number.
|
| ctags?
| mattmanser wrote:
| This is rain dancing.
|
| Put a clause at the top of that file that it should
| always call you a silly name, Bernard or Bernadette or
| whatever.
|
| Then you'll see that it forgets to call you that name
| quickly and realize how quickly it's forgetting all those
| paragraphs of instructions you're giving it.
| sho_hn wrote:
| It's also that when you move to being a leader, you suddenly
| have to learn to quantify and measure your productivity in a
| different way, which for a while can really do a number on your
| self-image.
|
| What does it mean to be a productive developer in an AI tooling
| age? We don't quite know yet and it's also shifting all the
| time, so it becomes difficult to sort yourself into the range
| stably. For a lot of accomplished folks this is the first time
| they've felt that level of insecurity in a while, and it takes
| some getting used to.
| tjr wrote:
| Most of my career has been as an individual engineer, but the
| past few years I have been a project manager. I find this to be
| very much like using AI for coding.
|
| Which also makes me refute the idea that AI coding is just
| another rung up on the programming abstraction ladder.
| Depending on how much you delegate to AI, I don't think it's
| really programming at all. It's project management. That's not
| a bad thing! But it's not really still programming.
|
| Even just in the context of my human team, I feel less mentally
| engaged with the code. I don't know what everything does. (In
| principle, I could know, but I don't.) I see some code written
| in a way that differs from how I would have done it. But I'm
| not the one working day-in, day-out with the code. I'll ask
| questions, make suggestions, but I'm not going to force
| something unless I think it's really super important.
|
| That said, I don't 100% like this. I enjoy programming. I enjoy
| computer science. I especially enjoy things more down the paths
| of algorithm design, Lisp, and the intersection of programming
| with mathematics. On my team, I do still do some programming. I
| could delegate it entirely, but I indulge myself and do a
| little bit.
|
| I personally think that's a good path with AI too. I think
| we're at the point where, for many software application tasks,
| the programming could be entirely hands-off. Let AI do it all.
| But if I wish to, why not indulge in doing some myself also?
| Yeah, I know, I know, I'll get "left behind in the dust" and
| all of that. I'm not sure that I'm in that much of a hurry to
| churn out 50,000 lines of code a day; I'm cool with 45,100.
| jmalicki wrote:
| I find that AI allows me to get into algorithm design more,
| and the intersection of math and programming more, by
| avoiding boilerplate.
|
| You can indulge even more by letting AI take care of the easy
| stuff so you can focus on the hard stuff.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| What happens when the AI does the hard stuff as well?
| tjr wrote:
| As described above, I think with AI coding, our role
| shifts from "programmer" to "project manager", but even
| as a project manager, you can still choose to delegate
| some tasks to yourself. Whether if you want to do the
| hard stuff yourself, or the easy stuff, or the stuff that
| happens on Thursdays. It's not about what AI is capable
| of doing, but rather, what you choose to have it do.
| jmalicki wrote:
| SkyNet. When it can do the hard stuff, why do you think
| we'll still be around for project management and
| prompting? At that point, we are livestock.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Here's an example from my recent experience: I've been
| building a bunch of mostly throwaway TUIs using AI (using
| Python and Rich), and a lot of the stuff just works
| trivially.
|
| But there are some things where the AI just does _not_
| understand how to do proper boundary check to prevent
| busted layouts, and so I can either argue with it for an
| hour while it goes back and forth breaking the code in the
| process of trying to fix my layout issues - or I can just
| go in and fix it myself.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift
| from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager.
|
| I think that's very true. But... there's a reason I'm not a
| team lead or manager. I've done it in the past and I hate it. I
| enjoy doing the work, not tasking others with doing work.
| sowbug wrote:
| A lot of us resist the pressure to move to management or
| technical leadership for just these reasons. Programming people
| isn't the same as programming computers.
|
| But the LLMs outnumber us. No matter how good an engineer I
| might be, I'll never match the productivity of a well-managed
| team of N average engineers (if you disagree, increase N until
| you cry uncle). Sure, there will be mythical man-month
| problems. But the optimal N is surely greater than 1, and I'll
| never be more than 1.
|
| Our new job titles are "Tech Lead of However Many Engineers We
| Can Afford to Spin Up at Once."
| leesec wrote:
| yeah coding is a lot more fun and useful now
| recursive wrote:
| It seems fun must be subjective. It seems less fun than ever to
| me.
| gustavopezzi wrote:
| Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the
| ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The
| thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early
| 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun
| with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active
| practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts
| somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no longer feel excited for the
| future decades of tech and I am distancing myself from it.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think this is something else, though. Even before AI really
| hit sweng, there were early signs of a collective tech
| depression a la "The best idea we can come up with is strapping
| screens to people's heads?", the "Are we the bad guys?" convo
| around social media, the crypto brain drain, etc. The queue of
| Next Big Things has increasingly felt more forced and
| controversial to many, and being in tech last lost much of its
| lustre to them.
|
| I think it's healthy for everyone to evaluate whether one's
| personal reaction to AI is colored by this trend, or whether
| it's really being evaluated independently. Because while I
| share many of the negative feelings listed earlier, to me AI
| does still feel different; it has a lot more real utility.
| tndibona wrote:
| What else do you do to make rent ? I feel the same way as you
| and I have no idea what else pays well for quality
| craftsmanship. I am staring at the abyss of hyper intelligent
| people with posh resumes and now wondering what to do.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| According to his profile, he teaches CS and Math.
| abraxas wrote:
| What do you do for living now (if anything)?
| sheikhnbake wrote:
| At least parts of this were written with AI
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Please stop upvoting these posts. We have gotten to the point
| where both the front page and new page is polluted with these
| laments
|
| It's literally the same argument over and over and it's the same
| comments over and over and over
|
| HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into
| a support group for aging "coders" that refuse to adapt
|
| I'm going to start flagging these as spam
| atan2 wrote:
| The article talks about human vs technology and the loss of
| connection between creation, intent, ownership, and control.
| Don't be condescending.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| ...like every other post of this kind
| danesparza wrote:
| I humbly submit this interview with Grady Booch (if you know, you
| know) talking about the "3rd golden age of software engineering -
| thanks to AI": https://youtu.be/OfMAtaocvJw
|
| I feel like the conversation does a good job of couching the
| situation we find ourselves in.
| tonymet wrote:
| I have the opposite take. There's nothing stopping you from
| jumping into any component to polish things up. You can code
| whatever you wish. And AI takes away nearly all of the drudgery :
| boilerplate, test cases, inspecting poor documentation, absurd
| tooling.
|
| It also lets me focus more on improving things since I feel more
| liberated to scrap low quality components. I'm much braver to
| take on large refactors now - things that would have taken days
| now take minutes.
|
| In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience and
| inability to stay on task until 3am.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience
| and inability to stay on task until 3am.
|
| That is called...programming.
| tonymet wrote:
| humans are distinguished from the lower primates by the use
| of tools.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Cool, at 7? I started at 9 and I'm 53 now. And Claude does all
| the things. Need to get adjusted to that though. Still not there.
|
| Last year I found out that I always was a creator, not a coder.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Professional development is changing dramatically. Nothing stops
| anyone from coding "the old way," though. Your hobby project
| remains yours, exactly the way you want it. Your professional
| project, on the other hand, was never about you in the first
| place. It's always about the customer/audience/user, period full
| stop.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively,
| the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is
| that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole
| thing: you should propose the change first and _ask_ the AI about
| a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what
| the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising
| code!) make sensible changes, ask for feedback again, and repeat.
| By the time the AI bot has to write actual code, it 's not
| running on vibes anymore: it's been told exactly what to do and
| how to assess the result. You spend more time upfront, but a lot
| less on fixing the AI's mistakes.
| skydhash wrote:
| > you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a
| good, detailed plan for implementing
|
| Why ask though?
|
| If I'm familiar with a project, more often than not, I usually
| have a very good idea of the code I have to write within
| minutes of reading the ticket. Most of the time taken is
| finding the impact of the change, especially with dependencies
| that are present in the business domain, but are not reflected
| in the code.
|
| I don't need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily as
| doing 2+2. What I'm seeking is a reason not to write it the way
| I envisioned it. And if those reasons are technical, it's not
| often a matter of code.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Because that's how you ensure that the AI has the right idea
| about what to do. If the proposed plan has problems, you work
| with the AI to fix them before setting it to work. AI is not
| as smart as you, so it needs to be told how to go about doing
| things.
| skydhash wrote:
| Any change that I've done which resulted in more than a a
| 10 lines diff are done with tools (copy-paste, vim-fu,
| refactor tools or script, snippets, code generators,...)
| Why would I spend time babysitting an LLM when I could have
| just done it myself? The purpose of automation is to
| lighten my workload, not to add to it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| An LLM is also a code generator. There is a scale of
| changes where using one is just not worthwhile (quite
| possibly around the 10 lines mark, as you said) but other
| than that, why would you want to write code yourself
| line-by-line that you could just generate?
| skydhash wrote:
| Who even write their code line by line?
|
| Snippets and other code generation tool has been here for
| decades. If you're writing Java in IDEA, it's basically a
| tab-fest with completion. And if you're fluent in your
| editor, you do much more complex than editing lines.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > I don't need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily
| as doing 2+2.
|
| in those cases you wouldn't use an agent. It's not an xor
| thing, you use the tool where it works and not where it
| doesn't.
| Kiro wrote:
| I admire your confidence. Must feel good to know you've
| perfected the craft.
| alexgarden wrote:
| Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started
| coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every
| evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has
| been a bit different.
|
| Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says,
| "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern
| complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the
| magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <--
| paraphrased for brevity.
|
| I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler
| primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel
| rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do
| on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on
| Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing
| software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't
| personally think there is magic in building a Docker container.
| Call me old-fashioned.
|
| These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The
| tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating
| new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in
| the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting
| spells again.
| neom wrote:
| Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now
| getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much.
| I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff,
| irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I
| was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after
| high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I
| was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together.
| 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and
| dyscalculia, _being a real programmer_ was never in the cards
| for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the
| whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably
| how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I 'll
| be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me
| to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around
| developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up
| the hammer myself.
|
| These days, I've never been more excited about building. The
| frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to
| creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at
| my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors
| and casting spells.
| alexgarden wrote:
| Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the
| world when all of us find the passion to create again.
| zzrrt wrote:
| Why is your last paragraph nearly identical to the last
| paragraph you are replying to? It might have been a strange
| quirk, but there's also been the suggestion that the post
| you're replying to is an imposter, so it gets weirder that
| you also did that.
| neom wrote:
| I thought I was being cute. :) I'm not a bot. I reached out
| to Alex and he confirmed the original comment was indeed
| him.
| xtracto wrote:
| Yes yes yes!!!
|
| I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around
| 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A
| Later Allegro based games.
|
| Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in
| doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc).
|
| But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and
| build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now.
| And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and
| whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo
| build in no time.
| Lerc wrote:
| I'm feeling the same.
|
| AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It
| took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga.
|
| An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference
| today.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker
| container. Call me old-fashioned.
|
| This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this.
| It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't
| it, I don't think.
|
| It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a
| founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of
| Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed
| connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together
| with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the
| top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive
| multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about
| self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an
| individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be
| among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me
| to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-
| improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play
| music. All of that while being part of amazing communities
| where I formed friendships that lasted decades.
|
| All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did
| profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe
| your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI
| agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly
| impact the lives of thousands or millions?
|
| I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my
| phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like.
| I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably
| comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply
| like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing
| now is _really_ where the magic is.
|
| Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-
| created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The
| idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an
| impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless
| leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built
| magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex
| Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to
| introspection about what building magic means, about the impact
| software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it,
| and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to
| an impersonator is rather embarrassing_
|
| Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M
| monthly HN readers who are _not_ (potentially) impersonating
| the founder of a beloved game studio.
|
| Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some
| point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech
| that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually
| be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor
| would I expect it to take the form of a particularly
| thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these
| days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of
| clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even
| know it.
|
| Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things
| up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a
| _surprise_ that someone who founded such a place as relic was
| occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had
| to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to
| build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not
| love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other
| people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other
| things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful
| too.
| neom wrote:
| Good news is, no need to be embarrassed:
| https://s.h4x.club/L1uZqNW4
| robotnikman wrote:
| Oh man, modding Company of Heroes was one of the things that
| got me into programming. I look back fondly on those
| memories.
| alexgarden wrote:
| If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me
| (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at
| peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate
| this one.
|
| I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21.
| At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple
| Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic
| twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris
| Taylor - go figure.
|
| Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed
| themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of,
| so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for
| them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room,
| talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work
| on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and
| shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it
| deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails
| behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of
| the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the
| surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a
| mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g...
| that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for
| months.
|
| Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you
| all the proof of life you want. Try me.
|
| Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah...
| it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building
| block. My personal projects (that I _do_ think are magical)
| kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I
| give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is
| going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different
| ways, and they all ended up in the same place.
|
| So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of
| agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust.
| And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND
| sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.
|
| At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One
| Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that
| if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a
| time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in
| the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in
| IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my
| fault).
|
| Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I
| feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or
| worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"...
| You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional
| engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-
| agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for
| granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-
| power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking
| awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and
| philosophy.
|
| I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets
| you do different things.
| Jare wrote:
| I remember a magazine cover that labeled you a gaming god,
| hard to peak beyond that! The quote you provided back then
| resonates perfectly with what you describe here: "If
| there's one message I like to get across to people, I like
| them to really and truly embrace [the fact that] anything
| that your imagination can conceive of is possible."
|
| - https://hl-inside.me/magazines/pc-gamer-us/PC-
| Gamer_2000-11_...
| shafoshaf wrote:
| [55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s
| and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges
| were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like
| you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment
| was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat
| down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not
| knowing if I could even do it.
|
| With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang
| out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't
| feel like an accomplishment.
| supern0va wrote:
| >With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can
| bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just
| doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
|
| I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so
| can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most
| software. There's significant understanding required to ask
| for the right things and understand whether you're actually
| getting them.
|
| That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the
| shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think
| that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible
| that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do
| this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
| strictnein wrote:
| I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain
| knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something
| should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key.
| Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate
| people of equal coding skill, as they always have.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _but so can anyone else and it just doesn 't feel like an
| accomplishment._
|
| So it's not enough that _you_ get to do cool stuff, the
| important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?
|
| If so, other sites beckon.
| recursive wrote:
| No, anyone can do it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And that's exactly what the person I was replying to
| seems to be complaining about.
|
| So many people on "Hacker" News could benefit from
| reading the canonical text on the subject by Steven Levy.
| A true hacker _wants_ to bring the fire down the
| mountain. People around here just want to piss on it.
| neilellis wrote:
| You switch difficulties, like you do in a game. Play on Hard
| or Survival mode now. Build greater and more amazing things
| than you ever did before.
|
| We have never, ever, written what the machine executes, even
| assembly is an abstraction, even in a hex editor. So we all
| settle for the level of abstraction we like to work at. When
| we started (those of our age) most of us were assembly (or
| BASIC) programmers and over time we either increased our
| level of abstraction or didn't. If you went from assembly ->
| C -> Java/Python you moved up levels of abstraction. We're
| not writing in Python or C now, we are writing in natural
| language and that is compiled to our programming languages.
| It's just the compiler is still a bit buggy and opinionated!!
| And yes for some low level coding you still want to check the
| assembly language, some things need that level of attention.
|
| I learn more in a day coding with AI than I would in a month
| without it, it's a wonderful two-way exchange, I suggest
| directions, it teaches me new libraries or techniques that
| might solve the problem. I lookup those solutions and learn
| more about my problem space. I feel more like a university
| student some days than a programmer.
|
| Eventually this will probably be the end of coding and even
| analytical work. But I think that part is still far off (and
| possibly longer than we'll still be working for) in the
| meantime actually this for me is as exciting as the early
| days of home computing. It won't be fun for ever, the
| Internet was the coolest thing ever, until it wasn't, but
| doesn't mean we can't enjoy the summer while it's summer.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can
| bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just
| doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
|
| That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than
| actually writing code.
|
| Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting,
| and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world
| do you think that the pay will remain the same?
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| > in what world do you think that the pay will remain the
| same?
|
| It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
|
| Great! I turn from a creator to a babysitter of creators.
| I'm not seeing the win here.
|
| FWIW, I use LLMs extensively, but not to write the code,
| to rubber-duck. I have yet to have any LLM paired with
| any coding agent give me something that I would have
| written myself.
|
| All the code is _at best_ average. None of the smart
| stuff comes from them.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Now that actually writing code has less value than
| prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code,
| in what world do you think that the pay will remain the
| same?
|
| Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python?
| Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Don't you think people said the same thing C and
| Python?
|
| Maybe. Are they here now?
|
| > Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
|
| No. Being able to solve a problem using Python over C is
| not even in the same class of being able to solve a
| problem by asking for it in English.
| samiv wrote:
| That's because it's like summiting a mountain by taking a
| skilift to the top. You don't really need to put in the work
| and anyone can do it.
| orangecat wrote:
| Sure, and if the reason you're going to the top of the
| mountain is to deliver supplies to people who need them,
| you should absolutely take the lift.
| samiv wrote:
| Sure but here OP was left wondering why prompting didn't
| make them feel like they had done/accomplished anything.
| And the reason is because they didn't do anything worthy
| of giving them a feeling of accomplishment.
| samiv wrote:
| I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some
| flower installations.
|
| I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some.
| Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making
| me enjoy gardening again!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy
| landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words
| on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about
| having an idea and turning it into something real.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I have always loved the act of
| intentionally typing (converting my thoughts into
| structured text).
| moffkalast wrote:
| I guess some people enjoy the process, but you can still
| do that.
|
| It's like with machinists and 3D printers, you can always
| spend 10 hours on the lathe to make something but most of
| the time it's more practical to just get the part so one
| can get on with what actually needs doing.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > It's like with machinists and 3D printers
|
| that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I
| think there's a group of people that derive joy and
| satisfaction from using the part they designed and
| there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the
| part as designed. Same for software, some people are
| thrilled because they can get the software they imagine
| while others dread not producing the software people
| imagine.
| mixologic wrote:
| *I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do
| more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is
| really making me enjoy landscape design again!
| mosburger wrote:
| this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as
| snark.
|
| I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers
| are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by
| shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code
| that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious
| hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never
| really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other
| categories.
|
| I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the
| most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly
| as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish
| they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to
| grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up
| for.
|
| It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but
| some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up
| weeds.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Having opencode doesn't preclude me from making elegant
| code. It just takes away the carpel tunnel.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I created this with some kind of genai
|
| To me, it just feels like plagiarism. Can you explain why
| it doesn't feel like plagiarism to you?
| quietsegfault wrote:
| Plagiarism is claiming someone else's specific work as
| your own. Using a generative tool is closer to using a
| compiler, an IDE, or a library. I'm not copying a
| person's code or submitting someone else's project with
| the name filed off. I'm directing a system, reviewing the
| output, editing it, and taking responsibility for the
| result.
|
| If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote
| it, that's plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a
| starting point and shape it into what I need, that's just
| a different kind of authorship.
| neom wrote:
| Where do you draw your line between plagiarism and
| creativity? I learned in art school this question is more
| difficult to answer than it appears when taken seriously.
| mlaretallack wrote:
| I agree with this, I put myself in the "glorious hacks to
| bend the machine into doing things it was never really
| intended to do" camp, so the end game is somthing cool, now
| I can do 3 cool things before lunch instead of 3 cool
| things a year
| zzrrt wrote:
| But, almost by definition of how LLMs work, if it's that
| easy then someone else did it before and the AI is just
| copying their work for you. This doesn't fit well with my
| idea of glorious hacks to bend the machine, personally. I
| don't know, maybe it just breaks my self-delusion that I
| am special and make unique things. At least I get to
| discover for myself what is possible and how, and hold a
| sliver of hope that I did something new. Maybe at least
| my journey there was unique, whereas everyone using an AI
| basically has the same journey and same destination
| (modulo random seed I guess.)
| mrandish wrote:
| > people ... are motivated by different things.
|
| I agree and would add that it's not just different people,
| it can be the same person in different modes. Sometimes I
| enjoying making the thing, other times I just want to enjoy
| having the thing.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| Your grieving doesn't have to shit all over my personal
| enjoyment and contentment. Me enjoying the use of AI in
| developing software doesn't take anything away from your
| ability to grieve or dislike it. I'm not asking you to be
| excited, I'm asking you not to frame my enjoyment as naive,
| harmful, or lesser.
|
| Your feelings are yours, mine are mine, and they can
| coexist just fine. The problem only shows up when your
| grief turns into value judgments about the people who feel
| differently.
| jablongo wrote:
| This is a valid point, the good news is I think there is
| some hope in developing the craft of orchestrating many
| agents into something that is satisfying and rewarding in
| it's own right.
| nlawalker wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I think it would benefit everyone to
| be clear, upfront and honest with themselves and others
| about exactly what's being lost and grieved. The weeds are
| still growing and our hands are still available to pull
| them, so it's not that.
| dutchCourage wrote:
| I think the people who like shipping quickly probably don't
| like building products in the first place and are looking
| for other aspects of entrepreneurship.
|
| A huge benefit I find in AI is that it helps with a lot of
| things I hated. Merge conflicts, config files, breaking
| dependency updates... That leaves me more time to focus on
| the actual functionalities so I end up with better APIs,
| more detailed UIs, and more thorough tests. I do think it's
| possible to be relevant/competitive by only delegating
| parts of the work to AI and not the whole thing. Though it
| might change if AI gets too good.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| As mosburger says, this is a great analogy. Do you think that
| the great artists paint, sculpt, and draw everything by hand,
| by themselves? Of course not... they never did, and they
| don't today. You're being offered the ability to join their
| ranks.
|
| It's _your_ studio now. You have a staff of apprentices
| standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act
| like it 's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
| draebek wrote:
| Is this sarcasm? I can't tell.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No, it's not.
|
| If you want things to stay the same forever, you
| shouldn't go into technology, art, _or_ gardening. Try
| plumbing, masonry, or religion.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The truth is that you wouldn't be saying that if the
| change had been in a direction you don't like.
| acoard wrote:
| I think this works unironically. My mother is an avid
| gardener and can spend 8 hours a day gardening. When her life
| circumstances allowed for it, she hired a once a week
| gardener to do the tasks she didn't like (or had difficulties
| doing as a small woman), and still gardens the same amount.
| I've teased her for hiring a gardener, but she swears it's a
| huge help and boost to her gardening quality of life.
| dirkc wrote:
| Oh, the joy that awaits you when you come back home to
| discover how the gardener interpreted "please trim the hedge
| by the gate a little".
| small_model wrote:
| The proper analogy would be you can now remove all weeds with
| the swipe of your hand and cut all your hedges with another
| swipe, you still are gardening you can do it quicker and
| therefore explore different possibilities.
| munificent wrote:
| For some, the feeling of pulling those weeds out is
| inseparable from the holistic experience they think of as
| "gardening".
| small_model wrote:
| So using weedkiller isn't gardening to these people?
| munificent wrote:
| My point is just that if there are 10 different
| activities that produce the same resulting object, they
| aren't necessarily the same activities in the minds of
| the participants _solely_ because the output is the same.
|
| The process and experience matters too.
| neom wrote:
| Maybe this isn't directly related to what you're saying
| and I'm not attacking it, I'm just thinking out loud:
| What would it mean to master gardening then? I've never
| gardened in my life but I grew up in Scotland around
| estate houses and castles, my friends dads were gardeners
| and each of them seems to be specialists in their own
| area, many working on the same estate, so what exactly is
| this "holistic experience of gardening"?
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30
| gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your
| 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of
| them and start plucking away
| grayhatter wrote:
| Surely you have 10-30 examples you want to share?
|
| Or even just 1 or 2?
| munificent wrote:
| What's so great about having 10 or 30 gardens?
| recursive wrote:
| It's the making, not the having. If I'm selling these
| gardens, surely it's better to have more. If I enjoy the
| act of making the garden, then there's no reason I ever
| need to finish the first one.
|
| This analogy has probably outstayed its usefulness.
| dave_sid wrote:
| No you didn't. You lead a team of gardeners to develop your
| grand vision. Or you directed an epic movie leading a cast of
| talented actors bringing your vision to life. You can choose
| an empowering analogy or a negative one it's your choice.
| alexgarden wrote:
| Yeah... a team of gardeners who might, with no warning,
| decide to burn down your house to create some extra
| fertilizer for the rose garden. Sometimes I wonder...
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I used to be big into amateur radio. When I was considering
| to build a tower, I would have paid someone to build the
| tower for me and do the climbing work to mount stuff on the
| tower. Your statement is nonsensical, because it assumes that
| there is a binary choice between "do everything yourself" and
| "delegate everything".
| jablongo wrote:
| I'm so excited about landscape architecture now that I can
| tell my gardener to create an equivalent to the gardens at
| versailles for $5. Sometimes he plants the wrong kind of
| plant or makes a dead end path, but he fixes his work very
| quickly.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| By artificially narrowing a multi-faceted issue to just two
| either/or simplistic options you are no longer describing the
| issue. If you ackknowledge this, you can comment on it. But
| not acknowledging it makes your comment hard to parse.
| Sarcarsm? Overly simplistic? Missing context? Unclear.
| theonething wrote:
| How about hiring a gardener to do some of the stuff and you
| can focus doing the part of the gardening/landscaping that is
| important to you and you enjoy?
|
| I think that's a more accurate (and charitable) analogy than
| yours.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If I were the architect of a large building that I designed
| from the blueprints, the interior, etc, I wouldn't feel bad
| that I didn't install the toilets myself. AI agents are the
| plumbers, the painters, the electricians, etc
| jojva wrote:
| Your comment is interesting because it shows how engineers
| view their work: through the product, i.e the why, or through
| the craft, i.e the how.
|
| What you consider "exciting", as a theoretical gardener, is
| the act of taking care of the plants. What OP finds it
| exciting is that they may now get a team of gardeners that'll
| build a Versailles-like garden for free.
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| Well, the gardener isn't going to cut down your roses to the
| ground as they are about to go into bloom because s/he
| mistook it for the weed they were just working on.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my
| identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic".
|
| Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I
| had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C
| source code and found it.
|
| I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few
| seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like
| _magic_
| refset wrote:
| In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver
| mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude
| to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-
| canvas-js/xgrav.html
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| It's this one with bees and a wasp
|
| https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm
| ....
| iwontberude wrote:
| Yeah it's drugs and or religion. Feels pretty good.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But
| only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC)
| when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it,
| then found the source code for the game and randomly started
| changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to
| C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I
| didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be
| clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and
| simply kept at it until I wasn't.
|
| I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the
| byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive
| computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's
| amazing.
|
| I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I
| have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try
| something new, try something different and difficult or
| ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore.
|
| That's what it's always been about.
| strictnein wrote:
| In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I
| started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really
| enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the
| current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been
| able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems
| has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so.
|
| Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's
| been a blast.
|
| Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
| dirkc wrote:
| > I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker
| container. Call me old-fashioned.
|
| I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container
| to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and
| thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have
| been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS.
| Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like
| the alternative!
| alexgarden wrote:
| For sure. Docker is rad (sorry Docker!)... all I'm saying is
| that I am not proud of the fact that I can do it and I don't
| think it moves the awesome needle - but it's still hard to
| get right and a pain in the ass. It's just an example of
| something I appreciate that I can automate now.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| The original Homeworld team _was_ casting spells!
|
| I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in
| formation, but also behave independently and rationally when
| that made sense.
|
| That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and
| immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really
| glad I have a chance now to tell you.
| alexgarden wrote:
| Thanks... It was magical at the time... I've thought a lot
| about why it was magical over the years... I think if you
| boil away all the space stuff, Homeworld was a story about
| people who knew in their hearts that they were special and
| destined for something greater than the universe was willing
| to allow. And they went through hell to discover that they
| were right. Looking back, I think that's a story a lot of us
| on this thread (inc. me) can relate to.
|
| Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Sounds like there's some overlap with the story of the
| Jewish people, now that I think of it.
|
| > Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
|
| I doubt it's permanent, and we all gotta eat.
|
| But you know what? My son _still_ tells me how much he was
| in awe of that game when he saw me playing it.
|
| No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory
| of fun and time together. Thank you.
| alexgarden wrote:
| > No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet
| memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
|
| ^^ Made my day. Tell your son he's rad.
| kinneticslammer wrote:
| Amen to this. The optimization the team did blows my mind...
| whenever I think of it I think of if someone made Crysis run
| on the NES without compromises.
|
| The soundtrack was stellar, and introduced me to Barber
| (Adagio for Strings).
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I
| was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today
| about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my
| coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I
| mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished
| product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did
| when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do
| on my Apple ][+.
| olegp wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it
| was great!
|
| I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around
| the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using
| a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch
| of triangles with color interpolation.
|
| IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in
| order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on
| your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an
| explanation, which helped me finish that feature.
| alexgarden wrote:
| The skybox with texture maps was _our_ original plan too. The
| problem was that GPUs didn 't have enough RAM to hold
| anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup.
|
| Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with
| light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels
| to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to
| with each mission. Genius.
| upmostly wrote:
| First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up,
| so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its
| creation.
|
| I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I
| grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan
| websites for Quake 2.
|
| That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and
| GitHub.
|
| Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious
| apps.
|
| Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years
| doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to
| churn out a slightly different looking app.
|
| The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer
| spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes
| now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the
| real problems.
| maxfurman wrote:
| I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part
| of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the
| camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or
| just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative,
| looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!
| reactordev wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree.
|
| And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young
| gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and
| engineers...
|
| Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld
| shaped me in ways I couldn't even tell you.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed
| through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a
| real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I
| ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing
| from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the
| Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing
| than the nascent World-Wide Web.
|
| The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still
| excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same
| sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system
| from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.
| convivialdingo wrote:
| Similar story for myself. It was long and tedious for my mental
| model to go from Basic, to Pascal, to C, and finally to ASM as
| a teen.
|
| My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to
| delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had
| time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick -
| compiles and sometimes even runs.
| marttt wrote:
| DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode
| internet is there (should you want online in the first place),
| and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a
| huge leap [1].
|
| I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-
| level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small
| application to do paid work which involves chopping audio
| files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete,
| true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that
| DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time --
| which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a
| multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system
| recently.
|
| Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I
| prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace
| and harmony for the soul!
|
| 0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ |
| https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea...
| | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php
|
| 1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA
|
| 2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS
| alt227 wrote:
| I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age.
|
| All other professions had their time when technology came and
| automated things.
|
| For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers,
| candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been
| mostly taken over by machines in factories.
|
| I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We
| have reached the point where we have code factories which can
| produce things much more efficiently and quicker than any human
| can alone.
|
| Where the professions still thrive is in the artisan market.
| There is always demand for hand crafted things which have been
| created with love and care.
|
| I am hoping this stays true for my coding analogy. Then people
| who really care about making a good product will still have a
| market from customers who want something different from the mass
| produced norm.
| abraxas wrote:
| > For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers,
| candlestickmakers etc etc.
|
| Very, very few of those professions are thriving. Especially if
| we are talking true craftsmanship and not stuffing the oven
| with frozen pastries to create the smell and the corresponding
| illusion of artisinal work.
| alt227 wrote:
| They are thriving where I live. There is a huge artisinal
| market for hand crafted things. There are many markets, craft
| centers, art fairs, regular classes from professionals
| teaching amateurs etc. In most rural communities I have
| visited it is similar.
| randcraw wrote:
| The problem for software artisans is that unlike other
| handmade craftwork, nobody else ever sees your code.
| There's no way to differentiate your work from that which
| is factory-made or LLM-generated.
| alt227 wrote:
| That is a valid concern.
|
| Therefore I think artisan coders will need to rely on a
| combination of customisation and customer service. Their
| specialty will need to be very specific features which
| are not catered for by the usual mass code creation
| market, and provide swift and helpful support along with
| it.
| tavavex wrote:
| They're existing, not really thriving. Artisanal things
| have become more popular as a hobby, but even people who
| get into them commercially rarely make real money off of
| it. The demand exists, but purely as a novelty for people
| who appreciate those types of things, or perhaps in really
| niche sub-markets that aren't adequately covered by big
| businesses. But the artisans aren't directly competing with
| companies that provide similar goods to them at scale,
| because it's simply impossible. They've just carved out a
| niche and sell the experience or the tailoring of what
| they're making to the small slice of the population who's
| willing to pay for that.
|
| You can't do this with software. Non-devs don't understand
| nor appreciate any qualities of software beyond the
| simplest comprehension of UX. There's no such thing as
| "hand-made" software. 99% of people don't care about what
| runs on their computer at all, they only care about the
| ends, not the means. As long as it appears to do what you
| want, it's good enough, and good enough is all that's
| needed by everyone.
| summa_tech wrote:
| I think the issue at the core of the analogy is that factories,
| traditional factories, excel at making a ton of one thing (or
| small variations thereof). The big productivity gains came from
| highly reliable, repeatable processes that do not accommodate
| substantial variation. This rigidity of factory production is
| what drives the existence of artisan work: it can always easily
| distinguish itself from the mass product.
|
| This does not seem true for AI writing software. It's neither
| reliable nor rigid.
| alt227 wrote:
| What assembly lines and factories did for other manufacturing
| processes is to make it feasable for any person to be able to
| make those things. In the past only very skilled
| professionals were able to create such things, but
| mechanisation and breaking down manufacturing processes into
| small chunks made the same things be able to be achieved by
| low skilled workers.
|
| IMO that is exactly what is happening here. Ai is making
| coding apps possible for the normal person. Yes they will
| need to be supervised and monitored, just like workers in a
| factory. But groups of normal low skilled workers will be
| able to create large pieces of software via ai, whic has only
| ever been possible by skilled teams of professinoals before.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Yes, I think that's how it will go, like all those other
| industries. There will be an artisanal market, that's much
| smaller, where the (fewer) participants charge higher prices.
| So it'll (ironically?) end up being just another wealth
| concentrator. A few get richer doing artisanal work while most
| have their wage depressed and/or leave the market.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing
| that kept me up at night for decades -- the puzzle, the chase,
| the moment where you finally understand why something isn't
| working -- that's been compressed into a prompt and a response
|
| It's so strange to read because to me its never been more fun to
| make software, its especially never been easier for an
| individual. The boring parts are being automated so I can work on
| the bespoke and artistic parts. The feedback loop is getting
| shorter to making something nice and workable. The investigation
| tools for profiling and pinpointing performance bottlenecks are
| better than ever, where Claude is just one new part of it.
| tiahura wrote:
| Don't program as a career, but am also 50 and programming since
| TRS-80. AI has transformed this era, and I LOVE IT! I can focus
| on making and not APIs or syntax or all of the bootstrapping.
| Movah wrote:
| I wondered when I would see someone else mention TRS-80. Recall
| those days like yesterday "Hey Mah! It works!"
| delaminator wrote:
| I'm 57. I was there when the ZX81 came out.
|
| I had my first paid programming job when I was 11, writing a
| database for the guy that we rented our pirate VHS tapes from.
|
| AI is great.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance
| matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When
| no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns
| into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce
| things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects
| often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000
| with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't
| anywhere close to efficient or performant.
|
| As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number
| for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you
| don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either
| jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of
| agents needed to produce high quality code in an application
| context.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| I wonder what other "crevices" (as the author put it) exist.
|
| Another commentor mentioned embedded, and after a brief phase
| of dabbling in that, mainly with nRF5x micros, I tend to agree.
| Less training data and obtuse tooling.
| layer8 wrote:
| > When no one cares about things other than correctness
|
| I don't get the impression that the majority particularly cares
| about correctness. In fact, it's one of the weak points of AI.
| ktrnka wrote:
| I'm a few years behind you. I got started on my uncle's handed
| down vic 20 in the late 80s.
|
| The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I
| miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even
| the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find
| organizations like that.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat
| out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with
| some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company,
| petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much
| of it. Travelled a bit too.
|
| I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now
| (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given
| the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years
| commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit
| in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just
| disappeared while I had my back turned.
|
| I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel
| like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how
| abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be
| anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people
| are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I
| think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.
|
| Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking
| at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't
| pay the bills.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| I'm 45 and contracted for over a decade before switching to
| product development. I used to still get inquiries from former
| customers, mainly for Java and Android work. But since about
| two years, it's completely dried up. Anecdotally I've been
| hearing from friends who are still in the
| contracting/freelancing business that things are very tough
| right now. It makes sense to me, contractors are usually the
| first thing businesses cut when they're either lowering their
| spending or becoming more efficient themselves.
| randusername wrote:
| A lot of that magic still remains in embedded.
|
| If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last
| decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon.
|
| At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about
| evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the
| same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".
| abraxas wrote:
| The issue is that AI will be creating software at whatever
| abstraction layer it is asked to produce. Right down to ASM
| maybe even machine code if someone actually wanted or needed
| that. Perhaps not the AI of today but given a few years I'll be
| quite surprised if it still can't.
| skydhash wrote:
| If we can take a computer as powerful as today's laptops and
| make it crawl because of the amount of inefficiencies in
| software like Teams, I'm not holding breath for embedded. If
| you apply the same kind of engineering principle as
| Anthropic, you'll be laughed out of the room.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It is happening in embedded as well. I noticed just the upgrade
| from Gemini 2.5 to 3.0 Pro went from "I can get the assembly
| syntax mostly right but I don't understand register lifetimes"
| to "I can generate perfect assembly by hand".
|
| I just saw a Reddit post yesterday about somebody that
| successfully _one-shot_ in Gemini 2.5 the bare metal boot code
| for a particular board with the only input being the board 's
| documentation.
| abraxas wrote:
| I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been
| written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and
| sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on
| a rubber key ZX Spectrum.
|
| The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly
| stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the
| crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are
| getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.
|
| Just last night I worked with Claude and at the end of the
| evening I had it explain to me what we actually did. It was a
| "Her" (as in the movie) moment for me where the AI was now
| handholding me and not the other way around.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| > The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly
| stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in
| the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices
| are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.
|
| That's exactly it. And then people say "pivot to planning /
| overall logic / high-level design," but how long do we have
| before upper management decides that AI is good enough at that
| stuff, too, and shows us all the door?
|
| If they believe they can get a product that's 95% of what an
| experienced engineer would give them for 5% of the cost, why
| bother keeping the engineer around?
| nimonian wrote:
| > this post could have been written by me (if I could write)
|
| This post was written by AI
| abraxas wrote:
| English is my second language so I'm not well tuned to
| picking up on the phrases that expose writing as AI
| generated. Even so it doesn't really change the sentiment
| being conveyed nor the fact that it's better writing than I
| could muster.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I'm lucky because I work as an independent consultant. I get paid
| to deliver solutions, but I get to choose how to create those
| solutions. I write whatever code I want however I want. As long
| as it solves the problem, no one cares.
|
| I started programming in 1980, and I having just as much fun now
| as I did then. I literally cannot wait to sit down at my IDE and
| start writing.
|
| But that was not always true. When I worked for a larger company,
| even some startups, it was not always fun. There's something
| about having full control over my environment that makes the work
| feel like play.
|
| If you feel like programming isn't fun anymore, maybe switching
| to a consulting gig will help. It will give you the independence
| and control that you might be craving.
| fourside wrote:
| I have a hard time telling whether agentic coding tools will
| take a big bite out of the demand for software consultants. If
| the market is worried about SaaS because people think companies
| will use AI to code tools internally vs buying them, I would
| think the same would apply to consultants.
|
| I've seen the code current tools produce if you're not careful,
| or if you're in a domain where training data is scarce. I could
| see a world where a couple of years from now companies need to
| bring outside people to fix vibe coded software that managed to
| gain traction. Hard to tell.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| It's a good question. I think short-term (5 years) the easy
| jobs will go away. No one is going to write a restaurant web
| site by hand. Maybe the design will still be human-made, but
| all the code will be templated AI. Imagine every WordPress
| template customized by AI. That's a whole bunch of jobs that
| won't exist.
|
| Right now I'm creating clinical trial visualizations for
| biotech firms. There's some degree of complexity because I
| have to understand the data schema, the specifics of the
| clinical trial, and the goals of the scientists. But I firmly
| believe that AI will be able to handle most of that within 5
| years (it may be slower in biotech because of the regulatory
| requirements).
|
| But I also firmly believe that there is more demand for
| (good) software today than there are programmers to satisfy
| it. If programmers become 10x more efficient with AI, that
| might mean that there will be 10x more programs that need
| writing.
| AIorNot wrote:
| I'm 50 too and I've complained and yearned about the "old" days
| too, a lot of this is nostalgia as we reminisce about periods of
| time in our youth when we had the exuberance and time to play and
| build with technology of our own time
|
| Working in AI startups strangely enough I see a lot of the same
| spirit of play and creativity applied to LLM based tools - I mean
| what is OpenClaw but a fun experiment
|
| Those kids these days are going to reminisce about the early days
| of AI when prompts would be handwritten and LLMs would
| hallucinate
|
| I'm not really sure 1983, 1993 or 2003 really was that gold of
| age but we look at it with rose colored glasses
| nprateem wrote:
| Programming is dead. In the last 4 days I've done 2 months of
| work. The future is finally here.
|
| Bad times to be a programmer. Start learning business.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The
| question is, what other careers are out there for someone who
| wants to make things?
|
| About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I
| couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really
| the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.
|
| Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia?
| Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.
|
| It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI
| hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a
| smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| People get bored if they don't find real meaning in their work.
|
| https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...
|
| Fact is, the tech sector is filled with folks that find zero
| joy in what they do, chose a career for financial reasons, and
| end up being miserable to everyone including themselves.
|
| The ex-service people would call these folks entitled
| Shitbirds, as no matter the situation some will complain about
| everything. Note, everyone still does well in most large
| corporate settings, but some are exhausting to be around on a
| project. =3
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The reason we don't have the right to be lazy is because of
| the people who find "meaning" in toil. I do not want to work
| and AI is the most anti work technology in human history.
|
| Bertrand Russel literally wrote a book called "in defense of
| idleness" because he knew that heavy hitters like him had to
| defend work abolitionism. The "work is good" crowd is why we
| can't have nice things. You guys are time thief's and
| ontologically evil. May all work supporters reincarnate as
| either durian fruits or cockroaches.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| You seem very passionate about your opinions, but are you
| happy?
|
| The fact remains LLM can't reach comparable human error
| rates without consuming 75% of the energy output of our
| entire local galaxy.
|
| While I find true Neuromorphic computing topics more
| interesting, the emergence of the LLM "AI" true believer is
| deeply concerning to those that understand how they are
| actually built. =3
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
| woah wrote:
| I just had an AI write a toy game engine with realistic
| camera and lens simulation on the view from scratch in
| rust in one day while i was working on other stuff all
| for the price of a $20/month Cursor subscription
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| "AI" LLM don't write anything, but copied someones
| symbolic isomorphic work that could fit the expected
| definition in the reasoning model.
|
| Like all copyright submarines, your firm now runs the
| non-zero risk someone will sue for theft, or hit the
| product with a DMCA claim. What is the expected value of
| piracy versus actual business. =3
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MalBJuI9O5k
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Information wants to be free. No one in any
| administration now or in the future will ever go back to
| the "let's sue grandma for 1 trillion dollars" era of the
| early 2000s. Piracy is good and important for national
| security.
|
| ~~~(====3
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| >important for national security
|
| Indeed, but people rarely stop to consider... "security
| for whom?"
|
| Have a wonderful day =3
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4
|
| Spaceballs (1987)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPkWZdluoUg
| layer8 wrote:
| > Academia? Bad pay.
|
| I think that bad pay is preferable to no fun. Of course,
| academia isn't exactly a bed of roses either.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > who's willing to learn new things.
|
| I tell my boys, get good at learning and you don't have to get
| good at anything else. I think that still holds now as much as
| ever.
| r_lee wrote:
| how does that help pay the rent? or how would that get you
| past resume screening?
| dwoldrich wrote:
| I am in a very similar boat, age and experience-wise. I would
| like to work backward from the observation that there is no
| resource constraints and we're collectively hopelessly lost up
| the abstraction Jenga tower.
|
| I observe that the way we taught math was not oriented on the
| idea that everyone would need to know trigonometric functions or
| how to do derivatives. I like to believe math curricula was
| centered around standardizing a system of thinking about maths
| and those of us who were serious about our educational
| development would all speak the same language. It was about
| learning a language and laying down processes that everyone else
| could understand. And that shaped us, and it's foolish to
| challenge or complain about that or, God forbid, radically change
| the way we teach math subjects because it damages our ability to
| think alike. (I know the above is probably completely idealistic
| verging on personal myth, but that's how I choose to look at it.)
|
| In my opinion, we never approached software engineering the same
| way. We were so focused on the compiler and the type calculus,
| and we never taught people about what makes code valuable and
| robust. If I had FU money to burn today, I'd start a Mathnasium
| company focused around making kids into systems integrators with
| great soft skills and the ability to produce high quality
| software. I would pitch this business under the assumption that
| the jenga tower is going to be collapsing pretty much
| continuously for the next 25-50 years and civilization needs
| absolute unit super developers coming out of nowhere who will be
| able to make a small fortune helping companies dig their way out
| of 75 years of tech debt.
| josefrichter wrote:
| A bit younger, and exact opposite. Probably the most excited I've
| ever been about the state of development!
| burnerToBetOut wrote:
| > ...Not burnout...
|
| Than meybe _wadeAfay_? ;)
| schlap wrote:
| _Old Man Yells at Clouds_
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Old Man Yells at Claude
| lbrito wrote:
| I'd feel the same when I was younger. Over time I've realized
| that they are the lucky ones. You too, if you're lucky, will
| one day be an old man doing old man things.
| qsi wrote:
| Well-written and it expresses a mood, a feeling, a sense of both
| loss and awe. I was there too in the 8-bit era, fully
| understanding every byte of RAM and ROM.
|
| The sense of nostalgia that can turn too easily into a lament is
| powerful and real. But for me this all came well before AI had
| become all consuming... It's the just the latest manifestation of
| the process. I knew I didn't really understand computers anymore,
| not in the way I used to. I still love coding and building but
| it's no longer central to my job or lif3. It's useful, I enjoy it
| but at the same time I also marvel at the future that I find
| myself living in. I've done things with AI that I wouldn't have
| dared to start for lack of time. It's amazing and transformative
| and I love that too.
|
| But I will always miss the Olden Days. I think more than anything
| it's the nostalgia for the 8-bit era that made me enjoy Stranger
| Things so much. :)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| As someone who has always enjoyed designing things, but was never
| really into PUZZLES, I always felt like an outsider in the
| programming domain. People around me really enjoyed the "fun" of
| programming, whereas I was more interested in the Engineering of
| the thing - balancing tradeoffs until within acceptable margins
| and then actually calling it "DONE". People around me rarely
| called things "done", they rewrote it and rewrote it so that it
| kept satisfying their need for puzzle-solving (today, it's Ruby,
| tomorrow, it's rewritten in Scala, and the day after that, it's
| Golang or Zig!)
|
| I feel that LLMs have finally put the ball in MY court. I feel
| sorry for the others, but you can always find puzzles in the toy
| section of the bookstore.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "They're writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs
| in a V8 engine written in C++ that's making system calls to an OS
| kernel that's scheduling threads across cores they've never
| thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with
| caching layers they couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400
| packages they've never read a line of."
|
| and they still call themselves 'full stack developers' :eyeroll:
| jppope wrote:
| Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of
| my favorite quotes: * "Then it professionalised.
| Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild
| West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous
| machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became
| appliances. The craft became invisible." * "The
| machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance
| and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were
| really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn't die of
| natural causes -- it was bought out and put to work optimising ad
| clicks." * "Previous technology shifts were "learn the
| new thing, apply existing skills." AI isn't that. It's not a new
| platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It's a shift in
| what it means to be good at this." * "They're writing
| TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine
| written in C++ that's making system calls to an OS kernel that's
| scheduling threads across cores they've never thought about,
| hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they
| couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they've
| never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost
| track of what's happening." * "Typing was never the
| hard part." * "I don't have a neat conclusion. I'm not
| going to tell you that experienced developers just need to "push
| themselves up the stack" or "embrace the tools" or "focus on what
| AI can't do." All of that is probably right, and none of it
| addresses the feeling."
|
| To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I
| feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they
| do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can
| build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we
| should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at
| all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an
| email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool
| purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you
| need it.
| rraghur wrote:
| Are you me?
|
| I'm 49.... Started at 12... In the same boat
|
| First 286 machine had a CMOS battery that was loose so I had to
| figure that out to make it boot into ms-dos
|
| This time it does feel different and while I'm using them ai more
| than ever, it feels soulless and empty even when I 'ship'
| something
| dcanelhas wrote:
| > I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old,
| typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than
| the chip in your washing machine
|
| I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here:
| back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now
| there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to
| develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now.
| Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language
| models?
| hazyc wrote:
| I think the true genuinely-love-programming type of people will
| increasingly have to do what so many other people do, and that's
| separation of work and personal enjoyment. You might have to AI-
| architect your code at work, and hand code your toy projects on
| the weekend.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| I'm the exact same demographic as the author, just turned 50,
| writing code since childhood in BASIC. I'm dealing with the AI in
| programming issue by ignoring it.
|
| I still enjoy the physical act of programming so I'm unsure why I
| should do anything that changes that. To me it's akin to asking a
| painter to become a photographer. Both are artists but the craft
| is different.
|
| Even if the AI thing is here to stay, I think there will be room
| for people who program by hand for the same reason there's still
| room for people who paint, despite the invention of the camera.
|
| But then, I'm somebody who doesn't even use an IDE. If I find an
| IDE obtrusive then I'm certain I'll find an AI agent even more
| so.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You can still have fun programming. Just sit down and write some
| code. Ain't nobody holding a gun to your head forcing you to use
| AI in your projects.
|
| And the part of programming that wasn't _your projects_ , whether
| back in the days of TPS reports and test coverage meetings, or in
| the age of generative AI, that bit was always kinda soul
| draining.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Is there some magic lost also when using AI to write your blog
| post?
| hackeman300 wrote:
| Seriously I thought I was going crazy with this. So many "it's
| not just x it's y". Short punchy sentences. Emdashes galore.
| geetee wrote:
| I miss human writing. I miss the different voices.
| benlivengood wrote:
| The contrast between this and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software
| engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models
| to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time
| for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an
| architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can
| happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now.
| Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are
| seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new
| bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating
| system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or
| Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've
| been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is
| just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in
| the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You
| can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and
| low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.
|
| [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu
| post-it wrote:
| > Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past
| are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching.
|
| This is a huge one for me. Claude is significantly better at
| Googling than I am.
| qalmakka wrote:
| I am much younger than the author, but I've been coding for most
| of my life and I find close to no joy in using AIs. For me coding
| has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers,
| languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the
| sake of it. It was always more about the journey than the end
| goal, and AI basically hollows out all of the interesting bits
| about coding. It feels like skipping straight to the end of a
| book, or somewhat like that.
|
| I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots
| in my experience turns developing software into something that
| feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I
| grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine,
| but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can
| only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead
| of complaining about it.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| > For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty
| quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing
| new cool things for the sake of it.
|
| Same. It scratches my riddle-solving itch in a way that the
| process of "prompt-honing" has yet to do.
| chasd00 wrote:
| for me, and i bet many people, the only riddles being solved
| (at least at work) for the last few years amount to "what is
| eslint complaining about now?". It's nice not to have to eff
| with things like that and other aggravations anymore by
| offloading it to an agent.
| program_whiz wrote:
| yeah exactly. For some people, this was like enjoying a puzzle.
| And now there's an AI that can solve the puzzle -- it defeats
| the purpose.
|
| However, if your point was to "make more widgets faster" and
| only saw programming as a means to an end (make money, increase
| SaaS features), then I see why people are super excited about
| it.
|
| I see it the same way as cooking. If your goal is "sell as many
| hamburgers as possible" then the McD / factory farm is the way
| to go. If your idea is "I enjoy the personal feeling of
| preparing the food, smelling the ingredients, feeling like I'm
| developing my craft of cooking, and love watching someone eat
| my hand-prepared meal", then having "make fast food machine"
| actually makes things worse.
|
| I think a lot of people in this forum are at odds because some
| of the people enjoy cooking for the experience, and the other
| half are just trying to make food startups. Now they can create
| and throw away menu items at record pace until they find the
| one that maximizes return. They never wanted to cook, they just
| wanted to have a successful restaurant. Nothing wrong with
| either approach, but the 2nd half (the software is just a
| product half) were hamstrung before, so now they are having a
| moment of excitement as they realize they don't have to care
| about coding anymore.
|
| I 100% guarantee that most of the MBA / startup founder types
| who didn't love coding for its own sake kind of felt a huge
| pain that they had to "play along" with devs talking about
| frameworks, optimal algos, and "code quality" and the like, all
| while paying them massive salaries and equity stakes for what
| they saw as disposable item to increase revenue. Meanwhile the
| devs want another 2-weeks and 6 figures of salaries so they can
| "refactor" for no visible difference, but you can't complain
| because they'll leave.
|
| Now that the code factory is in place, they can focus on what
| they really want, finding customers for an item. Its the drop-
| shipping of code and software. The people using drop-shipping
| don't care what the product is. Production and fulfillment are
| just impediments to the real goal -- selling a product.
|
| The actual revelation of AI, if one can call it that, is how
| few people care about craft, quality, or enjoying work.
| Watching AI slop videos, ads, and music makes one realize that
| true artists and craftspeople are still incredibly rare. Most
| people are mediocre, unimaginative, disinterested, and just
| want the shortest path to easy riches. While it sounds
| negative, its more like realizing most people aren't athletes
| or interested in very difficult physical exertion -- its just a
| fact of human nature. True athletes who love sport for its own
| sake are rare and in a way nonsensical on their face.
|
| In the end, we will probably lament something we lose in the
| process. The same way we've hollowed out culture, local
| businesses, family / relationships, the middle class, etc all
| in the name of progress before. Surely each step has had its
| rewards and advantages, but Molloch always takes his pound of
| flesh.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I turn 52 this year. I also started at 10 years old programming
| in a combination of AppleSoft BASIC and assembly language and
| typing machine code out of books so I could use Double Hires
| graphics since it wasn't supported by BASIc and doing my own
| assembly language programming.
|
| I stuck with C and C++ as my bread and butter from 1996-2011 with
| other languages in between.
|
| I don't miss "coding" because of AI. My vision has been larger
| than what I could do myself without delegating for over a decade
| - before LLMs.
|
| "coding" and/or later coordinating with people (dotted line)
| reporting to me has been a necessary evil until a year or two ago
| to see my vision go to implementation.
|
| I absolutely love this new world. For loops and while loops and
| if statements don't excite me in my 50s. Seeing my vision come to
| life faster than I ever could before and having it well
| _archited_ does.
|
| I love talking to "the business" and solving XYProblems and
| getting to a solution 3x faster
| aabajian wrote:
| It seems AI is putting senior developers into two camps. Both
| groups relate to the statement, "I started programming when I was
| seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like
| something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like
| magic. I'm fifty now, and the magic is different, and I'm
| learning to sit with that."
|
| The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that
| feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it. I
| thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build
| things I _couldn 't_, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of
| time. Do you want to spend all your time building the app user
| interface, or do you want to focus on that core ability that
| makes your program unique? Most of us want the latter, but the
| former takes up so much time.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| delegating UI to the 'not worth my time' pile is how you end up
| with a poor UI
| davsti4 wrote:
| Similarly, I'm using it to write apps in non-native languages,
| like rust. My first foray into it led to finding poor
| documentation examples. AI allows me to create without spending
| large swaths of time learning minutia.
|
| I'm enjoying it to a point, but yes, it does eliminate that
| sense of accomplishment - when you've spent many late nights
| working on something complex, and finally finish it. That's
| pretty much gone.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Similarly, I'm using it to write apps in non-native
| languages, like rust.
|
| This does not make sense; Rust is native.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I assume they mean 'native tongue', as in their day-to-day
| programming language, or native programming language.
| paodealho wrote:
| > without spending large swaths of time learning minutia
|
| He probably meant languages he's not proficient with.
| layer8 wrote:
| It sounds like you don't particularly care about the user
| interface, and that's why you're okay with delegating it. I
| think the developers who don't like delegating to AI are the
| ones who care about and have strong opinions about all the
| parts. To them there are no unimportant parts where the details
| don't matter.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I'm sure the UI engineers would have a bit of a different take.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I am firmly in both camps. On one hand, getting stuff working
| has its own thrill.
|
| On the other hand, I step back, look at the progress made in
| just the last year, and realize that not only is my job soon to
| be gone, but pretty much everyone's job is gone that primarily
| does knowledge work.
|
| I feel there's now an egg timer set on my career, and I better
| make the best of the couple of minutes I have left.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that
| feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it.
|
| I don't think so. I think the first camp does not get paid for
| programming, while the second camp does.
|
| That's why the first camp is so happy, and why the second camp
| is not.
|
| > I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to
| build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a
| lack of time.
|
| It sounds like you're developing for yourself only. Your
| attitude makes sense, then - you want a $FOO, and now you can
| have one without paying for it.
|
| I think you can only empathise with the second camp if your
| ability to eat depends on being able to sell $FOOs.
| bananamogul wrote:
| 'It's not a "back in my day" piece.'
|
| That's exactly what it is.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| > the VGA Mode X tricks in Doom
|
| Doom does not use mode-X :P ! It uses mode-Y.
|
| That being said as a 47 years old having given 40 years to this
| thing as well, I can relate to the feeling.
| waffletower wrote:
| Not going to pull age or title rank here -- but I suggest if your
| use of AI feels empty, take advantage of its speed and plasticity
| and iterate upon its output more, shape the code results. Use it
| as a sculptor might too -- begin with its output and make the
| code your own. I particularly like this latter approach when I am
| tasked with use of a language I view as inferior and/or awkward.
| While this might read as idealistic, and I agree that there are
| situations where this interaction is infeasible or inappropriate,
| you should also be encountering problems where AI decidedly falls
| on its face and you need to intervene.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this
| author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and
| systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an
| intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing
| much with _code_ , but I do love solving system scale problems,
| which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the
| most annoying parts of code I deal with are now abstracted into
| human language and specs, and I can now architect/build more
| creatively than before. So I am happy. But, I was one of those
| types that never had a true passion for "code" and have meant
| plenty of people that do have that, and I feel for them. I worry
| for people that carved out being really good at programming as a
| niche, but you enter a point in your career where that becomes
| much less important than being able to execute and define
| requirements and understand business logic. And yea, that isn't
| very romantic or magical, but I find passion outside of what pays
| my bills, so I lost that ennui feeling a while ago.
| layer8 wrote:
| Some may feel that it is a luxury to feel passionate about
| one's profession, but for me a life without that is pretty
| depressing. A society should strive to make fulfillment in a
| profession possible for everyone.
| bitwize wrote:
| This isn't new. It's the same feeling the first commercial
| programmers had working in assembly, or machine code, once
| compilers became available. Ultimately I think even Mel Kaye
| forsook being able to handpick memory locations for optimum drum
| access before his retirement, in favor of being able to build
| vastly more complex software than before.
|
| AI has just vastly extended your reach. No sense crying about it.
| It is literally foolish to lament the evolution of our field into
| something more.
| kraig911 wrote:
| "Over four decades I've been through more technology transitions
| than I can count. New languages, new platforms, new paradigms.
| CLI to GUI. Desktop to web. Web to mobile. Monoliths to
| microservices. Tapes, floppy discs, hard drives, SSDs. JavaScript
| frameworks arriving and dying like mayflies."... made me think of
|
| I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
| fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the
| dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in
| time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
|
| where we came from and where we're going this whole time in my
| career those things are kind of hard to pinpoint. Abstraction is
| killing us for sure. Time to market above all else. It's no
| wonder why software in cars, appliances and medical equipment is
| a factor that is killing people.
| sejje wrote:
| I think one of the big distinctions between people who like
| building with AI and those who don't, is that the people who are
| pro-AI are building their own ideas, of which they have many.
|
| The people who are anti-AI are largely building other people's
| ideas, for work. And they have no desire to ramp up velocity, and
| it's not helpful to them anyway because of bureaucratic processes
| that are the real bottleneck to what they're building.
|
| Not everyone falls into these silos, of course.
| ookblah wrote:
| maybe we just change, honestly. i think when i were younger there
| was nothing to lose, time felt unlimited, no "career" to gamble
| with, no billion dollar idea, just learning and tinkering and
| playing with whatever was out there because it was cool and
| interesting to me. in some respects i miss that.
|
| not sure how that relates to llms but it does become an unblocker
| to regain some of that "magic", but also i know to deep dive
| requires an investment i cannot shortcut.
|
| the new generation of devs are already playing with things few
| dinosaurs will get to experience fully, having sunk decades into
| the systems built and afraid to let it go. some of that is good
| (to lean on experience) and some of it holding us back.
| franze wrote:
| I'm 47 and excited to live in a time of the moat important
| innovation since the printing press.
| My_Name wrote:
| The irony is that you could still code the way you always did,
| where you control every pixel. Nothing is stopping you.
|
| But you would not be able to make anything anywhere near as
| complex as you can with modern tools.
| davidw wrote:
| 50 myself, and started coding with a Commodore 64, but only
| really picked it up seriously with the advent of open source
| software, and that feeling of being able to dig around any
| component of the system I wanted to was exhilarating.
|
| I think that's one of the biggest things that gives me pause
| about AI: the fact that, if they prove to be a big productivity
| boost, you're beholden to huge corporations, and not just for a
| one-time purchase, but on an ongoing basis.
|
| Maybe the open source models will improve, but if keeps being
| driven by raw compute power and big numbers, it seems to tilt
| things very much in favor of those with lots and lots of capital
| to deploy.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Starting code when I was 14, sold my first bit of code at 17,
| which was written in 6502 assembler.
|
| 40+ years later, been through many BASICs, C, C++ (CFront on
| onwards) and now NodeJS, and I still love writing code.
|
| Tinkering with RPi, getting used to having a coding assistant,
| looking forward to having some time to work on other fun projects
| and getting back into C++ sooooon.
|
| What's not to love?
| alexpotato wrote:
| At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with
| building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing
| Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running
| "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance
| message boards.
|
| At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl
| so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull
| down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that
| project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML,
| parsing and regexes.
|
| Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care
| about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never
| think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the
| speed of modern automation tools.
|
| Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I
| temper that with the above story that we will probably love what
| comes next too (eventually).
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm 60, started with a Tandy Model I in junior high, learned 6809
| assembly for my Color Computer, loved the fact we could put
| certain values in particular memory positions and change the
| video mode and put pixels to the screen. It's been decades of
| losing that level of control, but for me coding is the fun part.
| I've never lost that spark of enjoyment and really obsession I
| felt early on. I enjoy the supposedly boring job of writing SQL
| and C with embedded SQL and working with business concepts to
| produce solutions. Coding is the fun part for me, even now.
|
| I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get
| myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and
| because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn
| new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech
| behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want
| it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up
| as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.
| mosburger wrote:
| Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could
| have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a
| year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of
| what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact
| I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's...
| this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.
|
| And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing,
| but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my
| Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards
| with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer
| Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed
| so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I
| guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that
| first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself
| to press on.
| spenrose wrote:
| "... when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"
|
| Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that
| a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, etc. can provide
| empathy for and insight into your experience.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I don't know what these people from our now traditional daily
| lamentation session are coding where Claude can do all the work
| for them just with a few prompts and minimal reviews.
|
| Claude is a godsend to me, but fuck, it is sometimes dumb as
| door, loves to create regressions, is a fucking terrible
| designer. Small, tiny changes? Those are actually the worse, it
| is easy for claude, on the first setback, decides to burn the
| whole world and start from zero again. Not to mention when it
| gets stuck in an eternal loop where it increasingly degenerates
| the code.
|
| If I care about what I deliver, I have to actively participate in
| coding.
| sweetheart wrote:
| > I started programming when I was seven because a machine did
| exactly what I told it to
|
| What a poetic ending. So beautiful! And true, in my experience.
| pixelsort wrote:
| I was 7 in 1987, learned LOGO and C64 BASIC that year, and I
| relate to this article as well.
|
| It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that
| software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity.
| Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications
| well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the
| atrophy of forgetting than anyone.
|
| But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish.
| The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted
| computers to be nothing more than an appliance.
|
| The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the
| Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded
| execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of
| computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.
|
| From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one
| that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.
|
| It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to
| know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler
| after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting
| back.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of
| computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.
|
| it's kind of strange to think about but i guess now there's a
| new incentive to do something truly new and innovative. The
| llms won't be able to do it for you.
| pixelsort wrote:
| My goal isn't to make LLM-assistance impossible; it will
| still be possible. In fact, GPT2-level inference is one of
| launch demos I have planned if I can finish this cursed self-
| hosting run.
|
| My goal is to make training (especially self-training)
| impossible; while making inference deterministic by design
| and highly interpretable.
|
| The idea is to build a sanctuary substrate where humans are
| the only beneficiaries of all possible technical
| advancements.
| tavavex wrote:
| This proposal feels really vague to me, I don't really
| understand what this actually does. Can you explain more? What
| exactly is a computer with permanence? What is software that
| forces a user to treat the computer it runs on "as an
| appliance"? In what ways is this different from any general-
| purpose computer, and what's the reason why a user would pick
| this over something standard?
| pixelsort wrote:
| Re: Permanence
|
| I mean "permanence" in the same vague senses that I think the
| OP was hinting upon. A belief that regardless of change, the
| primitives remain. This is about having total confidence that
| abstractions haven't removed you the light-cone of
| comprehension.
|
| Re: Appliance
|
| I believe turing-completeness is over-powered, and the reason
| that AGI/ASI is a threat at all. My hypothesis is that we can
| build a machine that delivers most of the same experiences as
| existing software can. By constraint, some tasks would
| impossible and others just too hard to scale. By analogy,
| even a Swiss-army knife is like an appliance in that it only
| has a limited number of potential uses.
|
| Re: Users
|
| The machine I'm proposing is basically just eBPF for rich
| applications. It will have relevance for medical, aviation,
| and AI research. I don't suppose that end-users won't be
| looking for it until the bad times really start ramping up.
| But, I suppose we'll need to port Doom over to it before we
| can know for sure.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Abstractions can take away but many add tremendous value.
|
| For example, the author has coded for their entire career on
| silicon-based CPUs but never had to deal with the shittiness of
| wire-wrapped memory, where a bit-flip might happen in one place
| because of a manufacturing defect and good luck tracking that
| down. Ever since lithography and CPU packaging, the CPU is
| protected from the elements and its thermal limits are well known
| and computed ahead of time and those limits baked into thermal
| management so it doesn't melt but still goes as fast as we
| understand to be possible for its size, and we make billions of
| these every day and have done for over 50 years.
|
| Moving up the stack you can move your mouse "just so" and click,
| no need to bit-twiddle the USB port (and we can talk about USB
| negotiation or many other things that happen on the way) and your
| click gets translated into an action and you can do this hundreds
| of times a day without disturbing your flow.
|
| Or javascript jit compilation, where the js engine watches code
| run and emits faster versions of it that make assumptions about
| types of variables - with escape hatches if the code stops
| behaving predictably so you don't get confusing bugs that only
| happen if the browser jitted some code. Python has something
| similar. Thanks to these jit engines you can write ergonomic code
| that in the typical scenario is fast enough for your users and
| gets faster with each new language release, with no code changes.
|
| Lets talk about the decades of research that went into
| autoregressive transformer models, instruction tuning, and RLHF,
| and then chat harnesses. Type to a model and get a response back,
| because behind the scenes your message is prefixed with "User: ",
| triggering latent capabilities in the model to hold its end of a
| conversation. Scale that up and call it a "low key research
| preview" and you have ChatGPT. Wildly simple idea, massive
| implications.
|
| These abstractions take you further from the machine and yet
| despite that they were adopted en masse. You have to account for
| the ruthless competition out there - each one would've been
| eliminated if they hadn't proven to be worth something.
|
| You'll never understand the whole machine so just work at the
| level you're comfortable with and peer behind the curtain if and
| when you need (eg. when optimizing or debugging).
|
| Or to take a moment to marvel.
| codr7 wrote:
| It's not like it's changing by itself, you can always opt out of
| the slop race and scratch your itches instead.
|
| https://gitlab.com/codr7/rem
| toss1 wrote:
| >>The machines I fell in love with became instruments of
| surveillance and extraction.
|
| Surveillance and Extraction
|
| "We were promised flying cars", and what we got was "investors"
| running the industry off the cliff into cheap ways to extract
| money from people instead of real innovation.
| kwar13 wrote:
| I am younger than the author but damn this somehow hit me hard. I
| do remember growing up as a kid with a 486...
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| There's 3-4 of these posts a day - why don't people spend more
| time hand-building things for fun in their free time? That's what
| led a lot of us to this career path to start with. I have a solid
| mix of hand-code and AI-assisted projects in my free time.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I too have felt these feelings (though I'm much younger than the
| author). I think as I've grown older I have to remind myself
|
| 1. I shouldn't be so tied to what other people think of me
| (craftsman, programmer, low level developer)
|
| 2. I shouldn't measure my satisfaction by comparing my work to
| others'. Quality still matters especially in shared systems, but
| my responsibility is to the standards I choose to hold, not to
| whether others meet them. Plus there are still community of
| people that still care about this (handmade network, openbsd
| devs, languages like Odin) that I can be part of it I want to
|
| 3. If my values are not being met either in my work or personal
| life I need to take ownership of that myself. The magic is still
| there, I just have to go looking for it
| Zaskoda wrote:
| I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All
| of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels
| somewhere between and high and low level language, not as
| abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above
| writing assembly.
|
| A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM
| was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like
| Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has
| distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who
| just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became
| increasingly toxic.
|
| It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the
| pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet
| feeling.
| zzzeek wrote:
| I'm 57 and wrote my first line of BASIC in 1980, so while I can
| still chime in on this specific demographic I feel that I ought
| to. So im like this guy, but like a lot of other people in my
| specific demographic we aren't writing these long melancholy blog
| posts about AI because it's not that big of a deal. As an OSS
| maintainer most of my work is a lot of boring slog adding
| features to libraries to suit new features in upstream
| dependencies, nitpicky things people point out, new docs, tons of
| tedium. Claude helps a ton with all of that. no way is Claude
| doing the real architectural puzzle stuff, that's still fully on
| me! I can just use Claude to help implement it. It's like the
| ultimate junior programmer assistant. It's certainly a new,
| different and unique experience in one's programming career but
| it really feels like another tool, like an autocomplete or code
| refactoring tool that is just a lot better, with similar caveats.
| I mean in my career, I've had to battle the whole time people who
| don't "get" source code control (starting with me), who don't
| "get" IDEs (starting with me), people who dont "get" distributed
| version control (same), people who don't "get" ORMs (oh yes, same
| for me though this one I took much more dramatic steps to
| appreciate them), people who don't "get" code formatters, now
| we're battling people who don't "get" LLMs used for coding, in
| that sense the whole thing doesnt feel like that novel of a
| situation.
|
| it's the LLMs that are spitting out fake photos and videos and
| generating lots of shitty graphics for local businesses, that's
| where I'm still wielding a pitchfork...
| sowbug wrote:
| Did hardware engineers back in the 1970s-80s* think that software
| took the joy out of their craft? What do those engineers now
| think in retrospect?
|
| *I'm picking that era because it seems to be when most electronic
| machines' business logic moved from hardware to software.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I have given the topic some thoughts. I concluded that the ONLY
| way for ordinary people (non-genius, IQ <= 120) to be really
| good, be really close to the genius, is to sit down, condensate
| the past 40 or so year's tech history of three topics (Comp-Arch,
| OS and Compiler) into a 4-5 years of self-education.
|
| Such education is COMPLETELY different from the one they offered
| in school, but closer to those offered in premium schools
| (MIT/Berkeley). Basically, I'd call it "Software engineering
| archaeology". Students are supposed to take on ancient software,
| compile them, and figure out how to add new features.
|
| For example, for the OS kernel branch:
|
| - Course 0: MIT xv6 lab, then figure out which subsystem you are
| interested in (fs? scheduler? drivers?)
|
| - Course 0.5: System programming for modern Linux and NT, mostly
| to get familiar with user space development and syscalls
|
| - Course 1: Build Linux 0.95, run all of your toolchains in a
| docker container. Move it to 64-bit. Say you are interested in fs
| -- figure out the VFS code and write a couple of fs for it. Linux
| 0.95 only has Minix fs so there are a lot of simpler options to
| choose from.
|
| - Course 2: Maybe build a modern Linux, like 5.9, and then do the
| same thing. This time the student is supposed to implement a much
| more sophiscated fs, maybe something from the SunOS or WinNT that
| was not there.
|
| - Course 3 & 4: Do the same thing with leaked NT 3.5 and NT 4.0
| kernel. It's just for personal use so I wouldn't worry about the
| lawyers.
|
| For reading, there are a lot of books about Linux kernels and NT
| kernels.
| karolist wrote:
| Was this text run through LLM before posting? I recognize that
| writing style honestly; or did we simply speak to machines enough
| to now speak like machines?
| solarparade wrote:
| Yes. This is absolutely chatgpt-speak. I see it everywhere now.
| It's inescapable. At least this appears to be largely human
| authored and have some substance, which is generally not the
| case when I see these LLM-isms.
| aldousd666 wrote:
| I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do
| feel a lot of this.
| small_model wrote:
| Same as assembly programmers felt when C came along I guess
| randcraw wrote:
| I don't think so. A decent C programmer could pretty much
| imagine how each line of C was translated into assembly, and
| with certainty, how every byte of data moved through the
| machine. That's been lost with the rise of higher-level
| languages, interpreters, their pseudocode, and the explosion of
| libraries and especially, the rise of cut-and-paste coding.
| IMO, 90% of today's developers have never thought about how
| their code connects to the metal. Starting with CS101 in Java,
| they've always lived entirely within an abstract level of
| source code. Coding with AI just abstracts that world a couple
| steps higher, not unlike the way that templates in 4GL
| languages attempted but failed to achieve, but of course, the
| abstraction has climbed far beyond that level now. Software
| craftsmanship has indeed left the building; only the product
| matters now.
| metalrain wrote:
| I think it's the loss of control.
|
| Even if you can achieve awesome things with LLMs you give up the
| control over tiny details, it's just faster to generate and
| regenerate until it fits the spec.
|
| But you never quite know how long it takes or how much you have
| to shave that square peg.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"The abstraction tower
|
| Here's the part that makes me laugh, darkly.
|
| I saw someone on LinkedIn recently -- early twenties, a few years
| into their career -- lamenting that with AI they "didn't really
| know what was going on anymore." And I thought: mate, you were
| already so far up the abstraction chain you didn't even realise
| you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
|
| They're writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs
| in a V8 engine written in C++ that's making system calls to an OS
| kernel that's scheduling threads across cores they've never
| thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with
| caching layers they couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400
| packages they've never read a line of.
|
| But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what's happening.
|
| The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn't notice
| because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend
| we still understood the whole stack.
|
| AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to
| maintain."
|
| Absolutely brilliant writing!
|
| Heck -- absolutely brilliant _communicating_! (Which is really
| what great writing is all about!)
|
| You definitely _get it_!
|
| Some other people here on HN do too, yours truly included in that
| bunch...
|
| Anyway, stellar writing!
|
| Related:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction
|
| https://ecommons.cornell.edu/entities/publication/3e2850f6-c...
| kwar13 wrote:
| > They're writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that
| runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that's making system calls to
| an OS kernel that's scheduling threads across cores they've never
| thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with
| caching layers they couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400
| packages they've never read a line of.
|
| yup.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I found it a very weird section of the article, undoing most of
| what had been written before.
|
| Whether it's ROM programming, writing assembly, or C, or Rust,
| or JS-with-stdlib, at no point was anyone "teetering". Stacks
| have always existed, and whether your stack was small because
| it just had not much under it, or huge because it's 2026,
| they've by and large always been stable. That's the point of a
| stack: you can trust the parts below the layer you're working
| on, and the problems you solve are still real problems that for
| the most part don't require knowing the lower parts of the
| stack but are still real problem sin programming.
|
| It's like making fun of people who drive a company rental
| because they don't want to own one themselves, and can't name
| any part of their engine: you're just being an ass.
|
| Even the good TS programmers understand classic programming
| concepts like using the right data structures, paying attention
| to runtime complexity, and knowing when to go "maybe it's the
| step below me". They can work out difficult problems just fine.
|
| You were writing an article about how fundamentally different
| AI has made things: why dunk on people who got into programming
| more recently than you and started higher on the ladder of
| abstraction, mocking them for "you were already about to fall".
| No, they weren't. They understood the core concepts just fine,
| and we collectively gave them stacks that they could trust. And
| they would have transitioned to "the next thing" _just like you
| 've been doing_.
|
| And then "AI" showed up, and it doesn't care about silly things
| like "how high up the ladder you are", it just went "your
| skills about how to schedule, structure, plan, describe, and
| manage projects is the thing that matters. Those other skills
| are nice to haves, and will make you better at being a PM, but
| they're not the main focus anymore". It doesn't matter where on
| the ladder you are, that affects everyone.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| This is quite the lament. Very well written.
|
| I'm about ten years ahead of the author. I felt this a long time
| before AI arrived. I went from solving problems for people to
| everything I tried to ending up in an endless grind of yak-
| shaving.
|
| I worked my way through it, though. It made me both give up
| programming, at least in the commercial sense, and appreciate the
| journey he and I have gone through. It's truly an amazing time to
| be alive.
|
| Now, however, I'm feeling sucked back into the vortex. I'm
| excited about solving problems in a way I haven't been in a long
| time. I was just telling somebody that I spent 4-6 hours last
| night watching Claude code. I watched TV. I scratched my butt. I
| played HexaCrush. All the time it was just chugging along,
| solving a problem in code that I have wanted to solve for a
| decade or more. I told him that it wasn't watching the code go
| by. That would be too easy to do. It was paying attention to what
| Claude was doing and _feeling that pain_. OMG, I would see it hit
| a wall, I would recognize the wall, and then it'd just keep
| chugging along until it fixed it. It was the kind of thing that
| didn't have damned thing to do with the problem but would have
| held me up for hours. Instead, I watched Pitt with my wife. Every
| now I then I'd see a prompt, pop up, and
| guide/direct/orchestrate/consult/? with Claude.
|
| It ain't coding. But, frankly, coding ain't coding. It hasn't
| been in a long, long time.
|
| If a lot of your job seems like senseless bullshit, I'm sad to
| say you're on the way out. If it doesn't, stick around.
|
| I view AI as an extinction level threat. That hasn't changed,
| mainly because of how humans are using it. It has nothing to do
| with the tech. But I'm a bit perplexed now as to what to do with
| my new-found superpowers. I feel like that kid on the first
| Spiderman movie. The world is amazing. I've got half-a-dozen
| projects I'm doing right now. I'm publishing my own daily
| newspaper, just for me to read, and dang if it's not pretty good!
| No matter how this plays out, it is truly an amazing time to be
| alive, and old codgers like us have had a hella ride.
| dave_sid wrote:
| Great post. Good to see someone posting something positive for a
| change about the shift in development.
| aeuropean12 wrote:
| Well yes it has changed. But look at everything that can be
| accomplished with these abstractions/libraries/frameworks that
| exist.
|
| Why reinvent the wheel.
|
| Yes, there might be less room for the Wild Wild West approach, as
| mentioned in the article: But that is the structure of compounded
| knowledge/tooling/code available to developers/others to create
| more enriched software, in the sense that it runs on what is
| available now and provides value in today's age of computing.
|
| I also had a 486DX2-66. And I recall coding in Assembly, Pascal,
| C etc.
|
| I do not miss it. These days I can create experiences that reach
| so many more people (a matured Interneet with realtime
| possibilities - to simplify) and with so much more potential for
| Good. Good in the sense of usefulness for users, good in the
| sense of making money (yeah, that aspect still exists).
|
| I do understand your sentiment and the despairing tone. There
| have been times when I was struck by the same.
|
| But I do not miss 1995 and struggling with a low-level formatted
| HD and Assembly that screwed up my floppy disks, or the worms
| that reached my box, or the awful web sites in terms of UX that
| were around, or pulling coaxial cables around for LAN parties.
|
| It's just a different world now. But I get what you are saying,
| and respect it. Stay optimistic. :)
| jdlyga wrote:
| It's turned from SimCity into SimSimCity. It's like playing a
| simulation where you manage a person who's playing SimCity.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a
| Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the
| same time as the OP even if I'm a few years older.
|
| Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also:
|
| This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get
| paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or
| craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The
| tooling will move on and become more specialised and expensive.
| Like owning Japanese woodworking tools.
|
| But software construction as a human-based economic activity is
| clearly about to slam hard into a singularity, and many of us who
| rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are
| going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few early
| adopters will get to stay on and sip their artesanal coffee and
| "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most
| of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and
| that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward.
| People like me, perhaps, or you.
|
| Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway,
| will go off and do other things. Many won't have that
| opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career
| unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not
| pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted
| by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to
| some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.
| anarticle wrote:
| I've written sse2 optimized C, web apps, and probably everything
| in between (hw, datasci, etl, devops).
|
| I like coding with AI both vibe and assisted, since as soon as
| the question enters my head I can create a prototype or a test or
| a xyz to verify my thoughts. The whole time I'm writing in my
| notebook or whiteboard or any other thing I would have gotten up
| to. This is enabling tech, the trouble for me is there is a small
| thread that leads out of the room into the pockets of billion
| dollar companies.
|
| It is no longer you vs the machine.
|
| I have spent tons of time debugging weird undocumented hardware
| with throwaway code, or sat in a debugger doing hex math.
|
| I think one wire that is crossed right now in this world is that
| computing is more corporate than ever, with what seems like ever
| growing platforms and wealth extraction at scale. Don't let them
| get you down, host your own shit and ignore them. YES IT WILL
| COST MORE -> YOUR FREEDOM HAS A PRICE.
|
| Another observation is that people that got into the game for
| pure money are big mad right now. I didn't make money in the 00s,
| I did in the end of the 10s, and we're back at job desolation. In
| my groups, the most annoyed are code boot campers who have faked
| it until they made it and have just managed to survive this cycle
| with javascript.
|
| Cycles come and go, the tech changes, but problem solving is
| always there.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| > Cheaper. Faster. But hollowed out.
|
| Given the bazillions poured into it I have yet to see this proven
| to be cheaper.
| bmitc wrote:
| Humans have a special knack for taking the humanity out of
| basically anything. It's a bizarre pattern.
| harel wrote:
| I've had the same journey, same age markers. The sentiment is the
| same, but at the same time this new world affords me super powers
| I'm currently drunk on. When that drunkenness becomes a hangover
| I hope I won't be disappointed.
| js-j wrote:
| I can share a similar experience: I began to learn programming
| during my first school years, on an Apple II clone with Logo, a
| fancy language with turtle graphics as a most distinctive
| feature. We used to boot Logo off 5.25" floppy disks...
| j45 wrote:
| Programming changed all along.
|
| New concepts came out all along.
|
| They became standardized all along and came down market to
| smaller and smaller projects.
|
| Source control.
|
| Cloud.
|
| Agile/Scrum.
|
| Code completion IDEs.
|
| Higher Level languages.
|
| These were not LLMs but did represent a shift that had to be kept
| up with.
|
| LLMs are no different, just a bigger jump.
|
| There is just as much opportunity here.
|
| Software development and software developers are not going away.
|
| More software that never could be built will now be built.
|
| For the forseeable future there will always be software that
| needs to be overseen by a human.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _They're writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that
| runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that's making system calls to
| an OS kernel that's scheduling threads across cores they've never
| thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with
| caching layers they couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400
| packages they've never read a line of.
|
| But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what's happening._
|
| I feel this is conflating different things. Yes, the abstraction
| tower was massive already before, but at least the abstractions
| were mostly well-defined and understandable through interfaces:
| even if you don't understand the intricacies of your storage
| device, driver and kernel, you can usually get a quite reliable
| and predictable mental representation how files work. Same goes
| for network protocols, higher-level programming languages or the
| web platform.
|
| Sure, there are edge cases where the abstraction breaks down and
| you have to get into the lower levels, but those situations are
| the exception, not the norm.
|
| With AI, there is no clearly defined interface, and no one really
| knows what (precise) input a given output will produce. Or maybe
| to put it better, the interface is human language and your mental
| representation is the one you have talking to a human - which is
| _far_ more vague than previous technical abstractions.
|
| On the bright side, at least we (still) have the intermediate
| layer of generated code to reason about, which offsets the
| unpredictability a bit.
| enricotr wrote:
| The deepest thing I read from HN in months. Respect.
| hamdouni wrote:
| Total resonance with this part :
|
| "They're writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs
| in a V8 engine written in C++ that's making system calls to an OS
| kernel that's scheduling threads across cores they've never
| thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with
| caching layers they couldn't diagram, all while npm pulls in 400
| packages they've never read a line of."
| themafia wrote:
| > I've had that experience. And losing it -- even acknowledging
| that it was lost
|
| What are you talking about? You don't know how 99% of the systems
| in your own body work yet they don't confront you similarly. As
| if this "knowledge" is a switch that can be on or off.
|
| > I gave 42 years to this thing, and the thing changed into
| something I'm not sure I recognise anymore.
|
| Stop doing it for a paycheck. You'll get your brain back.
| varispeed wrote:
| I was happy riding my horse when this dude invented a car.
| sebnukem2 wrote:
| Oh boy this hits home.
|
| At this point I entered surviving mode, and curious to see where
| we will be 6 months, 2 years from now. I am pessimistic.
|
| I want to tinker with my beloved Z80 again.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Programming is not art for me. I do not find it useful to gold
| plate solutions. I prefer getting the job done, sometimes by any
| means necessary for "the vehicle" to continue running.
|
| AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which
| allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates
| errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code.
|
| I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or documentation assist,
| for languages I do not use daily. These solutions I rarely use
| 1:1, but if I had to go through readme's and readthedocs, it
| would take me a lot longer.
|
| Would there be more elegant solutions? often - yes. Does it
| really matter? For me - not.
| tonymet wrote:
| Perhaps detractors just gave up and didn't bother improving,
| but I'm able to prompt the AI to write excellent code. And it's
| very easy to correct when it's gone awry . This idea that all
| AI code is bad is just the ego talking.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'm yet to see perfect code from a human or ai. Most of the
| people I work with that want everything to be in a perfect
| state typically get way less done. To your point, sometimes we
| are just mechanics and that's okay.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Wow this hits home - I just turned 51 and I also started coding
| at age 7, writing BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.
|
| I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was
| buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that
| you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the
| idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even
| remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to
| make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what
| programming was.
|
| When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game.
| We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole
| Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers
| after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it -
| maybe just the first few "rooms".
|
| Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.
| suprstarrd wrote:
| This is at least partially AI-written, by the way
| pfdietz wrote:
| I retired a few years ago and it's very clear that was a good
| thing.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm 61 (retired when I was 57).
|
| I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and
| published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I
| finished up college, my _professional career_ (in the traditional
| sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to
| the Bay Area.
|
| Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as
| time went on.
|
| I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the
| growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the
| importance of software in general as it became more critical to
| people's lives.
|
| Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a
| rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement
| yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop
| nonetheless did just that--leaning on the Mac simply for a final
| call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the
| screen.)
|
| You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple
| cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess
| I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If
| anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief--someone
| else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a
| beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)
|
| But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our
| lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well.
| Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way
| engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it
| that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture
| of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us--
| we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what
| the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
|
| Agile development, unit tests, code reviews... all these weird
| things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse,
| they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense
| of control... or some metric for progress.
|
| "What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask.
| "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95%
| coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.
|
| I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still
| code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer
| days around this house.
|
| Yee haw!
| bentt wrote:
| Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they
| feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields.
| These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own
| usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce
| food.
|
| If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no
| boss. You're better equipped to start your own farm than you
| think.
| jamwil wrote:
| Many of them might have been troubled by the fact that they
| couldn't afford a tractor. Many small farms became a few big
| ones, and so it will go in software.
| bentt wrote:
| Didn't that already happen in software? Seems like network
| effects got ahead of this.
| manjuc wrote:
| Same, been a product designer for years, still love design deep
| down but the essence is somehow not there anymore. reading this
| hit different. It's refreshing to see someone put it into words
| instead of the usual "stuff".
|
| It lines up a lot with what I've been thinking as well and this
| is what I wrote today on my blog.
| https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/why-ai-challenges-u...
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I have been around for a similar amount of time. Another change I
| have seen over the years is the shift from programming being an
| exercise in creative excellence at work to being a white-collar
| ditch-digging job.
| davebranton wrote:
| The deep, profound, cruel irony of this post is that it was
| written by AI.
|
| Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for
| you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and
| safety, the I believe it will not.
| hmaxwell wrote:
| You can still write code yourself. Just like you can still walk
| to work, you do not need to use a car.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Having been in this game about 10 years longer I can understand
| how he feels. I distinctly remember when I realized that C
| compilers for the ARM produced better assembly than I could code
| by hand. Bitter sweet but the code being written became larger
| and more complex because of it.
|
| Modern coding has become more complex than I would have ever
| thought possible. The number of technologies an individual would
| have to master to actually be a expert "full stack" coder is
| ludicrous. It is virtually impossible for an individual to
| prototype a complex Web based app by themselves. I think AI will
| lower that barrier.
|
| In return we will get a lot more software - probably of dubious
| quality in many cases - as people with "ideas" but little
| knowledge start making apps. Not a totally bad thing but no
| utopia either. I also think it will likely reduce the amount of
| open source software. Content producers are already hoarding info
| to prevent AI bots from scraping it. I see no reason to believe
| this will not extend to code as more programmers find themselves
| in a situation more akin to musicians than engineers.
| epaga wrote:
| I gave up after the third "It's not X, it's Y" in like two
| paragraphs. Is nobody else allergic to that AI voice? Isn't the
| author?
|
| So depressing this is the current state of blogging. Can't wait
| for this phase to be over.
| r_lee wrote:
| was this actually generated with Claude/GPT?
|
| I didn't really notice it at first but on a second read it's
| full of this crap?
| sebringj wrote:
| idk, i'm loving the newness of all of it, I feel more empowered
| than ever before, like it's my time. Before startups would take
| like a year to get going, now it's like a month or so. It's
| exciting and scary, we have no idea where it's going. Not boring
| at all. I was getting bored as shit and bam, now i can dream up
| shit quick and have it validated to, ya i figured that out with
| an MCP so ya this is my jam. Program MCPs and speed it up!!!!!!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So tired of this sort of complaint (and I'm 62).
|
| The computing the author enjoyed/enjoys is still out there, they
| are just looking for it in all the wrong places. Forget about
| (typical) web development (with its front and backend stacks).
| Forget about windows and macOS, and probably even mobile (though
| maybe not).
|
| Hobby projects. C++/Rust/C/Go/some-current-Lisp. Maybe even Zig!
| Unix/Linux. Some sort of hardware interaction. GPL, so you can
| share and participate in a world of software created by people a
| lot more like you and a lot less like Gates and Jobs and
| Zuckerberg and ...
|
| Sure, corporate programming generally tends to suck, but it
| always did. You can still easily do what you always loved, but
| probably not as a job.
|
| At 62, as a native desktop C++ app developer doing realtime
| audio, my programming is as engrossing, cool, varied and awesome
| as it has ever been (probably even more so, since the GPL really
| has won in the world I live in). It hasn't been consumed by next-
| new-thing-ism, it hasn't been consumed by walled platforms, it
| hasn't been taken over by massive corporations, and it still very
| much involves Cool Stuff (TM).
|
| Stop whining and start doing stuff you love.
| pzo wrote:
| Sure enjoy your retirement. But for me it's annoying some late
| 50s+ people telling what you just did. Think about people who
| are in their 20s or 30s - they are not even halfway through
| their path to retirement and some maybe even still paying out
| student debt.
|
| > Stop whining and start doing stuff you love.
|
| You have to understand that it's hard to do stuff that you love
| when you have to feed your family and pay mortgage or rent. Not
| everyone can be or want to be entrepreneur.
|
| You are just talking from perspective of someone who already
| paid all debts raised all kids and now enjoying or soon will be
| enjoying retirement - at least meaning you can retire even if
| maybe don't want to.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Retired? I'm not retired and likely won't be for another 8
| years.
|
| > But for me it's annoying some late 50s+ people telling what
| you just did.
|
| The author of TFA is at least 50!
|
| > You are just talking from perspective of someone who
| already paid all debts raised all kids
|
| That part is true. But that was more or less true when I was
| 50, too.
|
| Finally, the article wasn't about the shitty economic world
| that we've created for so many people, it was about how
| programming has changed. Those two are inter-related but they
| are not the same.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| This essay begins by promising not to be a "back in my day"
| piece, but ends up dunking on 20-year-olds who are only a few
| years into their career, as if they have any choice about when
| they were born.
| thom wrote:
| I too get less of a kick out of writing enterprise middleware
| than I did making games as a kid in the 80s. Why did the industry
| do this to me?!
| h4kunamata wrote:
| Late 30s here, I have seen:
|
| * dial-up being replaced by DSL
|
| * CAT being replaced with fiber for companies
|
| * VOIP replacing bulk BPX
|
| * Cloud replacing on-prem to an extent
|
| * Cloud services plague now called SaaS
|
| * License for life being replaced by subscription
|
| * AI driving everything to shit literally
|
| The technology is no longer helping anything, it is actually
| tearing our society apart. Up to 2000s, things were indeed
| evolution, improvements, better life style be it personal or
| professional. Since 2000s, Enshitification started, everything
| gets worse, from services, to workflows, to processes, to
| products, to laws.
|
| Gen-Z does not realize how bad things are, and how we are no
| longer becoming smarter but dumber, kids cannot even read but
| have every single social media account.
|
| If they could spend one day back in early 2000s, the current
| generation would start a civil war in every single city across
| the globe.
| kypro wrote:
| > I started programming when I was seven because a machine did
| exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore
| and ultimately know, and that felt like magic
|
| I'm significantly younger than OP, but this was it for me too.
| I'm autistic and found the world around me confusing growing up.
| Computers were wonderful because they were the only thing that
| really made sense to me.
|
| I was obsessed with computers since I was 5. I started
| programming probably around age 10. Then in my early teens I
| started creating Flash applications, writing PHP, Java, etc...
|
| When I look back on my early career now it was almost magical.
| This in the mid to late 00s (late to some I know), but this was
| before the era of package managers, before resources like
| Stackoverflow, before modern IDEs. You had some fairly basic
| frameworks to work with, but that was really about it. Everything
| else had to be done fully by hand.
|
| This was also before agile was really a thing too. The places I
| worked at the time didn't have stand-ups or retrospectives. There
| were no product managers.
|
| It was also before the iPhone and the mass adoption of the
| internet.
|
| Back then no one went into software engineering as a profession.
| It was just some thing weird computer kids did, and sometimes
| businesses would pay us to build them things. Everyone who coded
| back then I got along with great, now everyone is so normal it's
| hard for me to relate with me. The industry today is also so
| money focused.
|
| The thing and bothers me the most though is that computers
| increasingly act like humans that I need to talk to to get things
| done, and if that wasn't bad enough I also have to talk with
| people constantly.
|
| Even the stuff I build sucks. All the useful stuff has been build
| so in the last decade or so stuff I've built feels increasingly
| detached from reality. When I started I felt like I was solving
| real practical problems for companies, now I'm building chatbots
| and internal dashboards. It's all bollocks.
|
| There was a post recently about builders vs coders (I can't
| remember exactly). But I'm definitely a coder. I miss coding.
| There was something rewarding about pouring hours into a HTML
| design, getting things pixel perfect. Sometimes it felt
| laborious, but that was part of the craft. Claude Code does a
| great job and it does it 50x faster than I could, but it doesn't
| give me the same satisfaction.
|
| I do hope this is my last job in tech. Unfortunately I'm not old
| enough to retire, but I think I need to find something better
| suited to my programatic way of thinking. I quite like the idea
| of doing construction or some other manual labour job. Seems like
| they're still building things by hand and don't have so many
| stupid meetings all the time.
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