[HN Gopher] Everything Changes, and Nothing Changes
___________________________________________________________________
Everything Changes, and Nothing Changes
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 28 points
Date : 2026-02-28 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (btao.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (btao.org)
| jongjong wrote:
| I self-taught myself coding at a young age but I haven't had any
| identity crisis due to AI. I always saw myself as a software
| architect, not a coder.
|
| When I was a junior learning to code, I would feel proud of
| myself because I could remember 100 lines of Windows API code
| needed to create a new window... But it's been decades since I
| understood that the real value is not in the code. It's in the
| architecture. As the author alludes to; the intuition behind the
| code is what counts.
|
| I think highly competent engineers are often underappreciated
| because the really clever stuff they do doesn't appear clever at
| all; it looks deceptively simple. I think what people don't
| understand is that maintaining simplicity whilst requirements are
| becoming more complex, is very difficult.
| fuzzzerd wrote:
| That maybe true, value is producing simple solutions as
| requirements get complex, but will companies realize and value
| this?
| dventimi wrote:
| So...software engineers become product managers? All of us?
| That's going to be an awful lot of product managers.
| magpi3 wrote:
| Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think
| bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were
| a 10x (or whatever) programmer?
| dventimi wrote:
| Sure. I'm with you. I'm just puzzled by the article.
| nine_k wrote:
| More like architects, in the civil engineering sense. Even if
| you don't pour concrete or drive nails yourself, you have to
| have a lot of technical understanding, including the low level,
| to be able to design a building competently. And, very
| certainly, you have to be able to inspect how the nails are
| driven and how the bricks are laid, whether your contractors
| are humans or robots.
| dventimi wrote:
| I create a lot of applications with AI. I don't inspect any
| of the cod.
| nine_k wrote:
| Maybe you should, something fishy may be going on in it.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > And, very certainly, you have to be able to inspect how the
| nails are driven and how the bricks are laid, whether your
| contractors are humans or robots.
|
| As someone coming from non-software engineering (mechanical),
| I always believed that good engineer is capable, and
| sometimes does these things himself. This guarantees he
| actually understands his domain in all aspects.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| There's also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of
| meat, but it can only be useful as it's harnessed properly with a
| nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back
| eventually. Not as an accelerator of what's already been done in
| the Industry, but as the actual revolution.
|
| And don't be naive to think that there aren't sophisticated
| symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of
| the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
| xg15 wrote:
| As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how
| quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program
| analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had
| before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or
| IntelliJ.
|
| I think those should be very useful, _especially_ with AI:
| Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of
| tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most
| of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE
| 's AST/symbol database?
|
| Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight
| what the AI did.
|
| Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI
| agents, and nothing else.
| tao_oat wrote:
| This is an interesting idea! I searched around and it looks
| like there's [ast-grep](https://ast-grep.github.io/), an AST-
| aware CLI that can search and refactor code -- and you can
| expose it to your AI agent using a skill
| (https://github.com/ast-grep/agent-skill).
|
| Not exactly symbolic AI, but pretty cool nonetheless.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _especially with AI_
|
| Yeah, the middle path sounds promising.
|
| "Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script
| to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As
| you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.
|
| This isn't exactly the same application of a "code mode" as
| before, but in my view it's a broad philosophy. AI for
| building machines, instead of doing the work directly. It
| also allows for easier updates/retries too.
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089505
| magpi3 wrote:
| But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear.
| I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a
| micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI
| is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What
| happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are
| we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations
| can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is
| depressing to think about.
|
| For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will
| always be relevant and necessary.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's unclear whether the price increases we saw for ride
| sharing (for example) will come to AI. There's plenty of
| competition and not much in the way of lock-in. And by the time
| the bubble is over, the underlying costs may have dropped due
| to improved algorithms.
|
| It might be more like personal computing in the 80's, when
| Moore's law resulted in both more usage and cheaper prices as
| the tech improved.
| brendanyounger wrote:
| I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I have
| no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.
|
| I take comfort in re-reading much of the 70's and 80's literature
| which focuses the possibilities of user experience. We still
| haven't fully explored all the dreams of half a century ago.
|
| If AI forces the business case that "code is cheap", I can only
| hope we re-double our efforts at creating new interfaces and
| capabilities for computer systems. The Meta glasses, Apple
| Vision, and the like are small steps in this direction.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Interesting! Could you give some examples of these unexplored
| fields/applications ?
| kgeist wrote:
| >I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I
| have no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.
|
| For me, it's the other way around: I'm glad that AI can write
| code for me. A few months ago, I moved from an engineering role
| to a researcher role exactly because I got tired of writing
| code. Probably 95% of code/features (at least the kind you get
| paid for) is just boring CRUD stuff where you move bytes from
| one place to another and then show them in the UI (plus some
| access rules and a few invariants here and there).
|
| All of it was actually interesting in the first couple of
| years. But when you do it over and over again for 20 years in a
| row... Yeah. Sometimes there are interesting projects from time
| to time, but usually it's the same stuff you've done countless
| times. Deja vu.
|
| In my current researcher role, my task is to explore novel
| ideas, productize research papers, etc., and LLMs allow me to
| quickly write prototypes and demos, play with various ideas,
| without having to spend a lot of time manually moving bytes
| from one place to another. It's fun again.
| snicky wrote:
| I'm in a similar age and career point and have similar
| feelings about my SE job atm. Can you share more about your
| transition to the researcher role? What field are you in, how
| did you get there, what problems did you encounter, etc.
| blither wrote:
| A lot of this really resonates with me, but, as much as I
| empathize with the Deep Blue analogy I don't fully subscribe to
| it.
|
| Maybe that's just me being naive! Feel like humans have always
| been able to do more with more, not certain why now would be any
| different.
|
| Does not mean the role won't change and evolve! Building the
| airplane while flying is part of the game, and to me is what
| makes this field exciting.
| camgunz wrote:
| I think the thing that drives me nuts is that, while most people
| think the result of programming is a program, I disagree. The
| result of programming is one or more people who have a deep
| understanding of a problem space. Codegen models still require a
| human in the loop; that human has to be a software expert. You
| only become a software expert by writing software.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-28 23:01 UTC)