[HN Gopher] We might all be AI engineers now
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We might all be AI engineers now
Author : sn0wflak3s
Score : 153 points
Date : 2026-03-06 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
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| bitwize wrote:
| The phrase "shape up or ship out" is an apt one I've heard.
| Agentic AI _is_ a core part of software engineering. Either you
| are learning and using these tools, or you 're not a professional
| and don't belong in the field.
| miningape wrote:
| Seems strange, for decades we allowed developers to use what
| made them comfortable, you like notepad? go ahead and use it.
| Don't want an LSP? that's fine disable it.
|
| So long as their productivity was on par with the rest of the
| team there was no issue.
|
| Suddenly, everyone needs to use this new tool (which we haven't
| proven to actually be effective) and if you don't you don't
| belong in the industry.
| bitwize wrote:
| > _So long as their productivity was on par with the rest of
| the team_ there was no issue.
|
| Emphasis added. And anyway, for most software dev in most
| shops it wasn't true; most development takes place in
| whatever IDE the group/organization standardized on for the
| task, to make sure everyone gets proper tooling and to make
| collaboration and information sharing easier. Think of all
| the Java enterprise software developed by legions of drones
| in the 2000s and 2010s. They all used Eclipse, because
| Eclipse is what they were given.
|
| It's only with the emergence of whiny, persnickety Unix devs
| who refused to leave the comforting embrace of their editor
| of choice that shops in the internet/dotcom/startup tradition
| embraced a "use whatever tools you want" philosophy. They had
| uncharacteristically enormous leverage over the tech stack
| being deployed in such businesses and could force employers
| to make that concession. And anyway, what some of them could
| do with vi blew the boss's mind.
|
| It is true that we don't have a whole lot of hard data from
| large organizations that show AI productivity improvements.
| But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Turns
| out, most large organizations just haven't adopted AI in the
| amount and ways that could make a big impact.
|
| But we have enough anecdata from competent developers to
| suggest that the productivity gains are _huge_. So big, AI
| not only lets you do your normal tasks many times faster, it
| puts projects within reach that you would not have
| countenanced before because they were too complex or tedious
| to be worth the payoff.
|
| So no. Refusing to use AI is just pure bloodymindedness at
| this point--like insisting on using a keypunch while everyone
| around you discovers the virtues of CRT terminals and
| timesharing. There were people like this even in the 1970s
| when IBM finally came around and made timesharing available
| in their mainframes. Those people either got up to speed or
| moved on to a different profession. They couldn't keep
| working the way they'd been working because the productivity
| expectations changed with the availability of new technology.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| > It's only with the emergence of whiny, persnickety Unix
| devs who refused to leave the comforting embrace of their
| editor of choice that shops in the internet/dotcom/startup
| tradition embraced a "use whatever tools you want"
| philosophy. They had uncharacteristically enormous leverage
| over the tech stack being deployed in such businesses and
| could force employers to make that concession. And anyway,
| what some of them could do with vi blew the boss's mind.
|
| They had enormous leverage because they were more
| productive then the drones who use whatever tools they are
| handed and lack the curiosity to use anything else. These
| breathless reports of increased productivity are constant,
| but why is there no evidence of that productivity increase
| otherwise? Why hasn't there been a surge of side-project
| video games on Steam? Why is github down so often despite
| Microsoft's commitment to AI?
|
| The AI tools make it easier to do things that were already
| easy, but the minute your code gets interesting these tools
| are an absolute mess.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| What an incredibly stupid, tasteless, reductionist opinion. Go
| log off for a while and reevaluate your life.
| noemit wrote:
| Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a
| screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But
| no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code
| that is better than most engineers can write.
|
| The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an
| already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and
| the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge the
| gap. I am generalizing, but I can see how AI can 10x the work of
| the typical engineer working in Startups in California. Even your
| comment about curiosity highlights this. It's the beginning of an
| even more K-shaped engineering workforce.
|
| Even people who were previously not great engineers, if they are
| curious and always enjoyed the learning part - they are now
| supercharged to learn new ways of building, and they are able to
| try it out, learn from their mistakes at an accelerated pace.
|
| Unfortunately, this group, the curious ones, IMHO is a minority.
| input_sh wrote:
| Quite frankly, if AI can write better code than most of your
| engineers "hundreds of times", then your hiring team is doing
| something terribly wrong.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired".
|
| But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks
| that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't
| know or frankly won't bother to learn.
| input_sh wrote:
| Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is
| quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs
| world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most
| engineers".
|
| In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of
| engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as
| much data as possible and returns the statistically most
| probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than
| roughly 50% of engineers. _Maybe_ you can claim that it 's
| better than 60% of engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel
| engineers tend to not publish their works online for it to
| be used as training data, but for every one of those you
| have a bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a
| living putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done
| using code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself
| immediately and say that it's about 40%.
|
| The same goes for every other output: it's gonna make the
| world's most average article, the most average song in a
| genre and so on. You can nudge it to be slightly better
| than the average with great effort, but no, you absolutely
| cannot make it better than most.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The thing that separates AI Agents from normal
| programmers is that agents don't get bored or tired.
|
| For most engineers the ability might be there, but the
| motivation or willingness to write, for example, 20
| different test cases checking the 3 line bug you just
| fixed is fixed FOR SURE usually isn't there. You add
| maybe 1-2 tests because they're annoying boilerplate crap
| to write and create the PR. CI passes, you added new
| tests, someone will approve it. (Yes, your specific
| company is of course better than this and requires
| rigorous testing, but the vast majority isn't. Most don't
| even add the two tests as long as the issue is fixed.)
|
| An AI Agent will happily and without complaining use
| Red/Green TDD on the issue, create the 20 tests first,
| make sure they fail (as they should), fix the issue and
| then again check that all tests pass. And it'll do it in
| 30 minutes while you do something else.
| rel_ic wrote:
| This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a
| better programmer than the average of his teachers.
|
| IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.
| input_sh wrote:
| The kid can learn and become better over time, while "AI"
| can only be retrained using better training data.
|
| I'm not against using AI by any means, but I know what to
| use it for: for stuff where _I_ can only do a worse than
| half the population because I can 't be bothered to learn
| it properly. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'd
| say I'm definitely better at my niche than 50% of the
| people. There are plenty of other niches where I'm not.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Yeah, but it's been trained on the boring, repetitive
| stuff, and A LOT of code that needs to be written is just
| boring, repetitive stuff.
|
| By leaving the busywork for the drones, this frees up
| time for the mind to solve the interesting and unsolved
| problems.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The AI doesn't know what good or bad code is. It doesn't
| know what surpassing someone means. It's been trained to
| generate text similar to its training data, and that's
| what it does.
|
| If you feed it only good code, we'd expect a better
| result, but currently we're feeding it average code. The
| cost to evaluate code quality for the huge data set is
| too high.
| recursive wrote:
| The training data includes plenty of examples of labelled
| good and bad code. And comparisons between two
| implementations plus trade-offs and costs and benefits. I
| think it absolutely does "know" good code, in the sense
| that it can know anything at all.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There does exist some text making comparisons like that,
| but compared to the raw quantity of totally unlabeled
| code out there, it's tiny.
|
| You can do some basic checks like "does it actually
| compile", but for the most part you'd really need to go
| out and do manual categorization, which would be brutally
| expensive.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Which indicates something unknown. Code quality
| evaluations in training. Do you know if there is any sort
| of code quality evaluation for the training data? I think
| the argument is a little reductive without knowing the
| actual details of the model training input pipeline and
| the stages of generating the output on that same
| dimension, but I don't really have any concrete knowledge
| here either, so your baseline assumption could be right.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it
| is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs
| world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most
| engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what
| percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is
| it consumes as much data as possible and returns the
| statistically most probable answer
|
| Yeah, you come across as someone who thinks that the AI
| simply spits out the average of the code in its training
| data. I don't think that understanding is accurate, to
| say the least.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Maybe you can claim that it 's better than 60% of
| engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel engineers tend to
| not publish their works online for it to be used as
| training data, but for every one of those you have a
| bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a living
| putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done using
| code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself
| immediately and say that it's about 40%._
|
| And there are a bunch of engineers from certain
| _cultures_ who don 't know what they don't know, but
| believe that a massive portfolio of slop is better than
| one or two well-developed projects.
|
| I can only hope that the people training the good coding
| models know to tell AI that these are antipatterns, not
| patterns.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a
| lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of
| mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and
| the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or
| LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static
| analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.
| input_sh wrote:
| And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do
| top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is
| likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting _more_
| stuff online than really good ones.
|
| So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of
| that as its training data and returns the most likely
| answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it
| be better than?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| These people also prefer plastic averaged-out images of
| AI girls to real ones.
|
| The Average is their top-tier.
| jasomill wrote:
| In other words, there's probably a market for a model
| trained on a curated collection of high-quality code.
| kelipso wrote:
| Doubt it"s sustainable. These big models keep improving
| at a fast pace and any progress like this made in a niche
| would likely get caught up to very quickly.
| simonw wrote:
| That is what we have today - it's why Opus 4.5+ and
| GPT-5.2+ are so much better at driving coding agents than
| previous models were.
| simonw wrote:
| That's not how modern LLMs are built. The days of dumping
| everything on the internet into the training data and
| crossing your fingers are long past.
|
| Anthropic and OpenAI spent most of 2025 focusing almost
| expensively on improving the coding abilities of their
| models, through reinforcement learning combined with
| additional expert curation of training data.
| input_sh wrote:
| Silly old me, how could've I forgotten about such
| _drastic_ improvements between say Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet
| 4.6. It 's 500x better now!
|
| Thank you for teaching me, AI understander. You're
| definitely not detached from reality one bit. It's me,
| obviously.
| simonw wrote:
| Have you seen how many people are talking about the
| November 2025 inflection point, where the models ticked
| over from being good at running coding agents to being
| _really good_ at it?
| javadhu wrote:
| I agree on the curiosity part, I have a non CS background but I
| have learned to program just out of curiosity. This led me to
| build production applications which companies actually use and
| this is before the AI era.
|
| Now, with AI I feel like I have an assistant engineer with me
| who can help me build exciting things.
| noemit wrote:
| I'm currently teaching a group of very curious non-technical
| content creators at one of the firms I consult at. I set up
| Codex for them, created the repo to have lots of hand-holding
| built in - and they took off. It's been 4 weeks and we
| already have 3 internal tools deployed, one of which
| eliminated the busy work of another team so much that they
| now have twice the capacity. These are all things 'real'
| engineers and product managers could have done, but just
| empowering people to solve their own problems is way faster.
| Today, several of them came to me and asked me to explain
| what APIs are (They want to use the google workspace APIs for
| something)
|
| I wrote out a list of topics/key words to ask AI about and
| teach themselves. I've already set up the integration in an
| example app I will give them, and I literally have no idea
| what they are going to build next, but I'm .. thrilled. Today
| was the first moment I realized, maybe these are the junior
| engineers of the future. The fact that they have nontechnical
| backgrounds is a huge bonus - one has a PhD in Biology, one a
| masters in writing - they bring so much to the process that a
| typical engineering team lacks. Thinking of writing up this
| case study/experience because it's been a highlight of my
| career.
| pydry wrote:
| >But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly
| wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.
|
| Are you serious? I've been hearing this constantly. since mid
| 2025.
|
| The gaslighting over AI is really something else.
|
| Ive also never seen jobs advertised before whose job was to
| lobby skeptical engineers over about how to engage in technical
| work. This is entirely new. There is a priesthood developing
| over this.
| kolinko wrote:
| you've been hearing that since mid 2025 bc that's when it
| became true.
| brabel wrote:
| I wrote code by hand for 20 years. Now I use AI for nearly
| all code. I just can't compete in speed and thoroughness. As
| the post says, you must guide the AI still. But if you think
| you can continue working without AI in a competitive
| industry, I am absolutely sure you will eventually have a
| very bad time.
| pydry wrote:
| >I just can't compete in speed and thoroughness
|
| I certainly know engineers for which this is true but
| unfortunately they were never particularly thorough or fast
| to begin with.
|
| I believe you can tell which way the wind is blowing by
| looking at open source.
|
| Other than being flooded with PRs high profile projects
| have not seen a notable difference - certainly no
| accelerated enhancements. there has definitely been an
| explosion of new projects, though, most of dubious quality.
|
| Spikes and research are definitely cheaper now.
| ericd wrote:
| Maybe the bottleneck for most high profile open source is
| PR review and not coding?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Their story is clearly fake. No one is getting screenshots of
| broken code texted to them so often that it's daily, and if
| they did, everyone must hate them.
| kdheiwns wrote:
| Engineers will go back in and fix it when they notice a
| problem. Or find someone who can. AI will send happy little
| emoji while it continues to trash your codebase and brings it
| to a state of total unmaintainability.
| tern wrote:
| I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past
| 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead.
| My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding
| systems was a hobby.
|
| I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real
| engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds
| (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software
| architecture, programming language design, compiler
| optimization, and open source politics in my free time.
|
| There are many bits of tacit knowledge I don't have. I know I
| don't have them, because I have that knowledge in other
| domains. I know that I don't know what I don't know about being
| a "real engineer."
|
| But I also know what taste _is_. I know what questions to ask.
| I know the magic words, and where to look for answers.
|
| For people like me, this feels like an insane golden age. I
| have no shortage of ideas, and now the only thing I have is a
| shortage of hands, eyes, and on a good week, tokens.
| salawat wrote:
| You _think_ you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on
| _real systems_ all these years, or have you been on the
| sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I 'm not trying to come
| across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when
| indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has
| precious little choice in the type of systems available on
| which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some
| variant of _system to make money for someone else somehow_ ,
| or _system that burns money, but ensures necessary work gets
| done somehow_. That 's it. That's the extent of the
| optimization function as defined by capitalism. _Taste_ ,
| falls by the wayside, compared to whether or not you are in
| the context of the optimizers who matter, because they're at
| the center of the capital centralization machine making the
| primary decisions as to where it gets allocated, is all that
| matters these days. So you make what they want or you don't
| get paid. As an Arts person, you should understand that no
| matter how sublime the piece to the artist, a rumbling belly
| is all that currently awaits you if your taste does not align
| with the holders of the fattest purses to lighten. I'm not
| speaking from a place of contempt here; I have a Philosophy
| background, and reaching out as one individual of the
| Humanities to another. We've lost sight of the "why we do
| things" and let ourselves become enslaved by the balance
| sheets. The economy was supposed to serve the people, it's
| now the other way around. All we do is feed more bodies to
| the wood chipper. Until we wake up from that, not even the
| desperate hope in the matter of taste will save us. We'll
| just keep following the capital gradient until we end up
| selling the world from under ourselves because it's the only
| thing we have left, and there is only the usual suspects as
| buyers.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Paragraphs, man. Paragraphs.
| sdf2df wrote:
| Sure but his post is very valid. Nice post fella.
| wk320189 wrote:
| Standard AI promotion talking points. Show us the frigging
| code or presumably your failed slow website that looks like a
| Bootcamp website from 2014.
| krona wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude, but you write like a chatbot. This
| makes sense, to be honest.
| sdf2df wrote:
| Ok fella. But show me something then. This is all talk.
|
| Personally I have been able to produce a very good output
| with Grok in relation to a video. However, it was insanely
| painful and very annoying to produce. In retrospect I
| would've much preferred to have hired humans.
|
| Not to mention I used about 50 free-trial Grok accounts, so
| who knows what the costs involved were? Tens of thousands no
| doubt.
| godelski wrote:
| But that knowledge was never hidden or out of reach. Why not
| read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free
| access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy.
|
| Everyone has tons of ideas. But every good engineer (and
| scientist) also knows that most of our ideas fall apart when
| either thinking deeper or trying to implement it (same thing,
| just mental or not). Those nuances and details don't go away.
| They don't matter any less. They only become less visible.
| But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable.
| What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again.
|
| The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the
| hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been
| complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity
| needed to improve it.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly
| wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.
|
| Because the instances of this happening are a) random and b)
| rarely ever happening ?
| codebolt wrote:
| One issue is that developers have been trained for the past few
| decades to look for solutions to problems online by just
| dumping a few relevant keywords into Google. But to get the
| most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were
| writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the
| background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and
| the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have
| become essential skills for engineering (and something many
| developers simply lack).
| skydhash wrote:
| > the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner,
| have become essential skills for engineering
|
| <Insert astronauts meme "Always has been">
| The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity,
| of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as
| effectively as possible.
|
| Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249),
| Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 7.
|
| And Some people found error messages they
| couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when
| judging the relative merits of programming languages, some
| still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease
| of making undetected mistakes.
|
| Dijkstra (1976-79) On the foolishness of "natural language
| programming" (EWD 667)
| godelski wrote:
| Oh, we're quoting Dijkstra? I'll add one :)
| by and large the programming community displays a very
| ambivalent attitude towards the problem of program
| correctness. ... I claim that a programmer has only done a
| decent job when his program is flawless and not when his
| program is functioning properly only most of the time. But
| I have had plenty of opportunity to observe that this
| suggestion is repulsive to many professional programmers:
| they object to it violently! Apparently, many programmers
| derive the major part of their intellectual satisfaction
| and professional excitement from not quite understanding
| what they are doing. In this streamlined age, one of our
| most under-nourished psychological needs is the craving for
| Black Magic, and apparently the automatic computer can
| satisfy this need for the professional software engineers,
| who are secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks they take
| in their daring irresponsibility. Concern for
| Correctness as a Guiding Principle for Program Composition.
| (EWD 288)
|
| Things don't seem to have changed, maybe only that we've
| embraced that black box more than ever. That we've only
| doubled down on "it works, therefore it's correct" or "it
| works, that's all that matters". Yet I'll argue that it
| only works if it's correct. Correct in the way they
| Dijkstra means, not in sense that it functions (passes
| tests).
|
| 50 years later and we're having the same discussions
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _But to get the most out of AI you should really be
| prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the
| British throne explaining the background of your request.
| Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate
| your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills
| for engineering (and something many developers simply lack)._
|
| That's probably why spec driven development has taken off.
|
| The developers who can't write prompts now get AI to help
| with their English, and with clarifying their thoughts, so
| that other AI can help write their code.
| pragma_x wrote:
| You are correct. You absolutely must fill the token space
| with unanbiguous requirements, or Claude will just get
| "creative". You don't want the AI to do creative things in
| the same way you don't want an intern to do the same.
|
| That said, I have found that I can get a lot of economy from
| speaking in terms of jargon, computer science formalisms,
| well-documented patterns, and providing code snippets to
| guide the LLM. It's trained on all of that, and it greatly
| streamlines code generation and refactoring.
|
| Amusingly, all of this turns the task of coding into (mostly)
| writing a robust requirements doc. And really, don't we all
| deserve one of those?
| kif wrote:
| But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at
| times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in
| myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster
| burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding
| anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then
| reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code.
|
| LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of
| thing. I myself use them daily. But the amount of mistakes
| Claude makes is not negligible in my experience.
| choutos wrote:
| This is a fair observation, and I think it actually
| reinforces the argument. The burnout you're describing comes
| from treating AI output as "your code that happens to need
| review." It's not. It's a hypothesis. Once you reframe it
| that way, the workflow shifts: you invest more in tests,
| validation scenarios, acceptance criteria, clear specs. Less
| time writing code, more time defining what correct looks
| like. That's not extra work on top of engineering. That is
| the engineering now. The teams I've seen adapt best are the
| ones that made this shift explicit: the deliverable isn't the
| code, it's the proof that the code is right.
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| This is a fair point. The cognitive load is real. Reviewing
| AI output is a different kind of exhausting than writing code
| yourself.
|
| Even when the output is "guided," I don't trust it. I still
| review every single line. Every statement. I need to
| understand what the hell is going on before it goes anywhere.
| That's non-negotiable. I think it gets better as you build
| tighter feedback loops and better testing around it, but I
| won't pretend it's effortless.
| sdf2df wrote:
| Prototyping is a perfectly fine use of LLMs - its easier to
| see a closer-to-finished good than one that is not.
|
| But that won't generate the returns Model producers need :)
| This is the issue. So they will keep pushing nonsense.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM
| use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load.
|
| This needs more attention. There's a lot of inhumanity in the
| modern workplace and modern economy, and that needs to be
| addressed.
|
| AI is being dumped into the society of 2026, which is about
| extracting as much wealth as possible for the already-wealthy
| shareholder class. Any wealth, comfort, or security anyone
| else gets is basically a glitch that "should" be fixed.
|
| AI is an attempt to fix the glitch of having a well-
| compensated and comfortable knowledge worker class (which
| includes software engineers). They'd rather have what few
| they need running hot and burning out, and a mass of idle
| people ready to take their place for bottom-dollar.
| scott_s wrote:
| You are correct, but this is not a new role. AI effectively
| makes all of us tech leads.
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| The K-shaped workforce point is sharp and I think you're right.
| The curious ones are a minority, but they've always been the
| ones who moved things forward. AI just made the gap more
| visible :)
|
| Your Codex case study with the content creators is fascinating.
| A PhD in Biology and a masters in writing building internal
| tools... that's exactly the kind of thing i meant by "you can
| learn anything now." I'm surrounded by PhDs and professors at
| my workplace and I'm genuinely positive about how things are
| progressing. These are people with deep domain expertise who
| can now build the tools they need. It's an interesting time.
| please write that up...
| Frannky wrote:
| This is my experience too. Also, the ones not striving for
| simplicity and not architecting end up with giant monsters that
| are very unstable and very difficult to update or make robust.
| They usually then look for another engineer to solve their
| mess. Usually, the easy way for the new engineer is just to
| architect and then turbo-build with Claude Code. But they are
| stuck in sunk cost prison with their mess and can't let it go
| :(
| _dwt wrote:
| I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and
| people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly
| round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps
| to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case
| - carry on.
|
| But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your
| peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack"
| ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't" or "what do
| they care about that I don't"? Is it possible that they are not
| enthusiastic for the change in the nature of the work? Is it
| possible they are concerned about "automation complacency"
| setting in, precisely _because_ of the ratio of "hundreds of
| times" writing decent code to the one time writing "something
| stupid", and fear that every once in a while that "something
| stupid" will slip past them in a way that wipes the entire net
| gain of AI use? Is it possible that they _don't_ feel that the
| typical code is "better than most engineers can write"? Is it
| possible they feel that the "learning" is mostly ephemera - how
| much "prompt engineering" advice from a year ago still holds
| today?
|
| You have a choice, and it's easy to label them (us?) as
| Luddites clinging to the old ways out of fear, stupidity, or
| "incuriosity". If you really want to understand, or even change
| some minds, though, please try to ask these people what they're
| really thinking, and listen.
| godelski wrote:
| > But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your
| peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack"
| ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't" or "what
| do they care about that I don't"?
|
| I'd argue these are good questions to ask in general, about
| _many_ topics. That it 's an essential skill of an engineer
| to ask these types of questions.
|
| There's two critical mistake that people often make: 1)
| thinking there's only one solution to any given problem, and
| 2) that were there an absolute optima, that they've converged
| into the optimal region. If you carefully look at many of the
| problems people routinely argue about you'll find that they
| often are working under different sets of assumptions. It
| doesn't matter if it's AI vs non-AI coding (or what mix), Vim
| vs Emacs vs VSCode, Windows vs Mac vs Linux, or even various
| political issues (no examples because we all know what will
| happen if I do, which only illustrates my point). There are
| no objective answers to these questions, and global optima
| only have the potential to exist when highly constraining the
| questions. The assumptions are understood by those you
| closely with, but that breaks down quickly.
|
| If your objective is to seek truth you _have_ to understand
| the other side. You have to understand their assumptions and
| measures. And just like everyone else, these are often not
| explicitly stated. They 're "so obvious" that people might
| not even know how to explicitly state them!
|
| But if the goal is not to find truth but instead find
| community, then don't follow this advice. Don't question
| anything. Just follow and stay in a safe bubble.
|
| We can all talk but it gets confusing. Some people argue to
| lay out their case and let others attack, seeking truth,
| updating their views as weaknesses are found. Others are
| arguing to social signal and strengthen their own beliefs,
| changing is not an option. And some people argue just because
| they're addicted to arguing, for the thrill of "winning".
| Unfortunately these can often look the same, at least from
| the onset.
|
| Personally, I think this all highlights a challenge with
| LLMs. One that only exasperates the problem of giving
| everyone access to all human knowledge. It's difficult you
| distinguish fact from fiction. I think it's only harder when
| you have something smooth talking and loves to use jargon.
| People do their own research all the time and come to wildly
| wrong conclusions. Not because they didn't try, not because
| they didn't do hard work, and not because they're
| specifically dumb; but because it's actually difficult to
| find truth. It's why you have PhD level domain experts
| disagree on things in their shared domain. That's usually
| more nuanced, but that's also at a very high level of
| expertise.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools
| or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers
| should face the fact that those skills and those ways they
| are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this
| point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the
| adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet.
|
| I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what
| this means for software engineering, but I don't think that's
| going to change anything at this point. If developers just
| don't want to participate in this new world, for whatever
| reason, I'm not judging them, but also I don't think the
| genie is going back in the bottle. There will be no movement
| to organize labor to protect us and there be no deus ex
| machina that is going to reverse course on this stuff.
| _dwt wrote:
| Well, no, not with that attitude there won't! I am not
| trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that
| posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge
| wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the
| Overton window to the distance between "it's here and it's
| great" and "I'm sad but it's inevitable".
|
| Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has
| used them exactly twice in anger, at the very beginning of
| that span. We can in fact just NOT do things! Not every
| world-beating technology takes off, for one reason or
| another. Supersonic airliners. Eugenics. Betamax.
|
| The best time to air concerns was yesterday. The next best
| time is today. I think we technologists wildly overestimate
| public understand and underestimate public distrust of our
| work and of "AI" specifically. We've got CEOs stating that
| LLMs are a bigger deal than nuclear weapons or fire(!) and
| yet getting upset that the government wants control of
| their use. We've got giddy thinkpieces from people (real
| example from LinkedIn!) who believe we'll hit 100% white
| collar unemployment in 5 years and wrap up by saying
| they're "5% nervous and 95% excited". If that's what they
| really think, and how they really feel, it's psychopathic!
| Those numbers get you a social scene that'll make the
| French Revolution look like a tea party. ("And honestly?
| I'm here for it.")
|
| So no, while I _think_ you're correct, I don't accept the
| inevitability of it all. There are possibilities I don't
| want to see closed off (maybe data finally really is the
| new oil, and that's the basis for a planetary sovereign
| wealth fund. Maybe every man, woman, and child who ever
| wrote a book or a program or an internet comment deserves a
| royalty check in the mail each month!) just yet.
| archagon wrote:
| A new technology comes out -- admittedly one that's
| extraordinarily capable at some things -- and suddenly
| conventional software engineering is "more or less obviated
| at this point"? I'm sorry, but that's really fucking dumb.
| Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think
| their capabilities exceed the quality of their training
| corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new
| software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer
| science, because the regurgitated statistical version of
| programming is entirely good enough? After all, what's code
| but a bunch of boring glue and other crap that's used to
| prop up a product idea until a few bucks can be extracted
| from it?
|
| Of course, there's nothing wiser than tying the entirety of
| your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x
| in price as soon as the market is captured).
|
| Is writing _solved_ because LLMs can make something
| decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can
| glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of
| seconds?
|
| I swear, some people in this field see no value in their
| programming work -- like they've been dying to be product
| managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me.
| All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes,
| heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no
| one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!
| doug_durham wrote:
| Underlying this and similar arguments is the presumption that
| the "old way" was perfect. You or your colleagues weren't
| doing one mistake per 100 successful commits. I have been in
| an industry for decades, and I can tell you that I do
| something stupid when writing code manually quite often. The
| same goes for the people that I work with. So fear that the
| LLM will make mistakes can't really be the reason. Or if it
| is the reason, it isn't a reasonable objection.
| axus wrote:
| I read the parent comment as calling the majority of AI users
| "incurious", and not referring to us who resist AI for
| whatever reasons. The curious AI users can obtain self-
| improvement, the incurious ones want money or at least custom
| software without caring how its made.
|
| I don't want the means of production to be located inside
| companies that can only exist with a steady bubble of VC
| dollars. It's perfectly reasonable to try AI or use it
| sparingly, but not embrace it for reasons that can be
| articulated. Not relevant to parent commenters point, though.
| Maybe you are "replying" to the article?
| distrill wrote:
| you make it seem like ai hesitation is a misunderstood fringe
| position, but it's not. i don't think anyone is confused
| about why some people are uninterested in ai tooling, but we
| do think you're wrong and the defensive posturing lines in
| the sand come off as incredibly uncurious.
| godelski wrote:
| > But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly
| wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.
|
| Your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I have people
| constantly telling me how LLMs are perfectly one shotting
| things. I see it from friend groups, coworkers, and even here
| on HN. It's also what the big tech companies are often saying
| too.
|
| I'm sorry, but to say that nobody is talking about success and
| just concentrating on failure is entirely disingenuous. You
| claim the group is a minority, yet all evidence points
| otherwise. The LLM companies wouldn't be so successful if
| people didn't believe it was useful.
| gavmor wrote:
| When AI screws up, it's "stupid." When AI succeeds, I'm smart.
|
| It's some cousin of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The problem is: you can't justify this throughput to someone
| who doesn't understand real software engineering. They see the
| output and think "well the AI did it." No. The AI executed it. I
| designed it. I knew what to ask for, how to decompose the
| problem, what patterns to use, when the model was going off
| track, and how to correct it. That's not prompting. That's
| engineering._
|
| That's the "money quote," for me. Often, I'm the one that causes
| the problem, because of errors in prompting. Sometimes, the AI
| catches it, sometimes, it goes into the ditch, and I need to call
| for a tow.
|
| The big deal, is that I can _considerably_ "up my game," and get
| a _lot_ done, alone. The velocity is kind of jaw-dropping.
|
| I'm not [yet] at the level of the author, and tend to follow a
| more "synchronous" path, but I'm seeing similar results (and
| enjoying myself).
| noemit wrote:
| There are two types of engineers who use AI:
|
| - Ones who see it generated something bad, and blame the AI.
|
| - Ones who see it generated something bad, and revert it and
| try to prompt better, with more clarity and guidance.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Three types:
|
| - Ones that use it as a "pair partner," as opposed to an
| employee.
|
| Thanks for the implicit insult. That was helpful.
| miningape wrote:
| - Ones who see it generated something bad, and realise it'd
| be faster to just hand fix the issues than babysit an LLM
| bitwize wrote:
| That's a PEBKAC issue.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Yeah why spend time fixing something when you can just
| roll the dice again?
| amelius wrote:
| > Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models,
| wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do
| the thinking. Honestly? I'm having more fun than ever.
|
| I'm sure some people are having fun that way.
|
| But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems
| that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even
| though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're
| dealing with humans. Some people just prefer to sit in a room and
| think, and they now feel this is taken away from them.
| nbvkappowqpeop wrote:
| I'm just an old school programmer who loves writing code, and
| the recent AI developments have just taken the most fun part
| away from me.
| kirito1337 wrote:
| fr, like in 2020 I started to learn programming in C/C++ at 9
| and in 2023 when the AI bubble just went on, it feels like I
| did it all for nothing
| coldtea wrote:
| And "taking the fun out" is one thing. Making 50% or more of
| coders redandunt is a whole other can of worms.
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| I get this. I don't think either of you is wrong. There's a
| real loss in not writing something from scratch and feeling
| it come together under your hands. I'm not dismissing that.
|
| I have immense respect for the senior engineers who came
| before me. They built the systems and the thinking that
| everything I do now sits on top of. I learned from people.
| Not from AI. The engineers who reviewed my terrible pull
| requests, the ones who sat with me and explained why my
| approach was wrong. That's irreplaceable. The article is
| about where I think things are going, not about what everyone
| should enjoy.
| FitchApps wrote:
| Right. What about to K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid)? If I need
| a bunch of agents and various levels of orchestration to simply
| close a bunch of Jira tasks then we have a problem. Also, what
| happens in a few years when this start failing and human
| operators are no longer able to troubleshoot the issue, forget
| fixing it.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| This essay somehow sounds worse than AI slop, like ChatGPT did a
| line of coke before writing this out.
|
| I use AI everyday for coding. But if someone so obviously puts
| this little effort into their work that they put out into the
| world, I don't think I trust them to do it properly when they're
| writing code.
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| I wrote it myself. But the irony isn't lost on me. "Who did
| what" is kind of the whole point of the article. Appreciate the
| feedback.
| jascha_eng wrote:
| FWIW I reported your post to the mods because it reads
| completely AI generated to me. My judgement was that it might
| have been slightly edited but is largely verbatim LLM output.
|
| Some tells that you might wanna look at in your writing, if
| you truly did write it yourself without Any LLM input are
| these contrarian/pivoting statements. Your post is full of
| these and it is imo the most classic LLM writing tell atm.
| These are mostly variants of the 'Its not X but Y" theme:
|
| - "Not whether they've adopted every tool, but whether
| they're curious"
|
| - "I still drive the intuition. The agents just execute at a
| speed I never could alone."
|
| - "The model doesn't save you from bad decisions. It just
| helps you make them faster."
|
| - "That foundation isn't decoration. It's the reason the AI
| is useful to me in the first place."
|
| - "That's not prompting. That's engineering"
|
| It is also telling that the reader basically cant take a
| breather most of the sentences try to emphasize harder than
| the last one. There is no fluff thought, no getting side
| tracked. It reads unnatural, humans do not think like this
| usually.
| abathologist wrote:
| The LLMs are training "us" now.
|
| First we develop the machines, then we contort the entire
| social and psychic order to serve their rhythms and
| facilitate their operation.
| andai wrote:
| Yeah, I came here to ask if you're Vibe Writing as well ;)
|
| I wasn't quite sure though. Sometimes it's clearly GPT,
| sometimes clearly Claude, and this article was like a blend.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| FWIW I thought it read fine and enjoyed the take. As I'm
| exploring more AI tooling I'm asking myself some of the same
| questions.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Yours is maybe the first good post on managing a team of AIs
| that I've read. There is no spoon.
|
| I've been shifting from being the know-it-all coder who fixes
| all of the problems to a middle manager of AIs over the past
| few months. I'm realizing that most of what I've been doing
| for the last 25 years of my career has largely been a waste
| of time, due to how the web went from being an academic
| pursuit to a profit-driven one. We stopped caring about how
| the sausage was made, and just rewarded profit under a
| results-driven economic model. And those results have been
| self-evidently disastrous for anyone who cares about process
| or leverage IMHO. So I ended up being a custodian solving
| other people's mistakes which I would never make, rather than
| architecting elegant greenfield solutions.
|
| For example, we went from HTML being a declarative markup
| language to something imperative. Now rather than designing
| websites like we were writing them in Microsoft Word and
| exporting them to HTML, we write C-like code directly in the
| build product and pretend that's as easy as WYSIWYG. We have
| React where we once had content management systems (CMSs). We
| have service-oriented architectures rather than solving
| scalability issues at the runtime level. I could go..
| forever. And I have in countless comments on HN.
|
| Anyway, none of that matters now, because AI handles the
| implementation details. Now it's about executive function to
| orchestrate the work. An area I'm finding that I'm
| exceptionally weak in, due to a lifetime of skirting burnout
| as I endlessly put out fires without the option to rest.
|
| So I think the challenge now is to unlearn everything we've
| learned. Somehow, we must remember why we started down this
| road in the first place. I'm hopeful that AI will facilitate
| that.
|
| Anyway, I'm sure there was a point I was making somewhere in
| this, but I forgot what it was. So this is more of a "you're
| not alone in this" comment I guess.
| roli64 wrote:
| Lost me at "I'm building something right now. I won't get into
| the details. You don't give away the idea."
| rl3 wrote:
| Perhaps execution is cheap now and ideas aren't?
|
| Personally I'm quite pleased with this inversion.
| bena wrote:
| Ideas are always cheap.
|
| Eventually you will have to tell people what the idea is,
| even if it is at product launch. And then, if execution is as
| cheap and easy as they claim, then anyone can replicate the
| idea without having to engage with the person in the first
| place.
|
| Ideas will never not be cheap.
| phil21 wrote:
| As someone else implied in their comment...
|
| If execution no longer matters, then what possible ideas
| exist out there that both are highly valuable as well as only
| valuable to the first mover? If the second person to see the
| value in the idea can execute it in a weekend using AI tools,
| what value is there in the idea to begin with?
|
| In fact the second mover advantage seems to me to be even
| larger than before. Let someone else get the first version
| out the door, then you just point your AI bot at the
| resulting product to copy it in a fraction of the time it
| took the original person to execute on it.
|
| If anything, ideas seem to be even cheaper to me in this new
| world. It probably just moves what bits of execution matter
| even more towards sales and marketing and hype vs. executing
| on the actual product itself.
|
| I think there might be some interesting spaces here opening
| up in the IP combined with "physical product" space. Where
| you need the idea as well as real-world practical
| manufacturing skills in order to execute. That will still be
| somewhat of a moat for a little while at least, but mostly at
| a scale where it's not worth an actual manufacturer from
| China to spin up a production line to compete with you at
| scale.
| codemog wrote:
| It's kind of funny seeing all the AI hype guys talking about
| their 10 OpenClaw instances all running doing work and when you
| ask what it is, you can never get a straight answer..
|
| For the record though, I love agentic coding. It deals with the
| accumulated cruft of software for me.
| q3k wrote:
| The work is mysterious and important.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| > It deals with the accumulated cruft of software for me.
|
| And creates more at record speeds!
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| Fair enough. I know how that reads. But when anyone with a
| laptop and a subscription can ship production software in a
| weekend, the architecture and the idea start to matter a lot
| more. The technical details in the post are real. I just can't
| share the what yet. Take it or leave it.
| nlh wrote:
| This has been a fallacy for as long as businesses have been
| built, and it will still be a fallacy in the AI era.
|
| Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste,
| execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things
| that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more
| quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care
| about it.
|
| I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in
| sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and
| negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in
| protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone
| hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.
|
| (The exception I think is in _highly_ competitive spaces
| where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency
| Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be
| worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then
| it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it
| first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)
| FitchApps wrote:
| I don't think it's about ideas or even the code. It's about
| execution, marketing, talking to your customers and doing
| sales. This is something AI can't do...yet
| duggan wrote:
| Very much on the same page as the author, I think AI is a
| phenomenal accelerant.
|
| If you're going in the right direction, acceleration is very
| useful. It rewards those who know what they're doing, certainly.
| What's maybe being left out is that, over a large enough
| distribution, it's going to accelerate people who are
| _accidentally_ going in the right direction, too.
|
| There's a baseline value in going fast.
| salawat wrote:
| >There's a baseline value in going fast.
|
| Maybe to the people writing the invoices for the infra you're
| renting, sure. Or to the people who get paid to dig you out of
| the consequences you inevitably bring about. Remember, the
| faster the timescale, the worse we are wired to effectively
| handle it as human beings. We're playing with a fire that
| catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the
| forest is catching and starting to react, the entire forest is
| already well on the way to joining in the blaze.
| duggan wrote:
| > We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast,
| by the time anyone realizes the forest is catching and
| starting to react, the entire forest is already well on the
| way to joining in the blaze.
|
| I suspect this has been said in one form or another since the
| discovery of fire itself.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| It sounds a bit no-true-scotsman to me.
| bambax wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with all that is said in this article.
| _When guided_ , AI amplifies the productivity of experts
| immensely.
|
| There are two problems left, though.
|
| One is, laypersons don't understand the difference between
| "guided" and "vibe coded". This shouldn't matter, but it does,
| because in most organizations managers are laypersons who don't
| know anything about coding whatsoever, aren't interested by the
| topic at all, and think developers are interchangeable.
|
| The other problem is, how do you develop those instincts when
| you're starting up, now that AI is a better junior coder than
| most junior coders? This is something one needs to think about
| hard as a society. We old farts are going to be fine, but we're
| eventually going to die (retire first, if we're lucky; then die).
|
| What comes after? How do we produce experts in the age of AI?
| jstanley wrote:
| I think the problem is overstated.
|
| People always learn the things they need to learn.
|
| Were people clutching their pearls about how programmers were
| going to lack the fundamentals of assembly language after
| compilers came along? Probably, but it turned out fine.
|
| People who need to program in assembly language still do.
| People who need to touch low-level things probably understand
| some of it but not as deeply. Most of us never need to worry
| about it.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _People always learn the things they need to learn._
|
| No, they don't. Which why a huge % of people are functionaly
| illiterate at the moment, know nothing about finance and
| statistics and such and are making horrendous decisions for
| their future and their bottom line, and so on.
|
| There is also such a thing as technical knowledge loss
| between generations.
| bambax wrote:
| I don't think the comparison (that's often made) between AI
| and compilers is valid though.
|
| A compiler is deterministic. It's a function; it transforms
| input into output and validates it in the process. If the
| input is incorrect it simply throws an error.
|
| AI doesn't validate anything, and transforms a vague input
| into a vague output, in a non-deterministic way.
|
| A compiler can be declared bug-free, at least in theory.
|
| But it doesn't mean anything to say that the chain 'prompt-
| LLM-code' is or isn't "correct". It's undecidable.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Actually, it isn't _that_ different. Compilers are trash.
| They produce hilariously bloated and stupid code, even the
| C++ compilers, not to speak about your average JIT
| compiler.
|
| However, in practice we don't care because it's good enough
| for 99% of the code. Sure, it could be like 5x better at
| least but who cares, our computers are fast enough.:tm:
|
| AI is the same. Is it as good as the best human output?
| Definitely not. Does it do the job most of the time? Yes,
| and that's what people care about.
|
| (But yes, for high-impact work - there's many people who
| know how to read x64 asm or PTX/SASS and they do insane
| stuff.)
| 9rx wrote:
| _> A compiler is deterministic._
|
| Not usually they aren't. They can be made to be, but it
| requires extra effort and tradeoffs. Hence why there is a
| lot of work put into reproducible builds -- something you
| would get for free if compilers were actually always
| deterministic.
|
| Unless you are taking a wider view and recognizing that,
| fundamentally, nothing running on a computer can be
| nondeterministic, which is definitely true.
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| This is the question I keep coming back to. I don't have a
| clean answer yet.
|
| The foundation I built came from years of writing bad code and
| understanding why it was bad. I look at code I wrote 10 years
| ago and it's genuinely terrible. But that's the point. It took
| time, feedback, reading books, reviewing other people's work,
| failing, and slowly building the instinct for what good looks
| like. That process can't be skipped.
|
| If AI shortens the path to output, educators have to double
| down on the fundamentals. Data structures, systems thinking,
| understanding why things break. Not because everyone needs to
| hand-write a linked list forever, but because without that
| foundation you can't tell when the AI is wrong. You can't
| course-correct what you don't understand.
|
| Anyone can break into tech. That's a good thing. But if someone
| becomes a purely vibe-coding engineer with no depth, that's not
| on them. That's on the companies and institutions that didn't
| evaluate for the right things. We studied these fundamentals
| for a reason. That reason didn't go away just because the tools
| got better.
| jinko-niwashi wrote:
| The instincts can absolutely be developed faster with AI -- if
| you set it up right. I work with an AI partner daily and one
| thing I've noticed is that it's a brutal mirror: it exposes
| gaps in your thinking immediately because it does exactly what
| you tell it, not what you meant.
|
| That feedback loop, hundreds of times a day, compresses years
| of learning into months. The catch is you need guardrails --
| tests that fail when the AI drifts, review cycles you can't
| skip, architecture constraints it must respect.
|
| That's what builds the instincts: not the AI doing the work for
| you, but the AI showing you where your understanding breaks
| down, fast enough that you actually learn from it. Just-In-Time
| Learning.
| rimmontrieu wrote:
| > But guided? The models can write better code than most
| developers. That's the part people don't want to sit with. When
| guided.
|
| Where do you draw the line between just enough guidance vs too
| much hand holding to an agent? At some point, wouldn't it be
| better to just do it yourself and be done with the project (while
| also build your muscle memory, experiences and the mental model
| for future projects, just like tons of regular devs have done in
| the past)
| sn0wflak3s wrote:
| The line is scope.
|
| I'm not asking an agent to build me a full-stack app. That's
| where you end up babysitting it like a kindergartener and
| honestly you'd be faster doing it yourself. The way I use
| agents is focused, context-driven, one small task at a time.
|
| For example: i need a function that takes a dependency graph,
| topologically sorts it, and returns the affected nodes when a
| given node changes. That's well-scoped. The agent writes it, I
| review it, done.
|
| But say I'm debugging a connection pool leak in Postgres where
| connections aren't being released back under load because a
| transaction is left open inside a retry loop. I'm not handing
| that to an agent. I already know our system. I know which
| service is misbehaving, I know the ORM layer, I know where the
| connection lifecycle is managed. The context needed to guide
| the agent properly would take longer to write than just opening
| the code and tracing it myself.
|
| That's the line. If the context you'd need to provide is larger
| than the task itself, just do it. If the task is well-defined
| and the output is easy to verify, let the agent rip.
|
| The muscle memory point is real though. i still hand-write code
| when I'm learning something new or exploring a space I don't
| understand yet. AI is terrible for building intuition in
| unfamiliar territory because you can't evaluate output you
| don't understand. But for mundane scaffolding, boilerplate,
| things that repeat? I don't. llife's too short to hand-write
| your 50th REST handler.
| jruz wrote:
| I find really sad how people are so stubborn to dismiss AI as a
| slop generator. I completely agree with the author, once you
| spend the time building a good enough harness oh boy you start
| getting those sweet gains, but it takes a lot of time and effort
| but is absolutely worth it.
| holyra wrote:
| Personally, I dismiss AI, mainly agenetic ones, because of its
| environmental impact. I hope that one day everyone will be held
| accountable for it.
| yanis_t wrote:
| They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their
| jobs.
|
| This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly
| economic perspective.
|
| AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to
| workforce reduction.
|
| Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have
| 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have
| new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount
| of bread with only 5 people.
|
| You have a choice: fire 5 people, or produce 2,000 loaves per
| month. But does the city really need that many loaves?
|
| To make matters worse, all your competitors also have the same
| semi-automatic ovens...
| hansmayer wrote:
| > Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You
| have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you
| have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same
| amount of bread with only 5 people.
|
| That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days.
| But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with
| almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients
| used will be exact to the rounding error. Each time. No matter
| how many times they use the oven. And they don't have to invent
| strategies on how to "best use the ovens", they don't claim to
| "vibe-bake" 10x more than what they used to bake before etc...
| The semi-automated ovens just effing work!
|
| Now show me an LLM that even remotely provides this kind of
| experience.
| 0x3f wrote:
| A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range
| or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly
| what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris
| paribus.
| JR1427 wrote:
| This is what I find interesting - the response from most
| companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI",
| not "we can build more things because of AI".
|
| What is driving companies to want to get rid of people,
| rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven
| thinking?
| 0x3f wrote:
| I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying
| as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've
| never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to
| fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.
| salawat wrote:
| The optimization function of capitalism and it's
| instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is
| already here, and it is us.
| scruple wrote:
| How much more productive are we supposed to be in
| engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the
| same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my
| $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large
| derives from having the typing machine type faster.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Perhaps this is one of the understanding gaps that crop
| up around AI development? At my current company and most
| others I've worked at, testing capability is part of the
| same bucket because engineers do their own QA.
| scruple wrote:
| I'm far more interested in understanding how we can 10x
| our _confidence_ in a change and not just our line
| counts.
| squidbeak wrote:
| A market has to exist for this expanded range and for the
| expanded ranges of every other bakery. Otherwise the bakery's
| just wasting flour.
|
| Where is this expanded demand coming from?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Two loaves of bread off the same line are perfect
| substitutes for each other, and compete to be sold.
|
| Lines of code within the same code base aren't competing to
| be sold. They either complement each other by adding new
| features, making the actual product sold more valuable, or
| one replaces another to make a feature more desirable- look
| better, work faster, etc.
|
| The market grows if you add new features- your bread now
| doubles as a floatation device- or you introduce a new line
| of bread with nuts and berries.
|
| So, the business has to decide- does it fire some workers
| and pocket the difference until someone else undercuts
| them, or does it keep the workers and grow the market it
| can sell to faster?
| squidbeak wrote:
| Read the comment I replied to to see where the bread came
| from.
|
| But on your point (which seems to hinge on wish
| thinking), this infinity of new features you propose for
| every product still needs those new markets you take for
| granted to justify their inclusion in the product.
| However cornering a new market isn't as straightforward
| as deploying a new feature - we all wish it was. The tech
| that makes it trivial for one firm to develop these
| features, makes it trivial for everyone else to build
| them. This means any new market will be immediately
| saturated.
|
| Even if the leap of finding new markets was as easy as
| you think, you still need to explain why this
| hypothetical company would keep paying millions in
| avoidable salaries. Because whatever jobs you assign to
| AI, it won't be any less available to do the work of the
| human labor.
| turblety wrote:
| Maybe the bakery expands to make more than just loaves of
| bread, maybe different cakes, sandwiches, maybe expand delivery
| to nearby towns.
| bojan wrote:
| On another note, if you had 100 engineers and you lay almost
| all of them off and keep 5 super-AI-accelerated engineers, and
| your competitor keeps 50 of such engineers, your competitor is
| still able to iterate 10x as fast. So you still lay people off
| at the risk of falling behind.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I don't think it's valid to reduce the act of creating software
| to an assembly line, especially with Amdahl's law.
| driverdan wrote:
| Writing software isn't like a small bakery with fixed demand.
| There are always more features to build and improvements to do
| than capacity allows. For better or worse software products are
| never finished.
| holyra wrote:
| what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI?
| I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its
| environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone
| has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our
| world a little more.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I believe the orange site's consensus was that it's
| approximately one additional mini fridge or dish washer worth
| of consumption on average. You've got users who use these tools
| barely 1k tokens per week. Assuming it's all batched ideally
| that's like running an LED floodlight for a minute or so. The
| other end of the spectrum can be pretty extreme in consumption
| but it's also rare. Most people just use the adhoc stuff.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is
| orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that
| programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2
| emissions per capita.
|
| And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the
| money that programmer gets from programming - travels around
| the world, buying large houses, ...
|
| If you care about the environment, you should want AI's
| replacing humans at most jobs so that they can no longer afford
| traveling around the world and buying extravagant stuff.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| So you mean that human programmers who were replaced by AI
| are dead by now?
|
| "You'll be fine digging trenches, programmer", they said.
|
| Seriously, though:
|
| _...so that they can no longer afford traveling around the
| world..._
|
| This is either a sarcasm I failed to parse, or pure
| technofascism.
| bdangubic wrote:
| on top of that for sure all programmers AI is replacing are
| all extravagantly traveling around the world (especially
| ones in America that make the most dough and 90% do not
| have a passport)
| holyra wrote:
| Yes the environmental impact of an AI agent performing a
| given task is lower. However we will not simply replace every
| programmer with an agent: in the process we will use more
| agents exceeding the previous environmental impact of humans.
| This is the rebound effect [0].
|
| Your reasoning could be effective if we bounded the computing
| resources usable by all AI in order to meet carbon reduction
| goals.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The environmental impact of AI replacing a human
| programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the
| environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US
| water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita._
|
| The programmer will continue to exist as a consumer of those
| things even if they get replaced by AI in their job.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| But he will no longer have that much money to spend on
| environment damaging products.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| this is genocidal, on a human-wide scale.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more
| equal than the others!
| holyra wrote:
| This comes from a dystopian book (Animal Farm). What is your
| point?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| If you read the book, my point should be crystal clear -
| that environmental impact which aligns with The Party goals
| (shareholder profits) the best, is painted the least
| concerning of all.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Environment impact is overstated. If you've ever looked at the
| numbers vs your daily carbon impact, you'd realize this.
| v3xro wrote:
| The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-
| using side of this) is strict liability for companies making
| software products (just like in the physical world). Then it
| doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a
| software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are
| aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and
| sort out any externalities caused. This will probably mean no
| vibe-coded side hustles but I personally am OK with that.
| _dwt wrote:
| I think this is coming, alongside professional licensure for
| "software engineers". Every public-facing project will need
| someone to put a literal stamp of approval on the code, and
| regardless whether Claude or Codex wrote the bulk of it, it'll
| be that person's head on a pike when something goes wrong.
|
| This isn't what many of us probably would have wanted, but I
| think the public blowback when "AI-coded" systems start failing
| is going to drive us there. (Note to passing hype-men: I did
| not say they will fail at higher rates than human-coded
| systems! I happen to believe this, but it is not germane to the
| argument - only the public perception matters here.)
| thefounder wrote:
| The issue is that you become lazy after a while and stop "leading
| the design". And I think that's ok because most of the code is
| just throwaway code. You would rewrite your project/app several
| times by the time it's worth it to pay attention to "proper"
| architecture. I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could
| focus on everything I wanted to build instead to become a
| framework developer/engineer.
| sd9 wrote:
| I agree. I've got more lazy over time too. But the cost of
| creating code is so cheap... it's now less important to be
| perfect the first time the code hits prod (application
| dependant). It can be rewritten from scratch in no time. The
| bar for 'maintainability' is a lot lower now, because the AI
| has more capacity and persistence to maintain terrible code.
|
| I'm sure plenty of people disagree with me. But I'm a good hand
| programmer, and I just don't feel the need to do that any more.
| I got into this to build things for other people, and AI is
| letting me do that more efficiently. Yes, I've had to give up a
| puritan approach to code quality.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could focus on
| everything I wanted to build instead to become a framework
| developer /engineer._
|
| I think frameworks (especially those that have testing built-
| in) are even more important as guardrails now.
| jwr wrote:
| Finally a take that I can agree with.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed
| compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before. Now
| I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole organization.
|
| That would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the
| syntax and evaluate competing options. Now I can get sccache
| working in a day, find it doesn't scale well, and replace it with
| recc + buildbarn. And ask the AI questions like whether we should
| be sharding the CAS storage.
|
| The downside is the AI is always pushing me towards half-assed
| solutions that didn't solve the problem. Like just setting up
| distributed caching instead of compilation. It also keeps lying
| which requires me to redirect & audit its work. But I'm also
| learning much more than I ever could without AI.
| truetraveller wrote:
| You perhaps just introduced one more moving part, that you
| don't understand well. Instead of thinking of a simpler
| solution.
| _dwt wrote:
| I hope we get a follow-up in six months or a year as to how
| this all went.
| sph wrote:
| > I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed
| compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before.
| Now I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole
| organization.
|
| Dunning-Kruger as a service. Thank God software engineers are
| not in charge of building bridges.
|
| Looking forward to your post-mortem.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > that would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the
| syntax
|
| This is hyperbole, right? In what world does it take 3 months
| to learn the syntax to anything? 3 days is more than enough
| time.
| wk320189 wrote:
| Strangely we never hear gushing pieces on how great gcc is. If
| you have to advertise that much or recruit people with AI mania,
| perhaps your product isn't that great.
| ericd wrote:
| Maybe when they've also been doing their thing for almost 40
| years, people will be past this phase for LLMs, too ;-)
| doug_durham wrote:
| You must be new to Hacker News. There have been plenty of
| pieces praising the GCC toolchain.
| egl2020 wrote:
| "You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true
| before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get
| an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone
| learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully)
| working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an
| answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM
| to translate a Linux program to Windows because I wanted the
| program Right Now and decided that was more important than
| learning those Windows APIs. But I did give up a learning
| opportunity.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Books are for the mentally enfeebled who can't memorize
| knowledge.
|
| - Socrates
| aozgaa wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a genuine quote or not. Can you
| provide a citation?
|
| (I think something like this comes up in the Phaedrus)
| goatlover wrote:
| Written by Plato.
| nightski wrote:
| Aren't books to communicate knowledge?
| sdf2df wrote:
| Wrong person you're quoting but he did not foresee the
| benefit of leveraging the work of others to extend and build-
| on-top.
| twodave wrote:
| I am beginning to disagree with this, or at least I am
| beginning to question its universal truth. For instance, there
| are so many times when "learning" is an exercise at attempting
| to apply wrong advice many times until something finally
| succeeds.
|
| For instance, retrieving the absolute path an Angular app is
| running at in a way that is safe both on the client and in SSR
| contexts has a very clear answer, but there are a myriad of
| wrong ways people accomplish that task before they stumble upon
| the Location injectable.
|
| In cases like the above, the LLM is often able to tell you not
| only the correct answer the first time (which means a lot less
| "noise" in the process trying to teach you wrong things) but
| also is often able to explain how the answer applies in a way
| that teaches me something I'd never have learned otherwise.
|
| We have spent the last 3 decades refining what it means to
| "learn" into buckets that held a lot of truth as long as the
| search engine was our interface to learning (and before that,
| reading textbooks). Some of this rhetoric begins to sound like
| "seniority" at a union job or some similar form of gatekeeping.
|
| That said, there are also absolutely times (and sometimes it's
| not always clear that a particular example is one of those
| times!!) when learning something the "long" way builds our long
| term/muscle memory or expands our understanding in a valuable
| way.
|
| And this is where using LLMs is still a difficult choice for
| me. I think it's less difficult a choice for those with more
| experience, since we can more confidently distinguish between
| the two, but I no longer think learning/accomplishing things
| via the LLM is always a self-damaging route.
| aspenmartin wrote:
| I do disagree with the notion that you have to slog through a
| problem to learn efficiently. That it's either "the easy way
| [bad, you dont learn] or the hard way [good you do learn]" is a
| false dichotomy. Agents / LLMs are like having an always-on,
| highly adept teacher who can synthesize information in an
| intuitive way, and that you can explore a topic with. That's
| extremely efficient and effective for learning. There is maybe
| a tradeoff somewhat in some things, but this idea that LLMs
| make you not learn doesn't feel right; they allow you to learn
| _as much as you want and about the things that you want_, which
| wasn't before. You had to learn, inefficiently(!), a bunch of
| crap you didn't want to in order to learn the thing you _did_
| want to. I will not miss those days.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I don't think your saying the same thing. Ai can help you get
| through the hard stuff effeciently and you'll learn. It acts
| as a guide, but you still do the work.
|
| Offloading completely the hard work and just getting a
| summary isn't really learning.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| It always comes down to economics and then the person and their
| attitude towards themselves.
|
| Some things are worth learning deeply, in other cases the easy
| / fast solution is what the situation calls for.
|
| I've thought recently that some kinds of 'learning' with AI are
| not really that different from using Cliffs Notes back in the
| day. Sometimes getting the Cliffs Notes summary was the way to
| get a paper done OR a way to quickly get through a
| boring/challenging book (Scarlet Letter, amirite?). And in some
| cases reading the summary is actually better than the book
| itself.
|
| BUT - I think everyone could agree that if you ONLY read Cliffs
| Notes, you're just cheating yourself out of an education.
|
| That's a different and deeper issue because _some people simply
| do not care to invest in themselves_. They want to do minimum
| work for maximum money and then go "enjoy themselves."
|
| Getting a person to take an interest in themselves, in their
| own growth and development, to invite curiosity, that's a
| timeless problem.
| skydhash wrote:
| I've always like the essential/accidental complexity split.
| It can be hard to find, but for a problem solving
| perspective, it may defines what's fun and what's a chore.
|
| I've been reading the OpenBSD lately and it's quite nice how
| they've split the general OS concepts from the machine
| dependent needs. And the general way they've separated
| interfaces and implementation.
|
| I believe that once you've solve the essential problem, the
| rest becomes way easier as you got a direction. But doing
| accidental problem solving without having done the essential
| one is pure misery.
| andai wrote:
| So I've actually been putting _more_ effort into deliberate
| practice since I started using AI in programming.
|
| I've been a fan of Zed Shaw's method for years, of typing out
| interesting programs by hand. But I've been appreciating it
| even more now, as a way to stave off the feeling of my brain
| melting :)
|
| The gross feeling I have if I go for too long without doing
| cardio, is a similar feeling to when I go for too long
| without actually writing a substantial amount of code myself.
|
| I think that the feeling of making a sustained effort is
| itself something necessary and healthy, and rapidly
| disappearing from the world.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time
| in a person's life to learn everything anyways.
|
| Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn
| deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don't care as
| much about.
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| I've managed to go my whole career using regex and never
| fully grokking it, and now I finally feel free to never
| learn!
|
| I've also wanted to play with C and Raylib for a long time
| and now I'm confident in coding by hand and struggling with
| it, I just use LLMs as a backstop for when I get frustrated,
| like a TA during lab hours.
| andoando wrote:
| Same there is a few things I never learned and don't care
| to learn and ultimately it has no greater value to learn.
|
| Like do I really get anything out of learning another
| framework or how some particular library does something?
| insin wrote:
| If you're going to deploy what you make with them to
| production without accidentally blowing your feet off,
| 100%, be they RegExp or useEffect(), if you can't even
| tell which way the gun is pointing how are you supposed
| to know which way the LLM has oriented it?
|
| Picking useEffect() as my second example because it took
| down CloudFlare, and if you see one with a tell-tale LLM
| comment attached to it in a PR from your coworkers who
| are now _never_ going to learn how it works, you can
| almost be certain it's either unnecessary or buggy.
| lich_king wrote:
| I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, I think LLMs make it
| easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially,
| superficially "click" for you. Sure, they were available
| before, but maybe in textbooks you needed to pay for (how
| quaint), or on websites that appeared on the fifth page of
| search results. Whatever are the externalities of that, in the
| short term, that part may be a net positive for learners.
|
| On the other hand, learning is doing; if it's not at least a
| tiny bit hard, it's probably not learning. This is not strictly
| an LLM problem; it's the same issue I have with YouTube
| educators. You can watch dazzling visualizations of problems in
| mathematics or physics, and it feels like you're learning, but
| you're probably not walking away from that any wiser because
| you have not flexed any problem-solving muscles and have not
| built that muscle memory.
|
| I had multiple interactions like that. Someone asked an LLM for
| an ELI5 and tried to leverage that in a conversation, and...
| the abstraction they came back feels profound to them, but is
| useless and wrong.
| mvaliente2001 wrote:
| One factor in favor of the use of LLM as a learning tool is
| the poor quality of documentation. It seems we've forgotten
| how to write usable explanations that help readers to build a
| coherent model of the topic at hand.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover
| explanations that, at least superficially, superficially
| "click" for you._
|
| The other benefit is that LLMs, for superficial topics, are
| the most patient teachers _ever_.
|
| I can ask it to explain a concept multiple times, hoping that
| it'll eventually click for me, and not be worried that I'd
| look stupid, or that it'll be annoyed or lose patience.
| amoorthy wrote:
| This. I feel this all the time. I love 3Blue1Brown's videos
| and when I watch them I feel like I really get a concept. But
| I don't retain it as well as I do things I learned in school.
|
| It's possible my brain is not as elastic now in my 40s. Or
| maybe there's no substitute for doing something yourself
| (practice problems) and that's the missing part.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > learning is doing;
|
| I could not agree more.
| scott_s wrote:
| That's not what the author means. Multiple times a day, I have
| conversations with LLMs about specific code or general
| technologies. It is very similar to having the same
| conversation with a colleague. Yes, the LLM may be wrong. Which
| is why I'm constantly looking at the code myself to see if the
| explanation makes sense, or finding external docs to see if the
| concepts check out.
|
| Importantly, the LLM is not writing code for me. It's
| explaining things, and I'm coming away with verifiable facts
| and conceptual frameworks I can apply to my work.
| phil21 wrote:
| Yeah, it's a great way for me to reduce activation energy to
| get started on a specific topic. Certainly doesn't get me all
| the way home, but cracks it open enough to get started.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I kinda wonder to what extent grad students' experience
| grading projects and homework will end up being a
| differentiating skill. 75% kidding.
| esafak wrote:
| It is uncertain what will be valuable in the future at the rate
| things are changing.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I don't know, most shit I learned programming (and subsequently
| get paid for) is meaningless arcana. For example, Kubernetes.
| And for you, it's Windows APIs.
|
| For programming in general, most learning is worthless. This is
| where I disagree with you. If you belong to a certain set of
| cultures, you overindex on this idea that math (for example) is
| the best way to solve problems, that you must learn all this
| stuff by this certain pedagogy, and that the people who are
| best at this are the best at solving problems, which of course
| is not true. This is why we have politics, and why we have
| great politicians who hail from cultures that are
| underrepresented in high levels of math study, because getting
| elected and having popular ideas and convincing people is the
| best way to solve way more problems people actually have than
| math. This isn't to say that procedural thinking isn't
| valuable. It's just that, well, jokes on you. ChatGPT will lose
| elections. But you can have it do procedural thinking pretty
| well, and what does the learning and economic order look like
| now? I reject this form of generalization, but there is
| tremendous schadenfreude about, well the math people are
| destroying their own relevance.
|
| All that said, my actual expertise, people don't pay for.
| Nobody pays for good game design or art direction (my field).
| They pay because you know Unity and they don't. They can't tell
| (and do not pay for) the difference between a good and bad
| game.
|
| Another way of stating this for the average CRUD developer is,
| most enterprise IT projects fail, so yeah, the learning didn't
| really matter anyway. It's not useful to learn how to deliver
| better failed enterprise IT project, other than to make money.
|
| One more POV: the effortlessness of agentic programming makes
| me more sympathetic to anti intellectualism. Most people do not
| want to learn anything, including people at fancy colleges,
| including your bosses and your customers, though many fewer in
| the academic category than say in the corporate world. If you
| told me, a chatbot could achieve in hours what would take a
| world expert days or weeks, I would wisely spend more time
| playing with my kids and just wait. The waiters are winning.
| Even in game development (cultural product development
| generally). It's better to wait for these tools to get more
| powerful than to learn meaningless arcana.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Convincing / coercing a bunch of slaves to build a pyramid
| takes a leader.
|
| But no amount of politics and charisma will calculate the
| motions of the planets or put satellites in orbit.
|
| A nation needs more than just influencers and charlatans.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > But no amount of politics and charisma will calculate the
| motions of the planets or put satellites in orbit.
|
| the government invented computers. you need politics to
| fund all of this. you are talking about triumphs of
| politics as much as invention. i don't know why you think i
| am pro influencer or charlatan...
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I learn a lot faster now with LLMs.
|
| You could learn the windows APIs much faster if you wanted to
| learn them
| 20k wrote:
| How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given
| that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it
| says against the docs anyway
| simonw wrote:
| Human teachers make mistakes too. If you aren't consuming
| information with a skeptical eye you're not learning as
| effectively as you could be no matter what the source is.
|
| The trick to learning with LLMs is to treat them as one of
| multiple sources of information, and work with those
| sources to build your own robust mental of how things work.
|
| If you exclusively rely on official documentation you'll
| miss out on things that the documentation doesn't cover.
| 20k wrote:
| If I have to treat LLMs as a fallible source of
| information, why wouldn't I just go right to the source
| though? Having an extra step in between me and the actual
| truth seems pointless
|
| WinAPI docs are pretty accurate and up to date
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Because it will take you years to read all the
| information you can get funneled through an LLM in a day
| simonw wrote:
| Because it's faster.
|
| If the WinAPI docs are solid you can do things like copy
| and paste pages of them into Claude and ask a question,
| rather then manually scan through them looking for the
| answer yourself.
|
| Apple's developer documentation is mostly awful - try
| finding out how to use the sips or sandbox-exec CLI tools
| for example. LLMs have unlocked those for me.
| subscribed wrote:
| I learn fastest from the examples, from application of the
| skill/knowledge - with explanations.
|
| AIs allowed me to get on with Python MUCH faster than I was
| doing myself, and understand more of the arcane secrets of
| jq in 6 months than I was able in few years before.
|
| And AIs mistakes are brilliant opportunity to debug, to
| analyse, and to go back to it saying "I beg you pardon, wth
| is this" :) pointing at the elementary mistakes you now see
| because you understand the flow better.
|
| Recently I had a fantastic back and forth with Claude and
| one of my precious tools written in python - I was trying
| to understand the specifics of the particular function's
| behaviour, discussing typing, arguing about trade-offs and
| portability. The thing I really like in it that I always
| get a pushback or things to consider if I come up with
| something stupid.
|
| It's a tailored team exercise and I'm enjoying it.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Yes you have to be careful, but the LLM will read and
| process core and documentation literally millions of times
| faster than you, so it's worth it
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Is this maybe more about the quality of the documentation? I
| say this 'cause my thinking is that reading is reading, it
| takes the same time to read the information.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Reminds some of something a friend said towards the end of
| college: "it's only like 12 thousand dollars a year to learn
| everything there is to know"
|
| Take it with a grain of salt..
| colecut wrote:
| AI gave you the option of making it happen without learning
| anything.
|
| It also gives you an avenue to accelerate your learning if that
| is your goal.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I've been programming for literally my entire life. I love it,
| it's part of me, and there hasn't been more than a week in 30
| years that I haven't written some code.
|
| This is the first time that I feel a level of anxiety when I am
| not actively doing it. What a crazy shift that I am still so
| excited and enamored by the process after all of this time.
|
| But there's also the double edged sword. I am also having a
| really hard time moderating my working hours, which I naturally
| struggle with anyway, even more. Partly because I am having so
| much fun and being so productive. But also because it's just so
| tempting to add 1 more feature, fix one more bug.
| holoduke wrote:
| I think he is absolutely right. But what if he is not right? Then
| he is also absolutely right. He is just always absolutely right
| right?. Even when he is not right? Yes he is always absolutely
| right.
| nabbed wrote:
| >I think we all might be AI Engineers now, and I'm not sure how I
| feel about that.
|
| Except the rest of the article strongly implies he feels pretty
| good about it, assuming you can properly supervise your agents.
| arikrahman wrote:
| The perception seems to be that AI is only causing security
| vulnerabilites (see: openclaw injection in npm (Clinejection)).
| But the article's optimistic tone much reflects my own, and if it
| were all bad, then nobody would be using AI. But it's mostly
| good, and with the benchmarks, it's a statistical fact that it
| helps more than it hurts. It's just math at a certain point.
| nabbed wrote:
| I'm glad I am no longer in tech because I just don't want to do
| this.
|
| This is not a dig at AI. If I take this article at face value, AI
| makes people more productive, assuming they have the taste and
| knowledge to steer their agents properly. And that's possibly a
| good thing even though it might have temporary negative side
| effects for the economy.
|
| >But the AI is writing the traversal logic, the hashing layers,
| the watcher loops,
|
| But unfortunately that's the stuff I like doing. And also I like
| communing with the computer: I don't want to delegate that to an
| agent (of course, like many engineers I put more and more layers
| between me and the computer, going from assembly to C to Java to
| Scala, but this seems like a bigger leap).
| drchickensalad wrote:
| I wish I moved to HCOL earlier so I could have saved enough
| fast enough to be you. I thought it would take more time before
| the end...
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Well, at least you will have lots of company (me included).
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I'm a developer who was made redundant, and I'm now casting
| around for an entirely new job because, likewise, I have no
| interest in working with AI. It sounds boring, and the concept
| squicks me out, to be honest.
| simonw wrote:
| Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at?
|
| I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar
| situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to
| know where they end up.
| gavinray wrote:
| I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video:
| as of this moment I officially resigned from my job
| as software engineer and will take up work
| on the farm shoveling pig shit and administering
| anal suppositories to sick horses because that will
| be a thousand times more tolerable than being in
| the same industry as dipshits like you
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| asciii wrote:
| Amazing to re-watch
|
| > "I cannot wait to castrate a 3000 pound bull as it
| kicks my head in"
|
| How I feel about merging an AI-generated PR these days
| and waiting for the issues
| mihaelm wrote:
| > "You turn it on and it scales right up"
|
| is my favorite quote from the video.
| 20k wrote:
| I work in tech, and I think the worst part is seeing all the
| pieces of catastrophe that have had to come together to make AI
| dominate
|
| There's several factors which are super depressing:
|
| 1. Economic productivity, and what it means for a company to be
| successful have become detached from producing good high
| quality products. The stock market is the endgame now
|
| 2. AI is attempting to strongly reject the notion that
| developers understanding their code is good. This is
| objectively wrong, but its an intangible skill that makes
| developers hard to replace, which is why management is so
| desperate for it
|
| 3. Developers had too much individual power, and AI feels like
| a modern attempt at busting the power of the workforce rather
| than a genuine attempt at a productivity increase
|
| 4. It has always been possible to trade long term productivity
| for short term gains. Being a senior developer means
| understanding this tradeoff, and resisting management pressure
| to push something out NOW that will screw you over later
|
| 5. The only way AI saves time in the long term is if you don't
| review its output to understand it as well as if you'd written
| it yourself. Understanding the code, and the large scale
| architecture is critical. Its a negative time savings if you
| want to write high-long-term-productivity code, because we've
| introduced an extra step
|
| 6. Many developers simply do not care about writing good code
| unfortunately, you just crank out any ol' crap. As long as you
| don't get fired, you're doing your job well enough. Who cares
| about making a product anymore, it doesn't matter. AI lets you
| do a bad job with much less effort than before
|
| 7. None of this is working. AI is not causing projects to get
| pushed out faster. There are no good high quality AI projects.
| The quality of code is going down, not up. Open source software
| is getting screwed
|
| Its an extension of the culture where performance doesn't
| matter. Windows is all made of react components which are each
| individually a web browser, because the quality of the end
| product no longer matters anymore. Software just becomes
| shittier, because none of these companies actually care about
| their products. AAA gaming is a good example of this, as is
| windows, discord, anything google makes, IBM, Intel, AMD's
| software etc
|
| A lot of this is a US problem, because of the economic
| conditions over there and the prevalence of insane venture
| capitalism and union busting. I have a feeling that as the EU
| gets more independent and starts to become a software
| competitor, the US tech market is going to absolutely implode
| zahlman wrote:
| Might I ask how you make a living now?
| voxleone wrote:
| I've always designed systems along the classic path: requirements
| - use cases - schematization. With AI, I continue in the same
| spirit (structure precedes prompting), but now the foundational
| layer of my systems is axioms and constraints, and the
| architecture emerges through structured prompts. Any AI on the
| shift is an aide in building systems that are logically grounded.
| This is where the "all of us as AI engineers" claim becomes
| subtle. Yes, anyone can generate code, but real engineering
| remains about judgment and structure. AI amplifies throughput,
| but the bottleneck is still problem framing, abstraction choice,
| and trade-off reasoning.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No we can't, because the teams are being reduced in headcount to
| the few lucky ones allowed to wear the AI hat.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| A 2026 AI Engineer is a 1996 Software Architect. I don't need to
| be the one manually implementing the individual widgets of a
| system, I can delegate their implementation to developers
| (agents).
|
| I'm being a little facetious, but I don't think it's far off the
| mark from what TFA is saying, and it matches my experience over
| the past few months. The worst architects we ever worked with
| were the ones who couldn't actually implement anything from
| scratch. Like TFA says, if you've got the fundamentals down and
| you want to see how far you can go with these new tools, play the
| role of architect for a change and let the agents fly.
| kseniamorph wrote:
| Saw the edit: I think that clarification was important. The core
| point resonates with me personally. The shift isn't about writing
| less code, it's about where the real judgment lives. Knowing what
| to build, how to decompose a problem, which patterns to reach for
| - and critically, when the model is confidently wrong. Without
| that foundation you're not moving faster, you're just making bad
| decisions faster. The scope point resonates too. Small, well-
| defined tasks with verifiable output is where agents actually
| shine.
| t43562 wrote:
| Without writing some code how will people really know what's
| right? I've supervised people before - one thinks one knows
| best and pontificates at them and then when one actually starts
| working in the codebase onself many issues become clear. If you
| never get your hands dirty your decisions will tend off towards
| badness.
| samdixon wrote:
| > I'm shipping in hours what used to take days. Not prototypes.
| Real, structured, well-architected software.
|
| > If I don't understand what it's doing, it doesn't ship. That's
| non-negotiable.
|
| Holy LinkedIn
| ontouchstart wrote:
| I am running local offline small models in the old fashioned REPL
| style, without any agentic features. One prompt at a time.
|
| Instead of asking for answers, I ask for specific files to read
| or specific command line tools with specific options. I pipe the
| results to a file and then load it into the CLI session. Then I
| turn these commands into my own scripts and documentation (in
| Makefile).
|
| I forbid the model wandering around to give me tons of irrelevant
| markdown text or generated scripts.
|
| I ask straight questions and look for straight answers. One line
| at a time, one file at a time.
|
| This gives me plenty of room to think what I want and how I get
| what I want.
|
| Learning what we want and what we need to do to achieve it is the
| precious learning experience that we don't want to offload to the
| machine.
| FitchApps wrote:
| This. I'm also using an LLM very similarly and treat it like a
| knowledgeable co-worker I can ask for an advice or check
| something. I want to be the one applying changes to my codebase
| and then running the tests. Ok, agents may improve the
| efficiency but it's a slippery slope. I don't want to sit here
| all day watching the agents modify and re-modify my codebase, I
| want to do this myself because it's still fun though not as
| much fun as it was pre-AI
| ontouchstart wrote:
| And you don't know what might trigger AI into overthinking.
| ;-)
|
| https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/bc301a60067f687b65dad64.
| ..
|
| (This is an ongoing experiment, it doesn't matter what model
| I use.)
| pragma_x wrote:
| > I ask straight questions and look for straight answers. One
| line at a time, one file at a time.
|
| I've also taken to using the Socratic Method when interrogating
| an LLM. No loaded questions, squeaky clean session/context, no
| language that is easy to misinterpret. This has worked well for
| me. The information I need is in there, I just need to coax it
| back out.
|
| I did exactly this for an exercise a while back. I wanted to
| learn Rust while coding a project and AI was invaluable for
| accelerating my learning. I needed to know completely off-the-
| wall things that involved translating idioms and practices from
| other languages. I also needed to know more about Rust idoms to
| solve specific problems and coding patterns. So I carefully
| asked these things, one at a time, rather than have it write
| the solution for me. I saved weeks if not months on that
| activity, and I'm at least dangerous at Rust now (still
| learning).
| sheepscreek wrote:
| "Hey AI, clone yourself"
|
| We're getting there..
| jgilias wrote:
| I've kind of done this. To an extent.
|
| "Hey Claude, you have a bunch of skills defined, some mcps, and
| memory filled with useful stuff. I want to use you on a machine
| accessible over SSH at <host>, can you clone yourself over?"
| pdh wrote:
| I would think an AI engineer is one who is, you know, engineering
| AI.
|
| We might all be AI users now, though.
| red_hare wrote:
| Right now I'm working two AI-jobs. I build agents for enterprises
| and I teach agent development at a university. So I'm probably
| too deep to see straight.
|
| But I think the future of programming is english.
|
| Agent frameworks are converging on a small set of core concepts:
| prompts, tools, RAG, agent-as-tool, agent handoff, and
| state/runcontext (an LLM-invisible KV store for sharing state
| across tools, sub-agents, and prompt templates).
|
| These primitives, by themselves, can cover most low-UX
| application business use cases. And once your tooling can be one-
| shotted by a coding agent, you stop writing code entirely. The
| job becomes naming, describing, and instructing and then wiring
| those pieces together with something more akin to flow-chart
| programming.
|
| So I think for most application development, the kind where
| you're solving a specific business problem, code stops being the
| relevant abstraction. Even Claude Code will feel too low-level
| for the median developer.
|
| The next IDE looks like Google Docs.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| You think prompting is here to stay? Sql has survived a long
| period of time. Servlets haven't. We moved from assembly to
| higher languages. Flash couldn't make it. So, im not sure for
| how long we will be prompting. Sure it looks great right now
| (just like Flash, servlets and assembly looked back then) but I
| think another technology will emerge that perhaps is based on
| promps behind the curtains but doesn't look like the current
| prompting.
|
| I would say prompting is not here to stay. It's just temporary
| "tech"
| skydhash wrote:
| > The job becomes naming, describing, and instructing and then
| wiring those pieces together with something more akin to flow-
| chart programming.
|
| That's precisely what peoples are bad at. If people don't grasp
| (even intuitively) the concept of finite state machine and the
| difference between states and logic, LLMs are more like a
| wishing well (vibes) than a code generator (tooling for
| engineering).
|
| Then there's the matter of technical knowledge. Software is
| layers of abstraction and there's already abstraction beneath.
| Not knowing those will limit your problem solving capabilities.
| mortsnort wrote:
| Can you share a link to your agent class or another one you
| think is good?
| JBorrow wrote:
| Maybe I'm entirely out of the loop and a complete idiot, but I am
| really not sure at all what people mean when they talk about this
| stuff. I use AI agents every day, but people who say they spend
| 'most of my time writing agents and tools' must be living in an
| absolutely different world.
|
| I don't understand how people are making anything that has any
| level of usefulness without a feedback loop with them at the
| center. My agents often can go off for a few minutes, maybe 10,
| and write some feature. Half of the time they will get it wrong,
| I realize I prompted wrong, and I will have to re-do it myself or
| re-do the prompt. A quarter of the time, they have no idea what
| they're doing, and I realize I can fix the issue that they're
| writing a thousand lines for with a single line change. The final
| quarter of the time I need to follow up and refine their solution
| either manually or through additional prompting.
|
| That's also only a small portion of my time... The rest is
| curating data (which you've pretty much got to do manually),
| writing code by hand (gasp!), working on deployments, and
| discussing with actual people.
|
| Maybe this is a limitation of the models, but I don't think so.
| To get to the vision in my head, there needs to be a feedback
| loop... Or are people just willing to abdicate that vision-making
| to the model? If you do that, how do you know you're solving the
| problem you actually want to?
| overgard wrote:
| I don't agree with the headline of "we're all AI engineers now",
| but I do agree that AI is more of a multiplier than anything. If
| you know what you're doing, you go faster, if you don't, you're
| just making a mess at a record pace.
|
| I'm not sure how this sustains though; like, I can't help but
| think this technology is going to dull a lot of people's skills,
| and other people just aren't going to develop skills in the first
| place. I have a feeling a couple years from now this is going to
| be a disaster (I don't think AGI is going to take place and I
| think the tools are going to get a lot more expensive when they
| start charging the true costs)
| t43562 wrote:
| So far the issue for me is that you can generate more crap by far
| than you can keep an eye on.
|
| Once you have your 50k line program that does X are you really
| going to go in there and deeply review everything? I think you're
| going to end up taking more and more on trust until the point
| where you're hostage to the AI.
|
| I think this is what happens to managers of course - becoming
| hostage to developers - but which is worse? I'm not sure.
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