[HN Gopher] Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignite...
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Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
I'm ready to retire. In my younger days, I remember a few pivotal
moments for me as a young nerd. Active Server Pages. COM
components. VB6. I know these are laughable today but back then it
was the greatest thing in the world to be able to call server-side
commands. It kept me up nights trying to absorb it all. Fast
forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and
drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I'm chasing the
midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
Author : shannoncc
Score : 969 points
Date : 2026-03-07 00:05 UTC (22 hours ago)
| TutleCpt wrote:
| I remember before style sheets existed. Webites were all nested
| tables and font tags. I built a video website before YouTube be
| even existed. Claude code and AI is definitely an exciting time.
| dnw wrote:
| And transparent 1 pixel gifs :-)
| water_badger wrote:
| don't forget VRML there are dozens of us
| Defenestresque wrote:
| Need to align something. Simple! :)
| dnw wrote:
| Curious, what are you building?
| kanwisher wrote:
| exactly need some goal here ;)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Re-calibrate your bot
| ynac wrote:
| Same here - it's like programming with a couple of buddies.
| Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, but we put it
| back together and end up with a finished project. I'm literally
| going through my backlog of projects from the early 80s! There
| are parts of each of these projects that were black holes for me
| - just didn't know enough to get a toe hold. With Karl (that's my
| agent) he explains everything I don't understand, does stuff,
| breaks stuff, and so on. It's really a blast.
| par wrote:
| > it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally
| they goof off and wreck everything,
|
| Nailed it :)
| jodleif wrote:
| The sad part is the "buddy hackathon" is kind of redundant
| now
| ValentineC wrote:
| I think people can do "buddy vibecodeathons" now. :)
|
| It's nice to be able to either just body double [1], or
| have some other people around to vent to when Claude goes
| off the rails.
|
| [1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-doubling-for-
| adhd
| lukan wrote:
| Same for me (even though I am a bit younger). I burned out a
| couple of times and assumed I will never finish so many
| sideprojects I have lying around. Now I can just feed them into
| claude and guide it to completion. It feels great. And yes,
| ideally I would have more time and energy to do it all by
| myself, but I don't. And to me results matter, not the
| tinkering itself, if I would be after that, I would do some
| code puzzles for fun. But I am rather interested in making
| ideas reality and AI is helping with that.
| garte wrote:
| Maybe it's like that. But they're drunk. Which means they are
| very supportive but quite unreliable and have a short memory.
|
| I've caught Claude making the gravest anti pattern mistakes
| using Elixir and trying to get it to correct them makes the
| whole thing worse.
|
| It's ok for smaller scoped stuff but actual architectural
| changes come out worse than before more often than not.
| cmos wrote:
| 51 year old electrical engineer here, same thing! (minus the
| retiring part cause finances)
|
| It's given me the guts to be a solo-founder (for now). I
| ynac wrote:
| Just checked out MoveOMeter.com Great idea - and I get how
| pitching to "an old coot" like my parents would get a laugh out
| of them before an insulting hurtful pass. Very clever
| positioning - I'd lean in on that. Your audience is there and
| waiting - which is tricky since your customer is actually the
| sales person and you need to give them the training up front to
| close the deal with their elder. Nice work!
| wepple wrote:
| As a parent to two young kids and in more of a leadership
| position at work, Claude allows me to grind through my backlog of
| ideas in minutes between other tasks, and see which ones take
| flight.
| al_borland wrote:
| I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding
| things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so
| unfulfilling. I'd equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a
| test, knowing I cheated. I didn't accomplish anything. I didn't
| learn anything. I got the end result with none of the
| satisfaction and learned nothing in the process.
|
| I'm probably going to go back and redo everything with my own
| code.
| dllrr wrote:
| For fun and education purposes, learning and satisfaction are
| understandable.
|
| For work, companies won't support it. Get it done. Fast. That's
| the new norm.
| al_borland wrote:
| I disagree. I need to be able to support what I ship and
| answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I
| can only truly do that if I write it myself.
|
| There should also be a symbiotic relationship at a job. Yes,
| they get something from me, but I should also get
| something... learning and some amount of satisfaction... in
| addition to the paycheck. I can get a paycheck anywhere.
|
| It's not the "new norm" unless employees accept it as the new
| normal. I don't know why anyone would accept a completely
| one-sided situation like that.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to
| the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only
| truly do that if I write it myself.
|
| How do you function on a team, where you have to maintain
| code others have written?
| al_borland wrote:
| We talk to each other. If someone wrote something I don't
| understand, I defer to them. If someone wrote something
| who is no longer with the company, we trying to make
| sense of it, and in some cases end up re-writing some
| things.
|
| There are only 3 or 4 of us working on most of the code I
| touch. 3 of us have worked together in some form or
| another for close to 20 years.
| ctxc wrote:
| That's a LONG time! I'm happy for you :)
| brabel wrote:
| > I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
|
| That's where you're wrong. AI can debug code better than
| humans. I put it on a task that I'd spent months on:
| debugging a distributed application which had random errors
| which required me to comb through MBs of logs. I gave
| Claude the task, a log parser (which it also wrote), and
| told it to find what each issue was. It did the job in a
| few minutes. This is a task that was, frankly, just a bit
| above my capacity with a human brain as it required
| associating lots of logs by timestamps trying to
| reconstruct what the heck was going on.
|
| My new worry is that I need to make sure the code AI is
| writing is more comprehensible not to other humans, but to
| other AIs in the future, since there's very little chance
| humans will be doing the debugging by themselves given how
| bad we are at that compared to LLMs even now, let alone in
| a few years.
|
| > but I should also get something
|
| What do you want beyond a pay check? If you want to get
| better at your job, the most important technique you can
| improve right now is hands down how to interact with an AI
| to solve business problems. The learning you're thinking
| of, being able to fully understand code and actually debug
| it in your head, is already a thing of the past now. In a
| few years, no one will seriously consider building software
| that's not entirely AI-written except for enthusiasts,
| similar to the people currently participating in C
| obfuscated code competitions. I say this as someone who
| reluctantly started using AI in anger only a few months ago
| after hating on it before that for the laughable code it
| was producing just around 6 months ago (it probably was
| already good by then but I was not really giving it a
| chance yet).
| TimFogarty wrote:
| That's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly
| different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could
| be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems
| like there are three joys in coding:
|
| 1. Creating something
|
| 2. Solving puzzles
|
| 3. Learning new things
|
| If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of
| some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can
| get an output so much quicker.
|
| If your enjoyment comes from solving hard puzzles, digging into
| algorithms, how hardware works, weird machine quirks, language
| internals etc... then you're going to lose nearly all of that
| fun.
|
| And learning new things is somewhere in the middle. I do think
| that you can use agentic coding to learn new technologies. I
| have found llms to be a phenomenal tool for teaching me things,
| exploring new concepts, and showing me where to go to read more
| from human authors. But I have to concede that the best way to
| learn is by doing so you will probably lose out on some depth
| and stickiness if you're not the one implementing something in
| a new technology.
|
| Of course most people find joy in some mix of all three. And
| exactly what they're looking for might change from project to
| project. I'm curious if you were leaning more towards 2 and 3
| in your recent project and that's why you were so unsatisfied
| with Claude Code.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I think your comment really captures some of the reasons
| behind the differences between people's reactions to Claude
| pretty well.
|
| I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the _coding_ I
| do in my day job as a staff engineer, it's pretty rare for me
| to encounter deeply interesting puzzles and really
| interesting things to learn. It's not like I'm writing a
| compiler or and OS kernel or something; this is web dev and
| infra at a mid sized company. For 95% of coding tasks I do
| I've seen some variation already before and they are boring.
| It's nice to have Claude power through them.
|
| On system design and architecture, the problems still tend to
| be a bit more novel. I still learn things there. Claude is
| helpful, but not as helpful as it is for the code.
|
| I do get the sense that some folks enjoy solving variations
| of familiar programming puzzles over and over again, and
| Claude kills that for them. That's not me at all. I like
| novelty and I hate solving the same thing twice. Different
| tastes, I guess.
| al_borland wrote:
| I think I'd add a #4 to this list, and that's helping people.
| I like making things that people can use to make their life
| easier. That's probably my number one.
|
| The "creating something" idea... That's more complex. With
| agentic coding something can be created, but did I create it?
| Using agentic coding feels like hiring someone to do the work
| for me. For example, I just had all the windows in my house
| replaced. A crew came out at did it. The job is done, but I
| didn't do anything and felt no pride or sense of
| accomplishment in having these new windows. It just happened.
| Contrast that to a slow drain I had in my bathroom. I took
| the pipes apart, found the blockage, cleared it out, and
| reassembled the drain. When I next used the sink and the
| water effortlessly flowed away, I felt like I accomplished
| something, because I did it, not some plumber I hired.
|
| So it isn't even about learning or solving puzzles, it's
| about being the person who actually did the work and seeing
| the result of that effort.
| TimFogarty wrote:
| Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more
| "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind
| that encompasses materializing something into the world to
| achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to
| help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch
| some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And
| helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be
| satisfying.
|
| The inherent value of creating is something I was missing.
| Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's
| the classic Platonic question about how we value actions:
| for their own sake, for their results, or for both.
|
| I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds
| like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in
| agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's
| the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its
| own sake or for its results? Where you land on that
| spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic
| coding.
|
| That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give
| enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic
| value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about
| moving up the abstraction chain to work more on
| architecture and product design. Those things can be fun
| and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's kind of a weird thing. I spent 2 days working one
| some code, which in a way was the process of working out
| the requirements and functionality that was required. I
| then told Claude to look at it in and refactor it.
|
| I did put in 2 days of work to come up with what Claude
| used to ultimately do what it did... but when I look at
| the resulting code, I feel nothing. Having the idea isn't
| the same as being the one who actually did the thing. I
| plan to delete the branch next week. I don't want to
| maintain what it did, and think it should be less complex
| than it made it.
| devilbunny wrote:
| > If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product
| of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent
|
| As someone who enjoys technology, and using it, and can just
| barely sort-of code but really not, agentic coding must be
| wonderful. I have barely scratched the surface with a couple
| of scripts. But simply translating "here's what I want, and
| how I would have done it the last time I used Linux 20 years
| ago, show me how to do it with systemd" is _so much easier_
| than digging through years of forum posts and trying to make
| sure they haven 't all been obsoleted.
|
| None of it is new. None of it is fancy. I do regret that
| people aren't getting credit for their work, but "automount
| this SMB share from my NAS" isn't going to make anyone's
| reputation. It's just going to make my day easier. I really
| did learn enough to set up a NAT system to share a DSL
| connection with an office in the late 1990s on OpenBSD. It
| took a long time, and I don't have that kind of free time
| anymore. I will never git gud. It's this, or just be another
| luser who goes without.
| buu700 wrote:
| I can see where this idea is coming from, but I don't agree
| with the conclusion at all. As someone who loves solving
| puzzles and learning new things, AI has been a godsend. I
| _also_ very much like creating things, but even more than
| that, I like doing all three at once.
|
| I think of AI like a microdose of Speed Force. Having super
| speed doesn't mean you don't like running; it just means you
| can run further and more often. That in turn justifies a
| greater amount of time spent running.
|
| Without the Speed Force, most of the time you were reliant on
| vehicles (i.e. paying for third-party solutions) to get where
| you needed to go. With the Speed Force, not only can you
| suddenly meet a lot more of your transportation needs by
| foot, you're able to run to entirely new destinations that
| you'd never before considered. Eventually, you may find
| yourself planning trips to yet unexplored faraway harsh
| terrains.
|
| If your joy in running came from attempting to push your
| biological physical limits, maybe you hate the Speed Force.
| If you enjoy spending time running and navigating unfamiliar
| territory, the Speed Force can give you more of that.
|
| Sure, there are also oddballs who don't know how to run, yet
| insist on using the Speed Force to awkwardly jump somewhere
| vaguely in the vicinity of their destination. No one's saying
| they don't exist, but that's a completely different crowd
| from experienced speedsters.
| xantronix wrote:
| > (i.e. paying for third-party solutions)
|
| My experiences are not universal but apart from hardware
| and maybe $10 for a VPS for hosting, I do not find the need
| to pay for third-party solutions; I quite like this
| situation, and I do not find myself particularly
| constrained taking a little extra time or having to think a
| bit harder. But, my friend, I must ask, what are LLMs if
| not third-party solutions with sizable expenditures?
| buu700 wrote:
| You may be an exception, but most businesses and many
| individuals pay for a laundry list of commercial software
| products. If you count non-monetary forms of payment
| (i.e. data and/or attention to ads), that expands to
| virtually everyone with access to a computer.
| scottLobster wrote:
| I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A"
| finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the
| best", finished product.
|
| I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this
| matters less, but that model has always made me a little
| queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff
| so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I
| could possibly give.
|
| Relying on AI code denies me the deep knowledge I need to
| feel that level of pride and confidence. And if I'm going to
| take the time to read, test and verify the AI code to that
| level, then I might as well write most of it unless it's
| really repetitive.
| TimFogarty wrote:
| That's a really good point. And I agree that kind of
| confidence in craftsmanship is something that's missing
| from agentic coding today... it does make slop if you're
| not careful with it. Even though I've learned how to guide
| agents, I still have some uneasiness about missing
| something sloppy they have done.
|
| But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good
| that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away.
| When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of
| the language because it was written by a lot of smart
| people and has proven itself to be good in production for
| thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove
| themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their
| craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think
| that's impossible.
| mriet wrote:
| I would argue that craftsmanship includes a thorough
| understanding and cognitive model of the code. And, as
| far as I understand it, these agents are syntactic
| wonders but can not really understand anything. Which
| would preclude any sort of craftsmanship, even if what
| they make happens to be well-built.
| rellfy wrote:
| I don't think AI coding means you stop being a craftsman.
| It is just a different tool. Manual coding is a hand tool,
| AI coding is a power tool. You still retain all of the
| knowledge and as much control over the codebase as you
| want, same with any tool.
|
| It's a different conversation when we talk about people
| learning to code now though. I'd probably not recommend
| going for the power tool until you have a solid
| understanding of the manual tools.
| scottLobster wrote:
| It can be a power tool if used in a limited capacity, but
| I'd describe vibe-coding as sending a junior construction
| worker out to finish a piece of framing on his own.
|
| Will he remember to use pressure treated lumber? Will he
| use the right nails? Will he space them correctly? Will
| the gaps be acceptable? Did he snort some bath salts and
| build a sandcastle in a corner for some reason?
|
| All unknowns and you have to over-specify and play
| inspector. Maybe that's still faster than doing it
| yourself for some tasks, but I doubt most vibe-coders are
| doing that. And I guess it doesn't matter for toy
| programs that aren't meant for production, but I'm not
| wired to enjoy it. My challenge is restraining myself
| from overengineering my work and wasting time on micro-
| optimizations.
| luke5441 wrote:
| Meanwhile Linus argued against Debuggers in 2000:
| https://lwn.net/2000/0914/a/lt-debugger.php3
|
| But then he changed his tune? Even on LLMs...
| munksbeer wrote:
| > I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A"
| finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the
| best", finished product.
|
| I don't raise a single PR that I feel I wouldn't have
| written myself. All the code written by the AI agent must
| be high quality and if it isn't, I tell it why and get it
| to write bits again, or I just do it myself.
|
| I'm having quite a hard time understanding why this is a
| problem for other people using AI. Can you help me?
| riquito wrote:
| You're forgetting that (1) brings a sense of pride. "I built
| this". That's not true in many ways if you ask something else
| to do it
| skeledrew wrote:
| I'm squarely into #1, but it usually requires #2 (at a high
| level) and has #3 as a side effect. But there's also #0 which
| kicks it all off: the triggering problem/question.
|
| Like just yesterday I started to notice the increasing
| pressure of an increasingly hard-to-navigate number of Claude
| chats. So I went searching for _something_ to organize them.
| I did find an extension, but it 's for Chrome, and I'm a
| Firefox person, so I had Claude look at it with the initial
| idea of porting to Firefox. Then in the analysis, Claude
| mentioned creating an extension from scratch, and that's what
| I went for.
|
| I've never really used JavaScript, let alone created a
| Firefox extension before, but in a few minutes I was
| iterating on one, figuring out how I wanted it to work with
| Claude, and now I have a very nice and featureful chats
| organizer. And I haven't even peeked at the code. I also now
| have a firm idea of this general spec of how I want arbitrary
| list-organizing UI to look+behave going forward.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| I find there are still opportunities to solve puzzles. Claude
| Code might build something in an unsatisfying or inelegant
| way, and you can suggest a better approach. You can
| absolutely write core components -- the fun parts you crave
| -- of the code and give it to an LLM to flesh out the rest.
|
| One of the recent joys I've had is having CC knit together
| separate notebooks I'd been updating for a couple of years
| into a unified app. It can be a fulfilling experience.
| alexpotato wrote:
| The creator of OpenClaw had a great line about this:
|
| "If your identity is tied to you being an iOS developer, you
| are going to have a rough time. But if your identity is 'I'm a
| builder!' it is a very exciting time to be alive."
|
| Plus, there is no rule that says you can't keep coding if it's
| faster for you and/or it's quicker in general. e.g I can write
| a Perl one liner much faster than Claude can. Heck, even if
| it's not faster and you enjoy coding, just keep coding.
| croes wrote:
| > I'm a builder!
|
| I'm a builder too.
|
| I built a house. Ok, I said an architect what I want and he
| showed me the plans and I gave him feedback for adjustments
| and then the plans were given to the construction crew and
| they built the actual house.
|
| But is was my prompt, so I'm a builder.
| xigoi wrote:
| Also, half of the rooms in the house can't be accessed
| because they don't have a door. And when it starts raining,
| the house collapses.
| Geste wrote:
| Curious about that reasoning : where do you draw the line ?
|
| Are you a builder if there is an middleman ? If not, what
| if the middleman is a tool ? If you use autocad to build
| the plans, are you still a builder ? What if autocad has a
| prompt feature, are you still a builder ?
| croes wrote:
| If you actually do something that is considered building.
|
| Same with vibe coding, if you don't write code you just
| ordered and didn't code, otherwise all my customers and
| bosses where coders long before AI because there orders
| don't reach much different from today's prompts. The
| recipient changed but that doesn't change the sender.
|
| It's some kind of Chinese Room but this time for those
| outside the room.
| NDizzle wrote:
| This past week I found and fixed a bug that happens once in
| 40,000 transactions working with Claude Code - Opus 4.6. Our
| legacy app was designed around 2008 and has had zillions of
| band aids added since then. Nobody (~700 person company) has
| been able to reliably reproduce this issue to confidently claim
| that they know what the cause is and how to definitively fix
| it. That all changed yesterday. I spent today writing up
| summaries that were shared far and wide. My wizard status is
| yet again renewed.
| random3 wrote:
| I think it depends what you're building. I find it fun, once in
| a while, an engineer to "not go shoeless" and get some of
| things I need done.
| icedchai wrote:
| I'm a few years younger than the OP, but I remember the early
| Internet days. I started with Perl CGI scripts, ASP, even some
| early server side JS, in the form of Netscape Livewire.
|
| Over the past couple months, I've created several applications
| with Claude Code. Personal projects that would've taken me
| weeks, months, or possibly forever, since I generally get
| distracted and move on to something else. I write pretty decent
| specs, break things into phases, and make sure each phase is
| solid before moving on to the next.
|
| I have Claude build things in frameworks I would've never tried
| myself, just because it can. I do actually look at the code.
| Some of it is slop. In a few cases, it _looks_ like it works,
| but it 'll be a totally naive or insecure implementation. If I
| really don't like how it did something, I'll revert and give it
| another attempt. I also have other AIs review it and make
| suggestions.
|
| It's fun, but I ultimately gain little intellectual
| satisfaction from it. It's not like the old days at all. I
| don't feel like I'm growing my skill set. Yes, I learned
| "something", but it's more about the capabilities of AI, not
| the end result.
|
| Still, I'm convinced this is the future. Experienced developers
| are in the best position to work with AI. We also may not have
| a choice.
| dwg wrote:
| Your choices are not limited to one extreme or the other.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it
| to drive business value and make a profit. You did so
| effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled.
| So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better?
|
| How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you
| tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but
| you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it by hand?
| al_borland wrote:
| It's not just about speed today. It's about the speed to make
| changes, to understand the minutia of the code to more
| quickly troubleshoot when something goes wrong, to better
| understand the implication of future changes...
|
| Just yesterday I was on a call where someone was trying to
| point to my code as a problem when we suspected a DNS issue.
| If I didn't know the code inside and out, I could have easily
| been steam rolled, because as we know, "it's never the
| network". We found out today it was in fact DNS.
|
| If someone only ever worries about is speed, they'll likely
| get tripped up and fall. One guy on my team is all about
| delivering quickly. He gives very optimistic timelines and
| gets things out the door as fast as possible. Guess what, the
| code breaks. He is constantly getting bug reports from
| everyone and having to fix stuff. As he continues to run into
| this, he is starting to become a bit more mature and
| tactical, but that is taking time.
|
| I think the CEO would much rather see the production code be
| fully tested and stable. I write the frameworks everyone else
| on the team uses. If my code breaks, everyone's code is
| broken. How much will that cost?
| hananova wrote:
| Why would I give a rat's ass what my CEO thinks. I do my job
| the way I want to in a way that allows me to keep going. If
| the CEO wants it a different way he can fire me, and pay me
| 10 months worth of wages while I look for a different job.
|
| I know the code I produce is damn good, and I take pride in
| my extremely low defect rate. I will not be rushed. I will
| not be pushed. And I will do so until the day I retire.
| layer8 wrote:
| My CEO is fine as long as the project is profitable, which is
| part of my responsibility, and they are actually on board
| with us delivering the best quality we can under that
| constraint, not only because our clients do notice quality,
| but also as a matter of principle.
| kccqzy wrote:
| When it comes to writing code, I can almost tell before writing
| code that whether this particular piece of code will be
| intellectually stimulating to me. If so, I write it myself
| without thinking about whether Claude might have done it
| faster. If not, I let Claude write it. Currently I'd estimate
| maybe 70% of the code falls in the first category, and the
| remaining 30% is something I would've used a lot of my own
| willpower to get started anyways.
|
| Also, when I write code myself, I still ask Claude to review
| it. It's faster than asking a human colleague to review it, so
| you can have Claude review often. Just today after a five-
| minute review Claude said a piece of code I wrote had four
| bugs, three of which were hallucinations and one was a real
| bug. I honestly do think it would have taken me a bit more than
| five minutes to find that one real bug.
| wvenable wrote:
| > It was so unfulfilling.
|
| I'm going to say something people hate... you're probably
| holding it wrong. Why do I say that? Because I absolutely felt
| exactly the way you are feeling. In fact, it can be worse than
| unfulfilling, it can be even draining.
|
| But I, over time, changed how I used LLMs and I actually now
| find it rewarding and I'm learning a _huge_ amount. I 've
| learned more technologies (and I do mean _learn_ ) in the last
| year than I have ever in the past.
|
| I think my advice is that if it feels wrong then you shouldn't
| be doing it that way. But that isn't inherent in using LLMs to
| help you work. Everyone has different preferences for how they
| work (and what languages they like, etc). The people using 15
| LLMs to build software probably love that but I don't think
| that's how I want to do it. And that's fine.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I'm probably going to go back and redo everything with my own
| code.
|
| Why? Did Claude do a bad job?
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I had a similar feeling trying to calculate some combinatorial
| structures. At some point the LLM made a connection to extremal
| combinatorics and calculated tighter bounds and got me to the
| solution faster.
|
| Felt flashbacks of playing chess against humans online as a
| teen by copying moves from a chess engine.
|
| Whats the point haha
| ingatorp wrote:
| Then you haven't had any exciting idea and the need to actually
| build it. I personally like thinking of different projects and
| come up with ideas to make them unique. With Claude Code you
| can iterate like you're on steroids.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| I have bipolar disorder. The more frustrating aspects of coding
| have historically affected me tenfold (sometimes to the point of
| severe mania). Using Claude Code has been more like an
| accessibility tool in that regard. I no longer have to do the
| frustrating bits. Or at the very least, that aspect of the job is
| thoroughly diminished. And yes - coding is "fun again".
| TimFogarty wrote:
| I think coding can be an endurance sport sometimes. There are a
| lot of points at which you have to bang your head against a
| wall for hours or days to figure out the smallest issue. Having
| an agent do that frustrating part definitely lowers the
| endurance needed to stay productive on a project.
| adampunk wrote:
| This is the way. It's the most fun computers have been in
| decades.
| TimFogarty wrote:
| Same! After years in engineering management I'm building so many
| small side projects thanks to Claude Code. I'm creating at a
| breakneck pace. Claude Code has mostly raised the level of
| abstraction so I can focus much more on the creative aspect of
| building which has been so much fun.
|
| There are definitely a lot of limitations with Claude Code, but
| it's fun to work through the issues, figure out Claude's
| behavior, and create guardrails and workarounds. I do think that
| a lot of the poor behavior that agents exhibit can be fixed with
| more guardrails and scaffolding... so I'm looking forward to the
| future.
| pclowes wrote:
| "Hell-ya brother"
|
| 100% agree even with half your experience.
| pstuart wrote:
| Older here, equally excited. It's like programming with a team of
| your best buddies who are smarter than you but humble and eager
| to collaborate.
| d0gebro wrote:
| The split seems to be of at least a couple mindsets.
|
| AI haters trend towards affection for the jargon, languages, and
| falling down that rabbit hole. They _love_ Ruby, web apps,
| SaaS... the ecosystem of syntaxes. They love their job.
|
| Those that dig AI see code as a historically necessary tool to
| get a machine to do a thing. I fall in this category.
|
| I find the syntax and made up semantics boring, and doing
| interesting things with the machine interesting.
|
| Ymmv but both online and in the real world I have only
| encountered these two schools of thought, as they say, when AI
| comes up.
| juleiie wrote:
| I have this idea that probably violates some law of computing but
| I am really stubborn to make it happen somehow.
|
| I want a game that generates its own mechanics on the fly using
| AI. Generates itself live.
|
| Infinite game with infinite content. Not like no mans sky where
| everything is painfully predictable and schematic to a fault. No.
| Something that generates a whole method of generating. Some kind
| of ultra flexible communication protocol between engine and AI
| generator that is trained to program that protocol.
|
| Develop it into a framework.
|
| Use that framework to create one game. A dwarf fortress adventure
| mode 2.0
|
| I have no other desires, I have no other goals, I don't care. I
| or better yet - someone else, must do it.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| It sounds doable. An AI can be made to keep modifying a game's
| codebase. I imagine it'd be easiest to separate out a scripting
| layer for game mechanics & behavior that AI can iterate quickly
| on, although of course it could more riskily modify the engine
| itself.
|
| Then you could open voting up to a community for a weekly
| mechanics-change vote (similar to that recent repo where public
| voting decided what the AI would do next), and AI will
| implement it with whatever changes it sees fit.
|
| Honestly, without some dedicated human guidance and taste, it
| would probably be more of a novelty that eventually lost its
| shine.
| bGl2YW5j wrote:
| I've also been loving the speed Claude has enabled me to move at,
| and now agree that the coding part of SWE has become LLM-
| wrangling instead. I now see interacting with an LLM, to build
| all parts of software, as the new "frontend".
|
| Following this idea, what do people think "backend" work will
| involve? Building and tweaking models, and the infra around them?
| Obviously everyone will shift more into architecture and
| strategy, but in terms of hands-on technical work I'm interested
| in where people see this going.
| supermdguy wrote:
| I've been trying to learn a lot about domain driven design, I
| think knowledge crunching will be a huge part of the new
| software development role.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Was chatting with a friend about this:
|
| "I used to write java code and the compiler turned it into JVM
| bytecode.
|
| Now I write in English and the LLMs compile it into whatever
| language I want."
|
| Although as one HN commenter pointed out: English is a pretty
| bad programming language as it's way more ambiguous than most
| programming languages.
| sgc wrote:
| The English language has the _ability_ to be ambiguous, but I
| bet AI use will change the way we use the English language
| colloquially, to say more specifically what we mean. I worked
| as a home inspector for a while. Writing for an LLM is very
| similar to writing a home inspection report or legal brief
| (or talking to a group of teenagers). Navigate the minefield
| with very specific intention.
| par wrote:
| It's taken over my life, I am in a leadership position at faang
| but i'm daydreaming about getting back to my claude sessions at
| work.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Building things as I read this.
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps I shouldn't say this but I feel that with the current
| LLMs I've found "my people" :)
| tqwhite wrote:
| My wife calls Claude my girlfriend.
|
| I do a ton of programming but I also use it to learn all kinds
| of stuff. I'm into physics, history and philosophy and have
| done wonderful explorations.
|
| Now I tell it what I had for breakfast just to see what it
| says. Half the time it says something interesting and I end up
| exploring another new thing.
|
| "My people" for sure and everyone is mad at me because I think
| that.
|
| Also, I don't care what they think. I am all about the fun.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Getting claude to build mathematical models for me and running
| simulations really got me back into doing sciency things too.
| It's the model that's important, not the boilerplate each time!
| mfalcon wrote:
| "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"
| penneyd wrote:
| Same, early 50s and this is like the heyday of coding where you
| could rapidly iterate on things and actively make leaps and
| bounds of progress. Super fun.
| ares623 wrote:
| I'm so excited to be able to continue build things when I'm
| living on the streets. I'm glad to know that drive to create will
| always be with me and keep me warm during winters.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| You can't speak this kind of truth on hacker news!
|
| But, uh, yeah... I've been noticing a growing divide between
| people like OP who are either already retired or are wealthy
| enough that they could if they wanted to who absolutely love
| the new world of LLMs, and people who aren't currently
| financially secure and realize that LLMs are going to snatch
| their career away. Maybe not this year, but not too far out
| either.
| ares623 wrote:
| What I think is lost on ones like OP, is that yes, they are
| financially secure in the current climate. But if the future
| that everyone seems to be ushering in does come true, even
| ones like OP will be in a different state of security.
|
| How does the saying go again? "It takes a village to reach
| financially secure retirement"
| creamyhorror wrote:
| I'm enjoying the new era of agentic-coding all your ideas,
| but it's been obvious to me for a while that jobs are going
| to tend towards ones where you're liked by the decisionmaker
| or capital owner and kept around to be the middleman decider-
| delegator to others/AI/robots.
|
| Have warned my friends about this already.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Yeah this is some level of entitled selfish boomer talk here.
| Senior, stable, everything's fine for me, all of the ensuing
| impacts be damned.
| stuaxo wrote:
| A great thing you can do with LLMs:
|
| "in (language I'm familiar with) I use (some pattern or whatever)
| what's the equivalent in (other language)?"
|
| It's really great for doing bits and then get it to explain or
| you look and see what's wrong and modify it and learn.
| ms_menardi wrote:
| try asking claude to write in VB6. Make some Active Server Pages.
| Use COM components. Why not? We can do things "better" now, but
| what does that matter when you can do the same things as before,
| but better?
| thangalin wrote:
| Yes! Although 60 is still a decade away, I've spent a fair few
| evenings vibe-coding a FOSS dependency-free raw git repo
| browser.[1] Never would have even started such a project without
| LLMs because:
|
| * Implementing a raw Git reader is daunting.
|
| * Codifying syntax highlighting rules is laborious.
|
| * Developing a nice UI/UX is not super enjoyable for me.
|
| * Hardening with latest security measures would be tricky.
|
| * Crafting a templating language is time-consuming.
|
| Being able to orchestrate and design the high-level architecture
| while letting the LLM take care of the details is extremely
| rewarding. Moving all my repositories away from GitLab, GitHub,
| and BitBucket to a single repo under my own control is priceless.
|
| [1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/treetrek/
| scottLobster wrote:
| Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people
| seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't
| help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously
| vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the
| breathless announcements of the death of software engineering,
| but quite similar in tone.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building
| out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC
| campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid
| adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against
| and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of
| the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly
| extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up,
| gets added to cart and purchased.
|
| It's the kind of thing that would be hours of tedious work,
| then even more time to actually make all the changes to the
| account. Instead I just say "yeah do all of that" and it is
| done. Magic stuff. Thousands of lines of Python to hit the
| Amazon APIs that I've never even looked at.
| scottLobster wrote:
| And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands
| of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you
| verify the end result?
|
| I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my
| co-workers without testing
| notAnAIBot768 wrote:
| Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The
| machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine
| it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked
| at...
| scottLobster wrote:
| None of that is generated by an LLM prone to
| hallucination and is perfectly deterministic unless
| there's a hardware problem.
|
| And yes, I have occasionally run into compiler bugs in my
| career. That's one reason we test.
| notAnAIBot768 wrote:
| > None of that is generated by an LLM
|
| How did you verify that?
|
| > prone to hallucination
|
| You know humans can hallucinate?
|
| > is perfectly deterministic
|
| We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the
| deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking
| at it.
|
| > That's one reason we test
|
| That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by
| an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that
| aren't coding.
|
| I get there's a difference. Shitty code can be produced
| by LLMs or humans. LLMs really can pump out the shitty
| code. I just think the argument that you cant trust code
| you haven't viewed is not a good argument. I very much
| trust a lot of code I've never seen, and yes I've been
| bitten by it too.
|
| Not trying to be an ass, more trying to figure out how im
| going to deal for the next decade before retirement age.
| Uts going to be a lot of testing and verification I guess
| xigoi wrote:
| > How did you verify that?
|
| The compiler works without an internet connection and
| requires too little resources to be secretly running a
| local model. (Also, you can't inspect the source code.)
|
| > You know humans can hallucinate?
|
| We are talking about compilers...
|
| > We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the
| deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking
| at it.
|
| Unlike a compiler, an LLM does not produce code in a
| deterministic way, so it's not guaranteed to do what the
| input tells it to.
| tqwhite wrote:
| It is for me because the LLM makes my ability to evaluate
| super, too.
| bandrami wrote:
| "Trust"? God no. That's why I have a debugger
| bandrami wrote:
| Also you really do have to know how the underlying
| assembly integer operations work or you can get yourself
| into a world of hurt. Do they not still teach that in CS
| classes?
| bobanrocky wrote:
| Compiler theory and implementation is based on
| mathematical and logic principles. And hence much more
| provable and trustworthy than a LLM thats stitching
| together pieces of text based on 'training'
| gopher_space wrote:
| It's thousands of lines of variation on my own hand-
| tooling, run through tests I designed, automated by the
| sort of onboarding docs I should have been writing years
| ago.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I've been doing agentic work for companies for the past
| year and first of all, error rates have dropped to 1-2%
| with the leading Q3 and Q4 models... 2026's Q1 models
| blowing those out the water and being cheaper in some way
|
| but second of all, even when error rates were 20%, the time
| savings still meant A Viable Business. a much more viable
| business actually, a scarily crazy viable business with
| many annoyed customers getting slop of some sort, with a
| human in the loop correcting things from the LLM before it
| went out to consumers
|
| agentic LLM coders are better than your co-workers. they
| can also write tests. they can do stress testing, load
| testing, end to end testing, and in my experience that's
| not even what course corrects LLMs that well, so we
| shouldn't even be trying to replicate processes made for
| humans with them. like a human, the LLM is prone to just
| correct the test as the test uses a deprecated assumption
| as opposed to product changes breaking a test to reveal a
| regression.
|
| in my experience, type errors, compiler errors, logs on
| deployment and database entries have made the LLM correct
| its approach more than tests. Devops and Data science, more
| than QA.
| tqwhite wrote:
| Why wouldn't you test? That sounds like a bad thing.
|
| Me? I use AI to write tests just as I use it to write
| everything else. I pay a lot of attention to what's being
| done including code quality but I am no more insecure about
| trusting those thousands of tested lines than I am about
| trusting the byte code generated from the 'strings of
| code'.
|
| We have just moved up another level of abstraction, as we
| have done many times before. It will take time to perfect
| but it's already amazing.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| So people don't look at the code, or the tests.
|
| So they don't know if it has the right behavior to begin
| with, or even if the tests are testing the right
| behavior.
|
| This is what people are talking about. This is why nobody
| responsible wants to uberscale a serious app this way.
| It's ridiculous to see so much hype in this thread,
| people claiming they've built entire businesses without
| looking at any code. Keep your business away from me,
| then.
| incr_me wrote:
| In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:
|
| - A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter
|
| - A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide
| generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)
|
| - A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected
| words/sentences in context
|
| - An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS
|
| - A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer
| (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)
|
| - A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript
|
| - An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental
| materialized views
|
| ...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic,
| or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off
| utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part
| of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any
| work done on, and so on.
|
| I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all
| of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times
| where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated
| because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of
| fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The other week I used Copilot to write a program that scans all
| our Amazon accounts and regions, collects services and
| versions, and finds the ones going EOL within a year. The data
| on EOL dates is scraped from several sources and kept in JSON.
| There's about 16 different AWS API calls used. It generates
| reports in markdown, json, and csv, so humans can read the
| markdown (flags major things, explains stuff), and the csv can
| be used to triage, prioritize, track work over time. The result
| is deduplicated, sorted, consolidated (similar entries), and
| classified. I can automatically send reports to teams based on
| a regex of names or tags. This is more data than I get from AWS
| Health Dashboard, and can put it into any format I want, across
| any number of accounts/regions.
|
| Afaik there are no open source projects that do this. AWS has a
| behemoth of a distributed system you can deploy in order to do
| something similar. But I made a Python script that does it in
| an afternoon with a couple of prompts.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff
| that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or
| brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves.
|
| I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some
| people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike
| AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming
| but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world
| with it, and they use them as a tool. And then some people just
| like tinkering and building _things_ for the sake of making
| stuff, and they get a kick out of vibe coding because it lets
| them add more things to their things-i-built collection.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I will say that I grieve the passing of 'coding', per se. I
| used to love getting the flow, envisioning the data flows and
| object structures and cool mechanisms, refactoring to
| perfection. I truly miss it.
|
| But the payoff for letting that go is huge.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what,
| exactly, is being coded_
|
| Why? You don't trust a newly-created account that has not
| engaged with any of the comments to be anything but truthful?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The combination of the internet and how insanely pushed every
| single facet of AI bullshit is has made me incredibly cynical.
| I see a post like this reach the top of HN by a nobody, getting
| top votes and all I can think is that this is once again,
| another campaign to try and make people feel better about AI.
|
| Every time I've asked people about what the hell they're
| actually doing with AI, they vanish into the ether. No one
| posts proof, they never post a link to a repo, they don't
| mention what they're doing at their job. The most I ever see is
| that someone managed to vibe code a basic website or a CRUD app
| that even a below-average engineer can whip up in a day or two.
|
| Like this entire thread is just the equivalent of karma farming
| on Reddit or whatever nonsense people post on Facebook
| nowadays.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| think about why anybody would ever associate a production level
| product with slop when consumers are polarized towards
| generative AI
|
| this site gets indexed
|
| there are too many disincentives to cater specifically to your
| suspicion and cynicism
| izacus wrote:
| It's also usually from people who stopped coding and haven't
| kept their skills up.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| Or have no more skin in the game, retirement.
| kdheiwns wrote:
| Yes. I never really see people say wtf they're making. It's
| always "AI bot wrote 200k lines of code for me!" Alright, cool.
| Is the project something completely new? Useful? A rushed
| remake of a project that already exists in GitHub with actual
| human support behind it? I _never_ see an answer.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff,
| too.
|
| I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to
| support an assistant with structured memory and many helpful
| capabilities.
|
| I have clients. I automated a complicated data ingestion
| pipeline into a desktop app with a bulletproof process queue,
| localhost control panel and many features.
|
| For another, I am writing an AI-specific app that is so cool.
| I wish I could tell you about it but it's definitely not a
| rushed remake of anything.
|
| I hope that helps.
| agenticbanana wrote:
| SuperSecretCrypt.com doesn't work.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > SuperSecretCrypt.com
|
| Is down. And the scoring one, no offense, seems like a
| project a junior would make to pad out their
| resume/portfolio. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I
| fail to see how this translates to all the hype being
| thrown around.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff, too.
|
| I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to support
| an assistant with structured memory and many helpful
| capabilities.
|
| I have a freelance gig with a startup adapting AI to their
| concept. I have one serious app under my belt and more on the
| way.
|
| Concrete enough?
| agenticbanana wrote:
| SuperSecretCrypt.com doesn't work.
| dplgk wrote:
| Yes and they all mention Claude as if it's the only LLM that
| can code.
| hippich wrote:
| Some _fun_ stuff i "coded" in a day each just in last couple
| weeks:
|
| https://hippich.github.io/minesweeper/ - no idea why but i had
| a couple weeks desire to play minesweeper. at some point i
| wanted to get a way to quickly estimate probability of the mine
| presence in each cell.. No problem - copilot coded both
| minesweeper and then added probabilities (hidden behind "Learn"
| checkbox) - Bonus, my wife now plays game "made" by me and not
| some random version from Play store.
|
| another one made in a day -
| https://hippich.github.io/OpenCamber - I am putting together
| old car, so will need to align wheels on it at some point.
| There is Gyraline, but it is iOS only (I think because
| precision is not good enough on Android?). And it is not free.
| I have no idea how well it will work in practice, but I can try
| it, because the cost of trying it is so low now!
|
| yes, both of these are not serious and fun projects. unlikely
| to have any impact. but it is _fun_! =)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| From what I've seen, and of course the models get better
| everyday, if you have very simple grunt work that needs to be
| done. Coding agents are basically magic. The moment something
| gets either difficult or subjective, coding agents love to add
| completely incorrect solutions.
|
| Try to tell Claude Code to refactor some code and see if it
| doesn't just delete the entire file and rewrite it. Sure that's
| cute, but it's absolutely not okay in a real software
| environment.
|
| I do find this stuff great for hobbyist projects. I don't know if
| I'd be willing to put money on the line yet
| tqwhite wrote:
| I am a professional for forty five years.
|
| Your description of the experience tells me that you have not
| figured out how to do it correctly.
|
| I NEVER have bad experiences like that. I absolutely DO create
| production grade software reliably every day.
|
| Treat it as collaborator instead of as a servant. You will get
| much better results.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Try to get Claude to use an uncommon toolset, like
| Haxe/HaxeFixel.
|
| I guarantee you it will make up apis , apologize and then
| make up more.
|
| A simple "I don't know" would be much productive
| tmh88j wrote:
| > I am a professional for forty five years.
|
| > I NEVER have bad experiences like that. I absolutely DO
| create production grade software reliably every day.
|
| You're all over this post commenting the same thing and
| shared 2 projects that you created. One of them doesn't even
| load (superSecretCrypt.com) and the other (scoreRummy.com)
| looks and feels like the result of a tutorial from the 90's.
| balls187 wrote:
| I'm on a field trip chaperoning my kid. I get a couple slack
| messages asking for some tweaks to a UI. I type a couple words
| into a Github AI Agent Session while riding the bus. Fixes are
| deployed to our staging env in 10 minutes.
|
| Fucking wild.
| meebee wrote:
| So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted
| but couldn't take the time to develop on my own. I'm 66 and have
| been in the software field in various capacities (but programming
| mostly as a hobby). Here's a partial list of apps I've completed
| in the last few months:
|
| - Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and
| I want to watch
|
| - Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases
|
| - Health Log for medical history, doc appointments and past
| visits
|
| - Habits Tracker with trends I'm interested
|
| - Daily Wisdom Reader instead of having multiple ebooks to keep
| track of where I'm at
|
| - A task manager similar to the old LifeBalance app
|
| - A Home Inventory app so that I can track what I have, warranty,
| and maintenance
|
| - An ios watch app to see when I'm asleep so that it can turn off
| my music or audiobook
|
| - An ios watch chess tactics trainer app
|
| - some games
|
| Many of these are similar to paid offerings, but those didn't
| check off all the features I really wanted, so I vibe-coded my
| own. They all do what I want, the way I want it to.
| rubidium wrote:
| And the biggest thing is that: software the way we want is much
| easier. No ads. No monthly cost.
| meebee wrote:
| Exactly! One of the reasons I vibed my own Ulysses/Bear
| similar app for journaling and notetaking with the essential
| features I need and no subscription.
| coffeecoders wrote:
| This is the reason. I have just been vibe-coding my way for a
| few months now, got almost all the tools (except Browser and
| Mail) that I use daily, designed by me (with the help of LLM).
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm curious what you mean by that. Tools I use include git
| and jj. I don't think I want my own versions of those. I use
| VSCode and Sublime Merge and gg. I'd be curious how far I
| could LLM code those. It'd be certainly easy to pull up
| Electron with Monaco but I'd probably just LLM code
| extensions. And I use lots of software via the browser (maps,
| google docs, chat, slack, discord, ...), I don't I'd want to
| make those. iIterm2, XCode, zsh, I don't think I want to LLM
| code a shell but that might be cool.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| That's amazing!!
|
| Can I ask, do you pay for any server service or run your own or
| are these standalone apps?
|
| For me, many of your ideas, if I was to implement them, I'd
| want them to have a server. Habits Tracker, need to access from
| whatever device I'm on at that moment. Grocery List. Same
| thing, and multiple users so everyone in the same house can add
| things to one list.
|
| Etc....
|
| This is not really LLM related but I feel like I have a
| blindspot, or hurdle or something where I haven't done enough
| server work be comfortable making these solutions. Trying to be
| clearer, I've setup a few servers in the past so it's not like
| I can't do it. It's more a feeling for comfort, or maybe
| discomfort.
|
| Example: If you ask me to make a static website, or a blog, I'd
| immediately make a new github repo, install certain tools
| (static site generator or whatever), setup the github actions,
| register a new domain if needed, setup the CNAME, check it it's
| working. If I think it's going to be popular put cloudflare in
| front of it. I'm 100% confident in that process. I'm not saying
| my process is perfect. Only that I'm confident of it. I also
| know what it costs, $10-$20 a year for the domain name and
| maybe a yearly subscription to github
|
| Conversely, if I was to make anything that was NOT a static
| server but actually a server with users and accounts, then I
| just have to go read up on the latest and cross my fingers I'm
| not leaking user data, have an XSS, going to get a bill for
| $250k from a DOS attack, picking the right kind of database, ID
| service, logging, etc... I could expose a home server but then
| be worried it'll get hacked. Need to find a backup solution,
| etc....
|
| I know someone will respond I'm worrying to much but I hoping
| for more example of what others are doing for these things. Is
| there some amazing saas that solves all of this that most of
| you use? Some high-level framework that solves all of this and
| I just pick "publish" don't have to worry about giant bills?
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| You're looking for something like Vercel or Firebase
| meebee wrote:
| Most all of the apps sync with iCloud so it syncs across all
| of my devices.
|
| However the MediaWatch app syncs between me and my wife which
| iCloud does not support (as a sidenote, this is one of the
| hallucination traps that both Claude and ChatGPT led me down
| -- both said it was possible, and after a few weeks and many,
| many hours, I learned the major constraints. I was not
| wanting any of my apps on the Appstore, so that blew that
| option). Anyway, I ended up making a small simple SQLite
| database using python on my Pi and use that for my sync
| needs. The devices only sync while at home, which was not a
| problem for me. Also I'm not exposing the database to
| external security issues.
| fidicen wrote:
| I've never built anything outside of a python notebook before,
| but Claude Code felt like magic to me.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| My main worry is: what is the license on the code produced by
| Claude (or any other coding agent)? It seems like, if it was
| trained using open-source software, then the resulting code needs
| to be open-source as well and it should be compatible with the
| original source. Artwork produced by an AI cannot be copyrighted,
| but apparently code can be?
|
| If the software produced is for internal use, the point is
| probably moot. But if it isn't, this seems like a question that
| needs to be answered ASAP.
| samiv wrote:
| As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent
| decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now
| that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their
| way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated
| and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull!
|
| My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.
| BatFastard wrote:
| IMHO any idiot can create a piece of crap. It takes experience
| to create good software. Use your experience Luke! Now you have
| a team of programmers to create what ever you fancy! Its been
| great for me, but I have only been programming C++ for 36
| years.
| elevation wrote:
| I'm with you here.
|
| I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software
| stalled at certain points. When I couldn't get a particular os
| API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn't exist, and I
| had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just
| working around it.
|
| After decades writing software I have done my best to be a
| mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability
| to help people understand the technology they're using, I've
| helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers
| understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots.
| I've really enjoyed giving back.
|
| But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler
| could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct
| answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs
| mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.
| atonse wrote:
| Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart
| and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't
| have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic
| questions.
|
| That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though.
| It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy
| person on higher-level things, like relationship building,
| rather than more basic questions.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| How would this affect future generations of ... well
| anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart
| mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem
| they might face?
|
| Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let
| your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to
| a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not
| physically in size, obviously).
| atonse wrote:
| I agree with you about using our brains. I honestly have
| no idea.
|
| But I can tell you that, just like with most things in
| life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly
| getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think
| about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing,
| smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages)
| and not have to do things most people don't want to do,
| like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code,
| refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually
| moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non
| tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document
| formatting.
|
| So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have
| never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20
| mins (which most people used to do all the time before
| abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that
| we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to
| not just get instant gratification is something that's
| happening all over in life.
|
| Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't
| know how it'll affect society.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Just because you have every instruction manual doesn't
| mean you can follow and perform the steps or have time to
| or can adapt to a real world situation.
| simonw wrote:
| "No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know
| how to use an LLM correctly."
|
| The "as long as they know how..." is doing a lot of work
| there.
|
| I expect developers with mentors who help give them the
| grounding they need to ask questions will get there a whole
| lot faster than developers without.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I have this feeling as well. At one point I thought when I
| got older it might be nice to teach - Steve Wozniak
| apparently does. But, it doesn't feel like I can really add
| much. Students have infinite teachers on youtube, and now
| they have Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT which are amazing. Sure,
| today, maybe, I could see myself as mostly a chaperone in
| some class to once in a while help a student out with some
| issue but that possibility seems like it will be gone in 1 to
| 2 years.
| ilc wrote:
| As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.
|
| I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the
| thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place
| I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same
| skill. Making good technical decisions.
|
| And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force
| multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins
| a hair.
| herdymerzbow wrote:
| As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit
| limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is
| always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides
| inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full
| context of a project/task. While it understands what good
| structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of
| good design and architecture and applying to the questions I
| have, and I don't have have the experience or skill set to
| ask those questions. It often suggests solutions (I tend to
| ask it for suggestions rather than full code, so I can work
| it out myself) that may have drawbacks that I only discover
| down the line.
|
| Any suggestions to overcome this deficit in design
| experience? My best guess is to read some texts on code
| design or alternatively get a job at a place to learn design
| in practice. Mainly learning javascript and web app
| development at the moment.
|
| *Who has had a career in a previous field, and doesn't
| necessarily think that learning programming with lead to
| another career (and is okay with that).
| ilc wrote:
| I can't summarize 40~ YOE of programming easily. (30+
| professional)
|
| I can tell you: Your problems are a layer higher than you
| think.
|
| Coding, Architecture, etc. Those get the face time.
| Process, and Discipline, and where the money is made and
| lost in AI.
|
| To give a minor example: My first attempt at a major
| project with AI failed HORRIBLY. But I stepped back and
| figured out why. What short-comings did my approach have,
| what short-comings did the AI have. Root Cause Analysis.
|
| Next day I sat down with the AI and developed a PLAN of
| what to do. Yes, a day spent on a plan.
|
| Then we executed the plan. (or it did and I kept it on
| track, and fixed problems in the plan as things happened.)
| On the third day I'd completed a VERY complex task. I mean
| STUPIDLY complex, something I knew WHAT I wanted to do, and
| roughly how, but not the exact details, and not at the
| level to implement it. I'm sure 1-2 weeks of research could
| have taught me. Or I could let the AI do it.
|
| ... And that formed my style of working with AI.
|
| If you need a mentor pop in the Svalboard discord, and join
| #sval-dev. You should be able to figure out who I am.
| atonse wrote:
| > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM.
|
| I've been a tech lead for years and have written business
| critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to
| writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x
| faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste,
| architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And
| as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.
|
| I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this
| stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize
| abilities.
|
| Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their
| brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire
| expensive software people. Most of them were never going to
| hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their
| heads.
| samiv wrote:
| What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do
| you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for
| this?
|
| One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of
| software per some unit and increase the volume.
|
| But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue
| to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries.
|
| So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too.
| When revenues go down lay offs will happen, salary cuts will
| happen.
|
| This is not fictional. Markets already reacted to this and
| many software service companies took a hit.
| rps93 wrote:
| Just sold a house/moved out after being laid off in mid-
| January from a govt IT contractor(there for 8 great years
| and mostly remote). I started my UX Research, Design and
| Front End Web Design coding career in 2009, but now I think
| it's almost a stupid go nowhere vanishing career, thanks to
| AI.
|
| I think much like you that AI is and will just continue to
| destroy the economy! At least I got to sell a house and
| make a profit--stash it away for when the big AI market
| crash happens (hopefully not a 2030 great depression tho).
| As then it's a down market and buying stocks, bitcoin and
| houses is always cheaper.
| atonse wrote:
| I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to.
|
| But my take on this is that accountability will still be a
| purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a
| contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM,
| and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3
| words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that
| was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff).
| When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated
| them.
|
| So I told him that:
|
| 1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it
| generated and ensure it's still good.
|
| 2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he
| do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic
| outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we
| should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But
| that's not what happened here.
|
| So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few
| years) "my AI was at fault" - you are ultimately
| responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to
| delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately
| they'll have to delegate to fewer people.
| eisa01 wrote:
| What drives that behavior is what I like to call human
| slop :)
| jgilias wrote:
| In general I agree. But it's somehow very unlikely for
| the AI to generate a three word ticket. That's what
| humans do. AI might generate an overly verbose and
| specific ticket instead.
| codebolt wrote:
| Any given system will still need people around to steer the
| AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained
| responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs
| at a financial company, and not worried about my future at
| all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the
| backlog of potential projects is still basically endless-
| why would anyone want to fire me?
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Why would it need people to steer the AI? I can easily
| see a future where companies that don't rely on the
| physical world (like manufacturing) are completely
| autonomous, just machines making money for their owner.
| codebolt wrote:
| It's easy to imagine but there's still a vast amount of
| innovation and development that has to happen before
| something like that becomes realistic. At that point the
| whole system of capitalism would need to be reconsidered.
| Not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
| skydhash wrote:
| Yours is a naive sight. You learn a bit about engineering
| and feedback control and realize that the world is too
| complex for that.
| anonnon wrote:
| > why would anyone want to fire me?
|
| Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer
| the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Anyone that only costs $30k-50k would either be doing
| this part-time, or have some limit that prevented them
| from earning $150k-250k.
| demosito666 wrote:
| Or not living in US?
| codebolt wrote:
| The difference between having a non-technical person and
| someone who is capable of understanding the code being
| generated and the systems running it is immense, and will
| continue to be so over the foreseeable future.
| codebolt wrote:
| Just because somebody has a bunch of power tools doesn't
| mean I'd ask them to build my house.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do
| you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for
| this?
|
| I'm assuming that the software factory of the future is
| going to need Millwrights
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwright
|
| But, builders are builders. These tools turn ideas into
| things, a builders dream.
| post-it wrote:
| If AI completely erases the profession of software
| developer, I'll find something else to do. Like I can't in
| good faith ever oppose a technology just because it's going
| to make my job redundant, that would be insane.
| ipaddr wrote:
| There may not be a job for you in an office setting. What
| would you do?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's when the problem shifts from individual to
| systemic, and only systemic solutions fix systemic
| problems.
| pajamasam wrote:
| I think that a what a lot of anti-AI folks are trying to
| argue without saying it explicitly is that it already is
| a systemic problem. They're not necessarily against the
| technology on its own, but against the systemic problems
| it would introduce if society doesn't take a stance
| against it.
| post-it wrote:
| I'd buy some good gloves and steel-toed boots.
| rapnie wrote:
| Take that to its extreme. Suppose there was a technology
| that you do not own that would make everyone's job
| redundant. Everyone out of a job. There is no need for
| education, for skills to be mastered, for expertise.
| Would it still be insane to complain?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There are bigger issues if everyone is out of a job.
| mchaver wrote:
| Then society needs to collectively decide how to allocate
| resources. Uh oh!
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| the resources go to the guys with the AI duh
| duskdozer wrote:
| The owners of the AI companies will collectively decide
| how to allocate resources, rather.
| rkuodys wrote:
| Isnt' that what old-school software did for many years?
| It used to take jobs, just not from developers. If you
| implement software that takes accounting from 10 people
| to 2, 8 just got fired. If you have Support solution
| helping one support rep answer 100 requests instead of
| 20, you just optimised support force by the rate of 1 to
| 5.
|
| I'm in the boat of SaaS myself, but feel a bit dishonesty
| from Senior devs complaining about technology stealing
| jobs. When it was them doing the stealing, it was fine.
| Now that the tables have turned, it's not technology is
| bad
| jhgb wrote:
| Jevons' paradox still exists. Making X cheaper (usually
| by needing fewer people to do one unit of X) can and
| often does lead to more people being needed for X.
| iExploder wrote:
| take that to absolute extreme. Why do we even need a job?
| If all our physical needs are met maybe humanity can
| finally focus on real problems (spiritual, mental, inter
| personal) that no amount of "jobs" can solve...
| pajamasam wrote:
| Because greedy capitalists control the world which means
| that most people's most basic needs aren't met if they
| don't have a job.
| darkwater wrote:
| I believe that if situation gets _that_ bad, then we will
| actually do some new kind of revolution, even in the
| West.
| hk__2 wrote:
| You still need education, skills to be mastered and
| expertise even in a world without jobs. How would you
| play any game or sport without skills?
| post-it wrote:
| A world where there is no need for work? Oh no, my steak
| is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| A world where there is no need for workers--not at all
| the same thing.
|
| You may not end up with a seat at the table.
| jmalicki wrote:
| "One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost
| of software per some unit and increase the volume.
|
| But..cost = revenue."
|
| That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been
| completely disproven.
|
| You don't charge what it costs to build something, you
| charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.
| jthrilly wrote:
| Congrats - you caused me to create an account to reply,
| due to the sheer density of your incorrectness.
|
| - First, the LTV was not Marx's idea. Adam Smith held the
| same view, as did many many others during this era. Marx
| refined this idea, but there's nothing about your point
| that is unique to his version of it.
|
| - Second, while LTV is not widely used today, this is not
| because it was "completely disproven" (can you cite
| anything to back this claim up?). It is because economics
| shifted to a different paradigm based on marginal
| utility. These two frameworks operate at different levels
| of abstraction and address different aspects of the price
| of goods. There is actually empirical evidence of a
| correlation between the cost of a good and the cost of
| the labour, at an aggregate level.
|
| - Third, Marx explicitly differentiated between _value_
| and _price_. LTV deals with value exclusively (in other
| words, what happens when externalities impacting price
| are accounted for). He would have had no issue accepting
| that externalities impacting supply and demand would
| impact price.
|
| The final irony of your comment is that the commenter's
| claim that you are incorrectly analysing is actually also
| fully defensible under your (presumably) neoclassical
| view of economics. In competitive markets, reduced
| production costs lead to reduced equilibrium prices as
| competitors undercut each other. The proposition that in
| the long run, under competition, price tends toward cost
| is a standard result in microeconomics. The idea that
| "you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay"
| only holds without qualification in monopoly or
| monopolistic competition with strong differentiation,
| which are precisely the conditions that increased
| software supply would erode.
| jmalicki wrote:
| Efficient markets barely exist anywhere, especially in
| tech, it's all monopolistic competition that's bad for
| the consumer and increases inequality.
| deanmen wrote:
| The price is determined by SUPPLY and demand, and being
| able to write software quickly using LLMS would move the
| supply curve.
| kazinator wrote:
| The models will not keep betting better. We have pased "peak
| LLM" already, by my estimate. Some of the parlour tricks that
| are wrapped around the models will make some incremental
| improvements, but the underlying models are done. More data,
| more parameters, are no longer doing to do anything.
|
| AI will have to take a different direction.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to
| this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that
| democratize abilities.
|
| Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs
| in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-
| end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once,
| which is completely at odds with the modular approach that
| most of the team wants to take, and would involve building
| out a whole system based around one concrete app and 4
| vaporware future maybe apps.
|
| And of course the higher-ups are like "But this is halfway
| done! With AI we can build things in 2 weeks that used to six
| months! Let's just build everything now!" Nevermind that we
| don't even have the requirements now, and nailing those down
| is the hardest part of the whole project. But the higher-ups
| never live through that grind.
| ministryofwarp wrote:
| It reemphasizes the question of importance. Would a user
| accept their data needing a AI implementation of a
| ("manual") migration and their flow completely changing?
| Does reliability to existing users even matter in the
| companies plans?
|
| If it isn't a product that needs to solve problems reliably
| over time then it was kind of silly to use a DBA that cost
| twice the Backend engineer and only handled the data niche.
| We progressed from there or regressed from there depending
| on why we are developing software.
| sigseg1v wrote:
| This scenario is not new with AI at all though? 14 years
| ago I watched a group of 3 front-end devs spin up a proof
| of concept in ember.js that has a flashy front end, all
| fake data, and demo it to execs. They wowed the execs and
| every time the execs asked "how long would it take to fix
| (blank) to actually show (blank)?" the devs hit f12,
| inspect element, and typed in what they asked for and said
| "already done!".
|
| It was missing years of backend and had maybe 1/20th
| feature parity with what we already had and it would have,
| in hindsight, been literally impossible to implement some
| of the things we would need in the future if we had went
| down that path. But they were amazed by this flashy new
| thing that devs made in a weekend that looked great but was
| actually a disaster.
|
| I fail to see how this is any different than what people
| are complaining about with vibe coded LLM stuff a decade
| and a half later now? This was always being done and will
| continue to be done; it's not a new problem.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| The difference is now _anyone_ can spin up a vibe-coded
| site that wows execs.
| xigoi wrote:
| > I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to
| this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that
| democratize abilities.
|
| Programming was already "democratized" in the sense that
| anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-
| source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil
| megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You know what they mean by that term, it's about building
| things without needing to put in the learning effort. I
| have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something
| they would not have done via learning to code and typing it
| manually.
|
| It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to
| AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative
| difference in the people now able to generate whatever they
| want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying
| "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very
| convincing. People _don 't_ want to do that yet still get
| an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you
| do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the
| "proper" way is to learn it by hand.
|
| Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.
| LPisGood wrote:
| On the bright side, working in tech between 2006 and 2026 means
| you should be extremely wealthy and able to retire comfortably.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Uh if you worked for a top company or something. Most tech
| workers have made relatively ordinary salaries the last 20
| years.
| niorad wrote:
| In SV probably. As a lead FE dev with 14 yoe in Munich I'm at
| 85kEUR, thats not even enough to pay off a loan for a house
| around here.
| cube00 wrote:
| _Cries in federal employee wages_
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| No offense but you sound more like a "principle coder", not a
| principle engineer. At least in many domains and orgs, Most
| principal engineers are already spending most their time not
| coding. But -engineering- still take sip much or most of their
| time.
|
| I felt what you describe feeling. But it lasted like a week in
| December. Otherwise there's still tons of stuff to build and my
| teams need me to design the systems and review their designs.
| And their prompt machine is not replacing my good sense.
| There's plenty of engineering to do, even if the coding writes
| itself.
| dionian wrote:
| I make documentation and diagrams for myself rather than
| writing code much of the time
| pelcg wrote:
| > As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've
| spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and
| now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt
| their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very
| unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull!
|
| Really?
|
| The vibe coders are running into a dark forest with a bunch of
| lobsters (OpenClaw) getting lost and confused in their own tech
| debt and you're saying they can prompt their way to the _same_
| software?
|
| Someone just ended up wiping their entire production database
| with Claude and you believe that your experience is for
| nothing, towards companies that need stable infrastructure and
| predictability.
|
| Cognitive debt is a real thing and being unable to read / write
| code that is broken is going to be an increasing problem which
| experienced engineers can solve.
|
| Do not fall for the AI agent hype.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| > Do not fall for the AI agent hype.
|
| Problem is, it's the people in higher positions who should be
| aware of that, except they don't care. All they would see is
| how much more profit company can make if it reduces
| workforce.
|
| Plenty of engineers do realize that AI is not some magical
| solution to everything - but the money and hype tends to
| overshadow cooler heads on HN.
| fma wrote:
| This is exactly it. The junior and mids on my team produce
| Junior and mid quality level vibe code.
|
| Too generic prompts, unaccounted edge casez, inattentive
| code reviews...
| YZF wrote:
| I consider myself very good at writing software. I built and
| shipped many projects. I built systems from zero. Embedded,
| distributed, SaaS- you name it.
|
| I'm having a lot of fun with AI. Any idiot can't prompt their
| way to the same software I can write. Not yet anyways.
| bitwize wrote:
| What I keep hearing is that the people who weren't very good at
| writing software are the ones reluctant to embrace LLMs because
| they are too emotionally attached to "coding" as a discipline
| rather than design and architecture, which are where the
| interesting and actually difficult work is done.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Really? To me it seems that quite the opposite is true -
| people who were never very good at writing code are excited
| about LLMs because suddenly they can pretend to be architects
| without understanding what's happening in the codebase.
|
| Same as with AI-art, where people without much drawing skills
| were excited about being able to make "art".
| sawmurai wrote:
| Perhaps you are both right. People who see coding as a
| means to an end enjoy LLMs while people who saw it as the
| most enjoyable part don't.
| oulu2006 wrote:
| This is more accurate, I've written enough code in my
| life to never really want to do it again ....but I still
| love creating (code was merely the way to do it) so LLMs
| help with my underlying passion.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon.
|
| What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI
| fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!"
|
| This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic
| but because of the way life goes he never really had
| opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI
| first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super
| excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of
| pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However,
| after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he
| didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided
| to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be
| able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some
| chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in
| the past couple of years.
|
| So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for
| people who just want to see the end result, but in the end
| would they actually learn anything?
| pizza wrote:
| I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals,
| needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a
| catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI
| was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he
| learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| I suppose, yes, AI was like a kickstart. But the point is -
| he didn't just stick to AI, he realized that in terms of
| skill and fulfillment it's a no-go direction. Because you
| neither learn anything, nor create anything yourself.
| bitwize wrote:
| I feel the same way. But this is a new economy now,
| software is cheap, and regarding the skill and
| fulfillment you derive writing it yourself, to quote
| Chris Farley: "that and a nickel will get you a nice hot
| cup of JACK SQUAT!!!"
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I urge you to actually try these tools. You will very quickly
| realize you have nothing to worry about.
|
| In the hands of a knowledgeable engineer these tools can save a
| lot of drudge work because you have the experience to spot when
| they're going off the rails.
|
| Now imagine someone who doesn't have the experience, and is not
| able to correct where necessary. Do you really think that's
| going to end well?
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Yeah, even just now I had to go and correct some issues with
| LLM output that I only knew were an issue because I have
| extensive experience with that domain. If I didn't have that
| I would not have caught it and it would have been a major
| issue down the line.
|
| LLM's remove much of the drudgery of programming that we
| unfortunately sort of did to ourselves collectively.
| bri3d wrote:
| This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief.
|
| My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_
| software, and the differentiator is in having the right
| experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is
| also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel
| personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel
| that it's a huge force multiplier for me.
|
| Where my concern about LLM generated software comes in is much
| more existential: how do we train people who know the
| difference between bad software and good software in the
| future? What I've seen is a pattern where experienced engineers
| are excellent at steering AI to make themselves multiples more
| effective, and junior engineers are replacing their previous
| sloppy output with ten times their previous sloppy output.
|
| For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the
| sloppy output looks nice in the short term, and overall, many
| organizations strategically think they are pointed in the right
| direction doing this and are happy to downsize blaming "AI."
| And, for places where this never really mattered (like "make my
| small business landing page,") this is an complete upheaval,
| without a doubt.
|
| My concern is basically: what will we do long term to get
| people from one end to another without the organic learning
| process that comes from having sloppy output curated and
| improved with a human touch by more senior engineers, and
| without an economic structure which allows "junior" engineers
| to subsidize themselves with low-end work while they learn? I
| worry greatly that in 5-10 years many organizations will end up
| with 10x larger balls of "legacy" garbage and 10x fewer
| knowledgeable people to fix it. For an experienced engineer I
| actually think this is a great career outlook and I can't
| understand the rug pull take at all; I think that today's
| strong and experienced engineer will be command a high amount
| of money and prestige in five years as the bottom drops out of
| software. From a "global outcomes" perspective this seems
| terrible, though, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| My guesses are
|
| 1. We'll train the LLMs not to make sloppy code.
|
| 2. We'll come up with better techinques to make guardrails to
| help
|
| Making up examples:
|
| * right now, lots of people code with no tests. LLMs do
| better with tests. So, training LLMs to make new and better
| tests.
|
| * right now, many things are left untested because it's work
| to build the infrastructure to test them. Now we have LLMs to
| help us build that infrustructure so we can use it make
| better tests for LLMs.
|
| * ...?
| jgilias wrote:
| * better languages and formal verification. If an LLM codes
| in Rust, there's a class of bugs that just can't happen. I
| imagine we can develop languages with built-in guardrails
| that would've been too tedious for humans to use.
| joeevans1000 wrote:
| Good software, bad software, and working software.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| >For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since
| the sloppy output looks nice in the short term
|
| It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at
| the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years.
| The correlation between high quality code and economic
| performance was not just non-existing, it was almost
| negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where
| engineering felt like a true priority, tech debt was well
| managed, principles followed, that place was _not_ making any
| money.
|
| I am not saying that this is a general rule, of course there
| are many places that perform well and have solid engineering.
| But what I am saying is that this short-sighted management
| might not be acting as irrationally as we prefer to think.
| bri3d wrote:
| I generally agree; for most organizations the product is
| the value and as long as the product gives some semblance
| of functionality, improving along any technical axis is a
| cost. Organizations that spend too much on engineering
| principles usually aren't as successful since the
| investment just isn't worth it.
|
| But, I have definitely seen failure due to persistent
| technical mistakes, as well, especially when combined with
| human factors. There's a particularly deep spiral that
| comes from "our technical leadership made poor choices or
| left, we don't know what to invest in strategically so we
| keep spending money on attempted refactors, reorgs, or
| rewrites that don't add more value, and now nobody can fix
| or maintain the core product and customers are noticing;" I
| think that at least two companies I've worked at have had
| this spiral materially affect their stock price.
|
| I think that generative coding can both help and hurt along
| this axis, but by and large I have not seen LLMs be
| promising at this kind of executive function (ie - "our
| aging codebase is getting hard to maintain, what do we need
| to do to ensure that it doesn't erode our ability to
| compete").
| desertrider12 wrote:
| ChatGPT came out a little over 3 years ago. After 5-10 more
| years of similar progress I doubt any humans will be required
| to clean up the messes created by today's agents.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Really? I love LLMs because I can't stand the process of taking
| the model in my brain and putting it in a file. Flow State is
| so hard for me to hit these days.
|
| So now I spec it out, feed it to an LLM, and monitor it while
| having a cup of tea. If it goes off the rails (it usually does)
| I redirect it. Way better than banging it out by hand.
| bitfilped wrote:
| It's only going to get harder to achieve if you keep letting
| your skills and resoning abilities rot from LLM reliance.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding
| feels even more valuable now.
|
| It was never about writing the code--anyone can do that,
| students in college, junior engineers...
|
| Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see
| it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are
| invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well
| structured (and well-organized) framework... Keeping it as
| simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the
| code-base in a way that anticipates expansion...
|
| I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs.
|
| Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers
| are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I
| just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a
| dog I this race.)
| mk89 wrote:
| Sorry for the dumb question but how could you feel threatened
| by LLMs if you retired just a few years ago? Considering the
| hype started somewhere in 2022-2023.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| and they only got really good like last December.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You're right, as I say, I no longer have skin in the game.
|
| Retired, I have continued to code, and have used Claude to
| _vibe code_ a number of projects--initially I dod so out of
| curiosity as to how good LLM are, and then to handle things
| like SwiftUI that I am hesitant to have to learn.
|
| It's true then that I am not in a position of employment
| where I have to consider a performance review, pleasing my
| boss or impressing my coworkers. I don't doubt that would
| color my perception.
|
| But speaking as someone who has used LLMs to code, while
| they impress me, again, I don't feel the threat. As others
| have pointed out in past threads here on HN, on blogs, LLMs
| feel like junior engineers. To be sure they have a lot of
| "facts" but they seem to lack... (thinking of a good word)
| insight? Foresight?
|
| And this too is how I have felt as I was aging-out of my
| career and watched clever, junior engineers come on board.
| The newness, like Swift, was easy for them. (They no doubt
| have rushed headlong into Swift UI and have mastered it.)
| Never though did I feel threatened by them though.
|
| The career itself, I have found, does in fact care little
| for "grey beards". I felt by age 50 I was being kind of...
| disregarded by the younger engineers. (It was too bad, I
| thought, because I had hoped that on my way out of the
| profession I might act more as mentor than coder. C'est la
| vie!)
|
| But for all the new engineer's energy and eagerness, I was
| comfortable instead with my own sense of confidence and
| clarity that came from just having been around the block a
| few times.
|
| Feel free to disregard my thoughts on LLMs and the degree
| to which they are threatening the industry. They may well
| be an existential threat. But, with junior engineers as
| also a kind of foil, I can only say that I still feel there
| is value in my experience and I don't disparage it.
| mmasu wrote:
| how would you suggest someone who just started their career
| moves ahead to build that "taste" for lean and elegant
| solutions? I am onboarding fresh grads onto my team and I see
| a tendency towards blindly implementing LLM generated code. I
| always tell people they are responsible for the code they
| push, so they should always research every line of code,
| their imported frameworks and generated solutions. They
| should be able to explain their choices (or the LLM's). But I
| still fail to see how I can help people become this "new"
| brand of developer. Would be very happy to hear your thoughts
| or how other people are planning to tackle this. Thanks!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| My "taste" (like perhaps all other "tastes") comes from
| experience. Cliche, I know.
|
| When you have had to tackle dozens of
| frameworks/libraries/API over the years, you get to where
| you find you like this one, dislike that one.
|
| Get/Set, Get/Set... The symmetry is good...
|
| Calling convention is to pass a dictionary: all the params
| are keys. Extensible, sure, but not very self-documenting,
| kind of baroque?
|
| An API that is almost entirely call-backs. Hard to wrap
| your head around, but seems to be pretty flexible... How
| better to write a parser API anyway?
|
| (You get the idea.)
|
| And as you design apps/frameworks yourself, then have to go
| through several cycles of adding features, refactoring, you
| start to think differently about structuring
| apps/frameworks that make the inevitable future work
| easier. Perhaps you break the features of a monolithic app
| into libraries/services...
|
| None of this is novel, it's just that doing enough of it,
| putting in the sweat and hours, screwing up a number of
| times) is where "taste" (insight?) comes from.
|
| It's no different from anything else.
|
| Perhaps the best way to accelerate the above though is to
| give a junior dev _ownership_ of an app (or if that is too
| big of a bite, then a _piece_ of a thing).
|
| "We need an image cache," you say to them. And then it's
| theirs.
|
| They whiteboard it, they prototype it, they write it, they
| fix the bugs, they maintain it, they extend it. If they
| have to rewrite it a few times over the course of its
| lifetime (until it moves into maintenance mode), that's
| fine. It's exactly how they'll learn.
|
| But it takes time.
| tstrimple wrote:
| This answer probably feels unsatisfying and I agree. But
| some things actually need repetition and ongoing effort.
| One of my favorite quotes is from Ira Glass about this
| very topic.
|
| > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I
| really wish somebody had told this to me.
|
| > All of us who do creative work, we get into it because
| we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For
| the first couple years that you're making stuff, what
| you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. It's
| trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it's
| not that good.
|
| > But your taste, the thing that got you into the game,
| is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you
| can tell that what you're making is kind of a
| disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past
| that phase. They quit.
|
| > Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work
| they went through years where they had really good taste
| and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as
| good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short.
| Everybody goes through that.
|
| > And if you are just starting out or if you are still in
| this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most
| important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge
| volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every
| week or every month you know you're going to finish one
| story. It is only by going through a volume of work that
| you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work
| you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
|
| > I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone
| I've ever met. It takes awhile. It's gonna take you a
| while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to
| fight your way through that.
|
| > --Ira Glass
| adampunk wrote:
| Why did you leave this as a comment on someone talking about
| how happy they were about their own experience?
| jv22222 wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| It may look the same, but it isn't the same.
|
| In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure
| agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a
| principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with
| less experience.
|
| The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more
| you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while
| retaining control of every line.
|
| This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to
| use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the
| equivalence of a full team of google devs.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _while retaining control of every line_
|
| What I want when I'm coding, especially on open source side
| projects, is to retain copyright licensing over every line
| (cleanly, without lying about anything).
|
| Whoops!
| jv22222 wrote:
| Hmm. TIL: The real exposure isn't Anthropic, OpenIA
| claiming your code, it's you unknowingly distributing
| someone else's GPL code because the model silently
| reproduced it, with essentially zero recourse for the model
| owner.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property,
| it's a concept that has long since lived past its
| usefulness, especially technologically.
| bitwize wrote:
| Because IP democratizes returns on the creative process.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney
| lengthening copyright times way beyond the original
| intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it
| seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort
| of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be
| bypassing all this and _actually_ democratizing returns
| on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the
| concept of IP.
| kazinator wrote:
| In the case of BSD-like licenses, IP is applied in a way
| that discourages plagiarism, while giving all the
| practical freedoms to the users, including making
| proprietary products.
|
| In the case of copyleft licenses like GPL, IP is applied
| in a way to ensure that users have the code.
|
| These things are taken away when the code is laundered
| through AI.
| bitwize wrote:
| Again, start talking to people outside the field of
| programming and ask them how they like it when their
| labor of passion is "democratized" by AI turning it into
| unattributable slurry.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't really care how they like it because it's not up
| to them how I use the tools I want to use. It's literally
| the same argument photographers faced 100 years ago and
| in another 100 years I guarantee no one will be talking
| about AI in the terms you are today.
| bitwize wrote:
| No one started photographing paintings and declaring them
| free to use. If they did the lawsuits would leave a huge
| impact crater.
|
| Photography started displacing painting as a form of
| portraiture, but displacing a technique is not the same
| thing as appropriating the work itself.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't see any issues with "appropriating" a work
| especially if it's not a one to one copy which AI does
| not produce (without out some pretzel level prompting),
| especially with regards to visual media (what even is
| appropriation in this case? Your example of photographers
| taking images of paintings is not the same as how AI
| training occurs). In other words, training is and should
| be free and fair use.
| kazinator wrote:
| Even today, in 2026, it is possible to use photography in
| ways that infringe copyright! You literally cannot just
| snap your shutter over anything whatsoever and call it
| yours!
| kazinator wrote:
| A free license, like the BSD, if followed, ensures that
| the unpaid creator of a free work is at least credited.
| Everyone using that work at the source code level sees
| the copyright notice with that author's name. The author
| has already given everyone the freedom to do anything
| with the code, except for plagiarism. AI is taking away
| the last thing from peoiple who have shared everything
| else.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why is plagiarism an issue? In school it's an issue due
| to the effect that students won't learn well if they just
| copy everything, but outside of school and especially for
| personal use, why should I care if I "plagiarize" or not
| (and arguably AI doesn't even plagiarize as it's not a 1
| to 1 copy paste of the code when making a new project)?
| The concept of plagiarism is as much a fiction as
| "intellectual" property. The only sort of property that
| actually exists is real and tangible.
| Lahst100 wrote:
| For morons who have never created anything and just steal
| theft is not an issue. Of course.
|
| Creators who are ripped off care. IP is more logical that
| land ownership, since new things have been created
| whereas no one created the land. Land is just stolen and
| defended.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Why is plagiarism an issue?_
|
| For starters, because of the western values of giving
| credit.
|
| We have _diseases_ named after people, never mind
| inventions and ideas.
|
| Plagiarism is kick-out-of-school grade academic
| misconduct, whereby you are pretending that someone's
| work (and the ability it implies) is your own.
|
| > _The only sort of property that actually exists is real
| and tangible._
|
| Remember, I'm talking about works that are free to
| redistribute, use and even modify. Or in other cases,
| that the users to whom a compiled work is distributed
| have access to the buildable source code.
|
| The authors put their names on it, and terms which says
| that their notices are to be preserved when copies are
| made.
|
| This isn't good enough for the Altmans and Amodeis of the
| world.
|
| > _it 's an issue due to the effect that students won't
| learn well if they just copy everything_
|
| ... and fraudulently obtain professional licensing, and
| use that to cause harm: medical malpractice, unsafe
| engineering.
|
| It is fraud.
| lovelearning wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a
| negative way.
|
| I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of
| abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
|
| Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge
| only because:
|
| - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the
| church and academia
|
| - web content publication and production were democratized away
| from academia and corporations
|
| - OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away
| from corporations through open-source projects
|
| - computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and
| universities
|
| Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue
| and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because
| you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else
| benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot
| either.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| This is a good response. Progress has always been resisted by
| incumbents
| card_zero wrote:
| So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge,
| gaining abilities, and just _obtaining things._
|
| I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the
| gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.
| ipdashc wrote:
| I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None
| of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web
| publishing, open-source software, computer hardware)
| involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the
| ability to produce those things widened and the cost went
| down massively, so more people were able to gain access to
| them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired
| and a bunch of bike factories popped up, so now everyone
| can get a cheap bike.
| card_zero wrote:
| I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from
| the old "information wants to be free" school. But the
| subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the
| bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do
| anything _clever,_ or have much of a learning experience.
|
| Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're
| still idiots.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| it is more like:
|
| You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you
| don't let anyone else ride it.
|
| Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by
| your house and now you are sad because you aren't the
| special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular
| kid like your neighbor.
| DaRealGraybeard wrote:
| Jesus that's brutal. Accurate. But I feel attacked ;p
| anonnon wrote:
| Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various
| disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then
| fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise
| for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation,
| sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike),
| only for some machine that mass produces bikes to
| (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the
| designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly
| become widely and cheaply available.
| kalskjUQh wrote:
| No, both bikes are owned by a $trillion corporation who
| collects a monthly rent.
| gzread wrote:
| Actually he would be very wise, for he then has a bike and
| can ride it or sell it for money. You have to learn
| capitalist thinking to succeed in this economy.
| spyder wrote:
| Using physical analogs for virtual things is not the best
| choice, for example: Would you give a copy of your bike, or
| copy of your food to your poor neighbor kid if you could
| copy it as easily and as cheaply as digital products?
| ares623 wrote:
| how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology
| "democratization"?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There are lots of open weight models
| lovelearning wrote:
| It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these
| counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:
|
| - What if these centralized providers had restricted their
| LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified
| individuals?
|
| - What if Google that invented the core transformer
| architecture had kept the research paper to themselves
| instead of openly publishing it?
|
| - What if the universities / corporations, who had worked
| on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for
| Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?
|
| - What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and
| frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-
| sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many
| more?
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > - What if Google that invented the core transformer
| architecture had kept the research paper to themselves
| instead of openly publishing it?
|
| I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around
| the corner with a similar idea some time later, because
| the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed
| decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the
| novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into
| a new idea and making it public. A couple of ingredients
| of the base research for this is decades old
| (interestingly back then some European universities were
| leading the field)
| app134 wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come
| around the corner with a similar idea some time later,
| because the fundamentals of these stuff were already
| discussed decases before
|
| I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to
| all research ever
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| thats true! I meant "not somewhen accidentally in the
| future" but more of "relative close together on the
| timeline"
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give
| increased mobility to millions of people, because they came
| from just a few manufacturers.
|
| Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero
| people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because
| they come from just a few different companies.
| xigoi wrote:
| Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility
| significantly worse for people who can't afford them or
| refuse to use them for ethical reasons.
| duskdozer wrote:
| And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are
| now beholden to
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I will tell that to the billions of people who are
| walking and biking around at this very moment. Just give
| me some time.
| xigoi wrote:
| I said worse, not impossible. Because of cars, I have to
| take longer routes and put myself into danger while
| working.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Those people are the exception that proves the rule.
| ares623 wrote:
| cars, up to relatively recently, have been pure hardware
| machines that when a consumer buys, they can own. Now
| that's starting to change. Let's see how "democratized"
| cars are when the manufacturers can hard-lock "owners"
| from them.
|
| Similar story to cell phones.
|
| LLMs are in this state right out the gate.
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| This is technically true in a lot of ways, but also
| intellectual and not identifying with what the comment was
| expressing. It's legitimately very frustrating to have
| something you enjoy democratized and feel like things are
| changing.
|
| It would be like if you put in all this time to get fit and
| skilled on mountain bikes and there was a whole community of
| people, quiet nature, yada yada, and then suddenly they just
| changed the rules and anyone with a dirt bike could go on the
| same trails.
|
| It's double damage for anyone who isn't close to retirement
| and built their career and invested time (i.e. opportunity
| cost) into something that might become a lot less valuable
| and then they are fearful for future economic issues.
|
| I enjoy using LLMs and have stopped writing code, but I also
| don't pretend that change isn't painful.
| lovelearning wrote:
| The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me.
| I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create
| some insecurity in my mind as well.
|
| However, our personal emotions need not turn into
| disparaging others' use of the same skills for their
| satisfaction / welfare / security.
|
| Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the
| objective analysis of a social phenomenon.
|
| Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| I appreciate that rationale, I also see the importance of
| those two principles and I think there's a lot of value
| there.
|
| I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase,
| like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who
| uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it
| would be seen as disparaging.
|
| Also, while there's a lot of examples of people
| entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing
| problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people
| who struggle with change. For people who are less
| predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the
| time the response is "just deal with it and don't be
| selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".
|
| Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on
| some level. I don't think we should go around attacking
| people, but very few things can be considered truly
| objective in the world of societal analysis.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| People actually value the effort and dedication required to
| master a craft. Imagine we invent a drug that allows everyone
| to achieve olympic level athletic performance, would you say
| that it "democratises" sports? No, that would be ridiculous.
| lovelearning wrote:
| It does technically democratize the exhilarating
| experiences of that level of performance. Likely also
| democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme
| dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships.
|
| That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts
| over history, we find that they usually result in some new
| social contracts and value systems.
|
| Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been
| able to publish non-fiction books from a few centuries now.
| But society still doesn't perceive them as the same at all.
| A value system is still prevalent and estimated primarily
| from the writing itself. This is regardless of any other
| qualifications/disqualifications of authors based on
| education / experience / nationality / profession etc.
|
| At the individual level too, just because book publishing
| is easy doesn't mean most people want to spend their time
| doing that. After some initial excitement, people will go
| do whatever are their main interests. Some may integrate
| these democratized skills into their main interests.
|
| In my opinion, this historical pattern will turn out to be
| true with the superdrug as well as vibe coding.
|
| Some new value will be seen in the swimming or running
| itself - maybe technique or additional training over and
| above the drug's benefits.
|
| Some new value will be discovered in the code itself -
| maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural
| cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values
| will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The exhilarating experience is a byproduct of the effort
| it took to obtain. Replace drug with exoskeleton or
| machine, my point is the same. The way you democratise
| stuff like this is removing barriers to skill development
| so that everyone can learn a craft, skill, train their
| bodies etc.
|
| But I do agree, if everyone can build software then the
| allure of it along with the value will be lost. Vibe
| coding is only a superpower as long as you're one of the
| select few doing it. Although I imagine it will continue
| to become a niche thing, anyone who thinks everyone and
| their grandma will be vibing bespoke software is out to
| lunch.
|
| Personally I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi
| about creating software that cannot be distilled to some
| mechanical construct, in the same way it exists for art,
| music, etc. So beyond assembly line programming, there
| will always be a human involved in the loop and that will
| be a differentiating factor.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| >Some new value will be discovered in the code itself -
| maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural
| cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values
| will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.
|
| It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be
| the case for very small companies or open source
| projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using
| AI. Artisan code I call it.
|
| At my company the prevailing thought is that code will
| only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's
| not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of
| this given the performance of AI currently. But their
| main point is, if the code solves the business
| requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate
| level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the
| value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely
| lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over
| the tech sector.
|
| I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people
| do value human created things more than AI created
| things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.
| rdiddly wrote:
| It would democratize sports, while making sports worthless
| and unremarkable. It would collapse the market for sports.
| anonnon wrote:
| > would you say that it "democratises" sports
|
| Given how I've seen a lot of AI "artists" describe
| themselves and "their" works, yeah, probably a lot of them
| would.
| anonnon wrote:
| > elitist in a negative way.
|
| It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the
| reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like:
|
| > Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the
| engineering
|
| or
|
| > In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are
| more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of
| focusing on the engineering
|
| As if getting further and further away from the instructions
| that the CPU or GPU actually execute is more, not less, a
| form of engineering, instead of something else, maybe
| respectable in its own way, but still different, like
| architecture.
|
| It's akin to someone claiming that they're not only still a
| legitimate novelist for using ChatGPT or a legitimate
| illustrator for using stable diffusion, but that delegating
| the actual details of the arrangement of words into sentences
| or layers and shapes of pigment in an image, actually makes
| them _more_ of a novelist or artist, than those who don 't.
| lovelearning wrote:
| Yes, both are forms of elitism.
| anonnon wrote:
| Yeah, and one is at least plausibly justifiable (though
| still potentially unfounded), while the other is absurd
| on its face.
| iExploder wrote:
| > I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of
| abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
|
| It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up
| a book or learn these skills on the internet.
|
| Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that
| was needed was the desire to put in the work.
|
| OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal
| promise that was working for longest time (spend personal
| time specializing and be rewarded) has been broken so I can
| understand that frustration..
| fragmede wrote:
| It goes past software though. That's just the common ground
| we share on here. A lifetime ago I was a souhd engineer,
| and knew how to mic up a rock band. I've since forgotten it
| all, but I was at a buddies practice space and the
| opportunity came up to mic their setup. so I dredged up
| decades old memories, only to take a photo and sent it to
| ChatGPT, which has read every book on sound engineering and
| mic placement, every web forum that was open to the public
| where someone dropped some knowledge out there on the
| Internet for free. So, damned if it didn't come up with
| some good suggestions! I wish I could say it only made
| wrong and stupid suggestions. A lot about mic placement is
| subjective, but in telling it the kind of sound we were
| after, it was able to tell us which direction to go to get
| warmer or harsher.
|
| So it's not just software that's coming to an end,
| everything else is as well. But; billionaires wives will
| still need haircuts (women billionaires will also need
| haircuts), so hairdresser will be the last profession.
| Kye wrote:
| I remember the cosmetology department on the other side
| of the tech school I went to was a common target of
| mockery on the "tech" tech side. Life as a hairdresser
| isn't always easy, but it's real skill. And unlike
| computer touching, requires certification.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy
| foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and
| cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin
| like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So
| now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and
| salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow
| betrayed me and canceled promises.
|
| /s, obviously I would hope except I've actually seen this
| sentiment expressed seriously.
| iExploder wrote:
| is the result the only thing that matters? or does the
| journey have its place as well?
|
| is there price to be paid for getting any desired result
| imaginable without effort on a press of a button?
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that
| create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much
| more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic
| that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden
| subscription service) without regaining their weight
| back.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > why does healthy food cost so much more than processed
| food?
|
| It does not. Legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and
| yogurt have always been cheaper than processed food.
|
| People prefer eating carbohydrates and saturated fats.
| girvo wrote:
| > why does healthy food cost so much more than processed
| food?
|
| It doesn't.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| The produce aisle has the cheapest food in the whole
| store. Inb4 you cite the price of some fancy imported
| vegetable as your excuse for eating pizza every night.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| I can only speak from my own experience but if you want
| to have a healthy diet (enough protein and calories)
| where I'm from it costs a lot more than just buying cheap
| junk food. Well, the proteins cost.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| People are obese because they eat at restaurants, eat
| junk food, and drink sugary or high carb liquids.
|
| They are not obese because they cannot afford the
| necessary amounts of protein and calories from healthy
| sources in the grocery store.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| And no lol, I eat very healthy and mainly cook my own
| vegetarian food, had junk food last time maybe a month
| ago.
| cpursley wrote:
| It's the regulations and subsidies that created the very
| situation in the first place (in the USA, at least).
| Twinkies are cheap because we literally pay farmers to
| grow cheap carbs and sugar. It was design this way, well
| - lobbied.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| I can believe that unfortunately. Good regulation is hard
| to do without lobbyists getting what they want at the
| expense of people.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _why does healthy food cost so much more than processed
| food?_
|
| It doesn't. Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are
| incredibly cheap. Protein like ground beef and basic cuts
| of chicken are not expensive. And broccoli, carrots,
| green peppers, apples -- these are not exactly breaking
| the bank. Product is seasonal, so you vary what you buy
| according to what is cheapest this week.
|
| Meanwhile, stuff like breakfast cereal and potato chips
| and Oreo cookies actually _are_ surprisingly expensive.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap.
|
| Eating too many carbs is not a healthy diet dude
| cpursley wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. For the longest time those of us who were
| self taught and/or started late were looked down upon.
| Before that, same with corporate vs. open source. This is
| the same elitist and gatekeeping mentality. If LLM coding
| tools help people finally get ideas out of their head, then
| more power to them! If others want to yak shave to and do
| more serious intellectual type of programming and
| exploration, more power to them!
| sdevonoes wrote:
| The real litmus test is whether one would allow LLMs to
| determine a medical procedure without human check. As of
| 2026, I wouldn't. In the same sense I prefer to work with
| engineers with tons of experience rather than fresh graduates
| using LLMs
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| Democratizing? A handful of companies harvesting data and
| building products on top of it is democratizing?
|
| Open research papers, that everyone can access is
| democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe
| (like open universities).
|
| But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge
| from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.
|
| I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but
| in this context your statements are also out of place, in my
| opinion.
| latexr wrote:
| > I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of
| abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
|
| This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals
| either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are
| sold without thinking.
|
| LLMs aren't "democratising" anything. There's no democracy in
| being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the
| largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any
| time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally
| change the terms of the deal.
|
| You know what's truly "democratic" and without "gatekeeping"?
| Exactly what we had before, an internet run by
| _collaboration_ filled with free resources for anyone keen
| enough to learn.
| zpeti wrote:
| > There's no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few
| companies which own the largest and most powerful models,
| who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to
| inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the
| deal.
|
| LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes
| they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them
| is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all
| the other models available in cursor, from chinese open
| source models to composer etc.
|
| How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything
| away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use
| models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best
| models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom
| ever.
|
| (I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be
| surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user
| base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of
| small chinese llm developers).
| app134 wrote:
| Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing
| is not productive.
|
| There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the
| market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this
| level of community engagement and collaboration since the
| open-source boom 20 years ago.
| latexr wrote:
| If I believed it was a different _opinion_ I wouldn't
| even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole
| reply.
|
| The issue arises from it not being that person's opinion
| but _a talking point_. People didn't all individually
| arrive at this "democratisation" argument by themselves,
| they were sold what to say by the big players with vested
| interest in succeeding.
|
| I'm very much for discussing thoughts one has come up
| with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine.
| But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy.
|
| > I have not seen this level of community engagement and
| collaboration
|
| Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
| rpdillon wrote:
| You're overthinking it.
|
| Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to
| get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps
| them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce
| useful programs. That's it.
|
| It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what
| the technology enables, and it's a simple enough
| observation that millions of people can independently
| arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even
| refer to it as "democratization".
| rglover wrote:
| > Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to
| get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it.
|
| This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless,
| lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a
| microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a
| hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are
| the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen
| Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with
| narcissism, too.
| cade wrote:
| > It signals either astroturfing or someone who just
| accepts what they are sold without thinking.
|
| > Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
|
| Your comments seem pretty aggressive for what you're
| replying to. Maybe take a beat to assess your biases? I
| thought the main comment was pretty fair and sensible,
| yet somehow you landed on calling them a spammer/bad
| submitter/astroturfer/non-thinker. Maybe they are? I
| could be wrong, but that's quite a strong reaction for
| what they asserted at face value. Not really trying to
| police anything here, I just thought the initial comment
| had merit and this devolved quite quickly.
| Herbstluft wrote:
| It is a fair note when there are a lot of people with a
| monetary incentive to hype up a certain piece of
| technology. And as gp correctly points out:
| "democratizing" is most commonly used in a very hostile
| and underhanded manner.
|
| It is what we are talking about, hence not
| "counterproductive".
| 63stack wrote:
| I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is
| being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing
| community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump
| card in an argument.
|
| Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any
| open source project, publish any of their code, run any of
| their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes
| it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this
| democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish
| smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting
| their slop is the democratic future you wish for?
|
| How many (job) positions do you see today that want a
| backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now
| everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also
| devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right
| now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount
| of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your
| job that is willing to do it.
|
| Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will
| require even more resources to run, you will have to pay
| even more for hardware, they will be slower, less
| responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to
| big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and
| pat themselves that we democratized programming, while
| running towards the future where nobody will be able to own
| hardware capable of general computing.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how
| would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run
| it, just in a different way
|
| Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service
| at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)?
| I'm not sure how that makes sense.
| 63stack wrote:
| I removed this line because people will get hung up on it
| and not see the forest from the tree.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _LLMs aren't "democratising" anything._
|
| They _absolutely_ are. Anytime new knowledge or skills
| become widely available to everyone, that 's a term used
| for it.
|
| > _There's no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few
| companies which own the largest and most powerful models,
| who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to
| inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the
| deal._
|
| None of that has anything to do with anything. There's
| competition between companies to keep prices low and
| accessibility high.
|
| I think you are simply misunderstanding the word
| "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW:
|
| > _3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad
| masses of the people : designed for or liked by most
| people_
|
| Here, it's specifically about making things _available to
| the broad masses of the people_ that wasn 't before.
|
| This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of
| the word.
| signatoremo wrote:
| > here's no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few
| companies which own the largest and most powerful models,
| who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to
| inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the
| deal.
|
| That would not happen, simply because those companies'
| interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least
| three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight
| models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play
| out.
|
| And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search
| is well and alive.
|
| > You know what's truly "democratic" and without
| "gatekeeping"? Exactly what we had before, an internet run
| by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen
| enough to learn.
|
| We have way more free resources at the moment. Name
| anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point
| you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of
| surfacing that resource.
|
| > This parroted argument
|
| Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad
| nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased)
| if it's against your own beliefs.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Exactly. How ridiculous. The world doesn't owe 'principal
| engineers' shit. I hate to work with people like this.
|
| --- from a 'principal engineer'
| throwA29B wrote:
| Elitism is good. Elitism is just. There is absolutely nothing
| wrong with elitism.
|
| Skill based one of course.
| accounting2026 wrote:
| While I can see your point I also think it is not directly
| relevant to OP. Firstly, I don't think OP meant that people
| are idiots for using LLM's, it was just a way of saying that
| skill is no longer required so even idiots can do it whereas
| it used to be something that required high skill.
|
| As for the comparisons - some are partly comparable to the
| current situation, but there's some differences as well. Sure
| books and online content enabled others to join, thereby
| reducing the "moat" for those who built careers on esoteric
| knowledge. But it didn't make things _that_ easy - it still
| required years of invested time to become a good developer.
| Also, it happened very gradually and while the developer pie
| was growing, and the range of tech growing, so developers who
| kept on top of technology (like OP did) could still be
| valuable. Of course, no one knows fully how it will play out
| this time around; maybe the pie will get even bigger, maybe
| there's still room for lots of developers and the only
| difference is that the tedious work is done. Sure, then it is
| comparable. But let's be honest, this has a very real chance
| of being different (humans inventing AI surely is something
| special!) and could result in skill-sets collapsing in value
| at record time. And perhaps worse, without opening new doors.
| Sure, new types of jobs may appear but they may be so
| different that they are essentially completely different
| careers. It is not like in the past you just needed to learn
| a new programming language.
| overgard wrote:
| Coding is one of the least gate kept things in history.
| Literally the only obstacle is "do I want to put in the time
| to learn it". All Claude is doing is remixing all the free
| stuff that was already a google search away.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _removal of gatekeeping_ "
|
| Gates were put in place for lawyers, doctors, and engineers
| (real ones, not software "engineers") because the cost of
| their negligence and malpractice was ruined lives and death.
| Gatekeeping has value.
|
| Software quality, reliability, and security was already lousy
| before the advent of LLMs, making it increasingly clear that
| the gate needed to be kept. Gripes about "gatekeeping" are a
| dogwhistle for "I would personally benefit from the bar being
| lowered even further".
| dilap wrote:
| I thought this was parody until the last sentence.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| I think it's important for you to understand that there were
| always way more people who loved programming than were able to
| work professionally as high-level coders. Sure, if you spent
| most of your working life writing code, you'd be very
| proficient. But for many, many others, they haven't been able
| to spend the time developing those muscles. Modern LLMs really
| are a joyful experience for people who enjoy software creation
| but haven't had the 10,000 hours.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM.
|
| My experience is the opposite. Those with a passion for the
| field and the ability to dig deeply into systems are really
| excited right now (literally all that power just waiting to be
| guided to do good...and oh does it need guidance!). Those who
| were just going through the motions and punching a clock are
| pretty unmotivated and getting ready to exit.
|
| Sometimes I dream about being laid off from my FAANG job so I
| have some time to use this power in more interesting than I'm
| doing at work (although I already get to use it in fairly
| interesting ways in my job).
| abm53 wrote:
| I wouldn't say the pessimists fall into that category.
|
| In my experience they are mostly the subset of engineers who
| enjoyed coding in and of itself and ----in some cases----
| without concern for the end product.
| nurettin wrote:
| Completely the opposite experience here! I am a tech lead with
| decades of experience with various programming languages.
|
| When it comes to producing code with an llm, most noobs get
| stuck producing spaghetti and rolling over. It is so bad that I
| have to go prompt-fix their randomly generated architecture,
| de-duplicate, vectorize and simplify.
|
| If they lack domain knowledge on top of being a noob it is a
| complete disaster. I saw llm code pick a bad default (0) for a
| denominator and then "fix" that by replacing with epsilon.
|
| It isn't the end, it is a new beginning. And I'm excited.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I find fun in using opencode and Claude to create projects but
| I can't find the energy to run the project or read the code.
|
| Watching this program do stuff is more enjoyable then using or
| looking at the stuff produced.
|
| But it doesn't produce code that looks or is designed the way I
| would normally. And it can't do the difficult or novel things.
| oulu2006 wrote:
| I don't find the same, like you, principle/CTO engineer,
| there's a world of difference between simplistic prompt/vibe
| coding and building a properly
| architected/performant/maintainable system with agentic coding.
| visarga wrote:
| > I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert
| knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot
| can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| Do you like the craft of programming more than the outcomes?
| Now you are in a better position than ever to achieve things.
| bitfilped wrote:
| I'm not sure why you feel devalued or let down, LLM code is a
| joke and will be a thing of the past after everyone has had
| their production environment trashed for the nth time by "AI."
| rendall wrote:
| I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to
| weigh in kindly too.
|
| > I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert
| knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.
|
| Listen to the comments that say that experience is more
| valuable than ever.
|
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far
| more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have
| dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of
| experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project
| gone bad without that experience.
|
| > I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire
| soon.
|
| Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break?
| Work on a side project, something you love to do.
|
| > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM.
|
| Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists",
| but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what
| something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that
| metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and
| illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they
| became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism,
| conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements
| that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple
| with that shift decades, even a century later.
|
| Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People
| using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or
| less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and
| illustrators became very valuable after the invention of
| photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.
| jorl17 wrote:
| In my experience, the truly best in class have gone from being
| 10x engineers to being 100x engineers, assuming they embrace
| AI. It's incredible to watch.
|
| I wouldn't say I'm a 10x-er, but I'm comfortable enough with my
| abilities nowadays to say I am definitely "above average", and
| I feel beyond empowered. When I joined college 15 years ago, I
| felt like I was always 10 steps ahead of everyone else, and in
| recent years that feeling had sort of faded. Well, I've got
| that feeling back! So much of the world around me feels frozen
| in place, whereas I am enjoying programming perhaps as much as
| when I learned it as a little kid. I didn't know I MISSED this
| feeling, but I truly did!
|
| Everything in my daily life (be it coding or creating user
| stories -- who has time to use a mouse when you can MCP to
| JIRA/notion/whatever?) is happening at an amazing speed and
| with provable higher levels of quality (more tests, better end-
| user and client satisfaction, more projects/leads closed,
| faster development times, less bug reports, etc.). I barely
| write lines of code, and I barely type (often just dictate to
| MacWhisper).
|
| I completely understand different people like different things.
| Had you asked me 5 years ago I probably would have told you I
| would be miserable if I stopped "writing" code, but apparently
| what I love is the problem solving, not the code churning. I'm
| not trying to claim my feelings are right, and other people are
| "wrong" for "feeling upset". What is "right" or "wrong" in
| matters of feelings? Perhaps little more than projection or a
| need for validation. There is no "right" or "wrong" about this!
|
| If I now look at average-to-low-tier-engineers, I think they
| are a mixed bag with AI on their hands. Sometimes they go
| faster and actually produce code as good as or better than
| before. Often, though, they lack the experience, "taste" or "a
| priori knowledge" to properly guide LLMs, so they churn lots of
| poorly designed code. I'd say they are not a net-positive. But
| Opus 4.6 is definitely turning the tide here, making it less
| likely that average engineers do as much damage as before (e.g.
| with a Sonnet-level model)
|
| On top of this divide within the "programming realm", there's
| another clear thing happening: software has finally entered the
| DIY era.
|
| Previously, anyone could already code, but...not really. It
| would be very difficult for random people to hack something
| quickly. I know we've had the terms "Script kiddies" for a long
| time, but realistically you couldn't just wire your own
| solution to things like you can with several physical objects.
| In the physical world, you grab your hammer and your tools and
| you build your DIY solutions -- as a hobby or out of necessity.
| For software...this hadn't really been the case....until now!
| Yes, we've had no-code solutions, but they don't compare.
|
| I know 65 year olds who have never even written a line of code
| that are now living the life by creating small apps to improve
| their daily lives or just for the fun of it. It's inspiring to
| see, and it excites me tremendously for the future. Computers
| have always meant endless possibilities, but now so many more
| people can create with computers! To me it's a golden age for
| experimentation and innovation!
|
| I could say the same about music, and art creation. So many
| people I know and love have been creating art. They can finally
| express themselves in a way they couldn't before. They can
| produce music and pictures that bring tears to my eyes. They
| aren't slop (though there is an abundance of slop out there --
| it's a problem), they are beautiful.
|
| There _is_ something to be said about the ethical implications
| of these systems, and how artists (and programmers, to a
| point?) are getting ripped off, but that 's an entirely
| different topic. It's an important topic, but it does not
| negate that this is a brand new world of brand new artists,
| brand new possibilities, and brand new challenges. Change is
| never easy -- often not even fair.
| antirez wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| Not only it would be good if true, but it is also not true.
| Good programmers learn how to build things, for the most part,
| since they know what to build, and have a general architectural
| idea of what they are going to build. Without that, you are
| like the average person in the 90s with Corel Draw in their
| hands, or the average person with an image diffusion model
| today: the output will be terrible because of lack of taste and
| ideas.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| You don't know what you don't know.
|
| Playing with Claude, if you tell it to do something, it'll
| produce something. Sometimes it's output is ok, sometimes it's
| not.
|
| I find I need to iterate with Claude, tell it no, tell it how
| to improve it's solution or do something in a different way.
| It's kind of like speed running iterating over my ideas without
| spending a few hours doing it manually, writing lots of code
| then deleting it to end with my final solution.
|
| If I had no prior coding knowledge i'd go with what ever the
| LLM gave me and end up with poor quality applications.
|
| Knowing how to code gives you the advantage still using an LLM.
| Saying that, i'm pessimistic what my future holds as an older
| software engineer starting to find age/experince is an issue
| when an employer can pay someone less with less experience to
| churn out code with prompts when a lot of time the industry
| lives by "it's good enough".
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| No worries. True, you need to learn new skills to work properly
| with Claude. However, 30 yrs of coding experience come in handy
| to quickly detect it is going in the wrong direction.
| Especially on an architectural level you need to guide it.
|
| Embrace
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software
|
| I have been thinking about the "same software"
|
| Because I remember seeing Sonnet 4.5 and I had made comments
| that time as well that I just wanted AI to stop developing more
| as the more it develops, the more harm to the economy/engineers
| it would do than benefit in totality.
|
| It was good enough to make scripts, I could make random
| scripts/one-off projects, something which I couldn't do
| previously but I used to still copy-paste it and run commands
| and I gave it the language to choose and everything. At that
| time, All I wanted was the models getting smaller/open source.
|
| Now, I would say that even an Idiot making software with AI is
| gonna reach AI fatigue at one point or another and it just
| feels so detached with agents.
|
| I do think that we would've been better off in society if we
| could've stopped the models at sonnet 4.5. We do now have
| models which are small and competitive to sonnet
| (Qwen,GLM,[kimi is a little large])
| outside1234 wrote:
| It is weird because I am the opposite. The symbols were never
| the objective for me but instead how they all fit together.
|
| Now I am like a perfect weapon because I have the wisdom to
| know what I want to build and I don't have to translate it to
| an army of senior engineers. I just have Github Copilot
| implement it directly.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| They simply can't in my experience. Most people cannot prompt
| their way out of a wet paper sack. The HN community is bathed
| in thoughtful, high quality writing 24/7/365, so I could see
| how a perception to the contrary might develop.
| schainks wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| You sound quite jaded. The people I see struggling _the most_
| at prompting are people who have not learned to write
| elegantly. HOWEVER, a huge boon is that if you're a non-native
| English speaker and that got in your way before, you can now
| prompt in your native language. Chinese speakers in particular
| have an advantage since you use fewer tokens to say the same
| thing in a lot of situations.
|
| > Talk about a rug pull!
|
| Talk to product managers and people who write requirements for
| a living. A PM at MSFT spoke to me today about how panicked he
| and other PMs are right now. Smart senior engineers are
| absorbing the job responsibilities of multiple people around
| them since fewer layers of communication are needed to get the
| same results.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I see this at my workplace. The PMs and BAs are now
| completely redundant since you can prompt your way to decent
| specs with the right access and setup.
| vb7132 wrote:
| Same level of engineer here - I feel that the importance of
| expertise has only increased, just that the language has
| changed. Think about the engineer who was an expert in Cobol
| and Fortran but didn't catch the C++ / Java wave. What would
| you say to them?
|
| LLMs goof up, hallucinate, make many mistakes - especially in
| design or architecting phase. That's where the experience truly
| shines.
|
| Plus, it let's you integrate things that you aren't good at (UI
| for me).
| jdmoreira wrote:
| As a senior engineer if your value add was "accumulated expert
| knowledge". Then yes, you are in a bad place.
|
| If instead it was building and delivering products / business
| value. Good judgement, coordination and communication skills,
| intuition, etc... then you are now way way more leveraged than
| you ever were and it has never been greater.
| ValentineC wrote:
| I think "accumulated expert knowledge" was never really
| useful if an organisation could just replace that person with
| a wiki.
| vmykyt wrote:
| Short answer: use your expertise in complex project.
|
| Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the
| same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I
| missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment
| and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net
| (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers")
| looked like evil joke.
|
| Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were
| all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command
| irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for
| me.
|
| Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and
| its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine.
|
| Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is
| obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse?
|
| So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete"
| things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in
| situation when world literally reinvent bicycle
| jgilias wrote:
| With all due respect. If _any idiot_ can prompt their way to
| the _same_ software you'd have written, and your primary value
| proposition is to churn out code, then you're... a bit of an
| outlier when it comes to principal engineers.
| kubb wrote:
| It's more common than you might think.
| frankohn wrote:
| I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to
| learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel
| almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling.
|
| However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some
| understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that
| understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy,
| and embrace life and the present moment as it is.
|
| I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle,
| and your comment made me think about what is explained in it.
| Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how
| deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth
| to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status
| among peers.
|
| He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we
| identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly
| feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and
| achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to
| protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works.
| We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-
| constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting
| the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in
| order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced.
|
| The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so
| much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real
| self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of
| yourself, and you don't need to identify with it.
|
| The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are
| impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We
| need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present
| moment without being attached to things that are by their
| nature impermanent.
|
| I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right
| now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you,
| and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in
| your life--I am trying to learn this myself!
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find
| it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by
| Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while.
|
| While I think rationally what you said is good and makes
| sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should
| forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in
| the present and only the present. I value everything about my
| life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and
| current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path
| essentially. When considering current choices I have to make,
| I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values
| previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting
| the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT
| technology.
|
| At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have
| tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow
| me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified
| with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying
| because it would mean devaluing my roots.
|
| Interested to hear your take on this.
| frankohn wrote:
| I think that's right when you say: "What has been my path
| and values previously, and what makes sense now?" That is
| actually a sensible way to approach the present moment.
|
| Disidentifying from your ego doesn't mean you have to act
| like a stateless robot with amnesia. Your past experiences,
| your role models, and your skills are still there for you
| to recall; they are tools that help guide your decisions.
| Disidentifying just means you don't let the mind-
| constructed image of those things define who you are. It
| means you don't have to constantly mull over the past, and
| you don't feel threatened when the things you valued in the
| past ends or changes.
|
| However, I was really struck by your comment that
| disidentifying would feel horrifying because it would mean
| "devaluing your roots" to make more money. I am wondering
| if this is what you really think.
|
| Imagine if letting go of that specific past identity led
| you to a truly marvelous opportunity in the present: not
| just more money, but working with wonderful people, doing
| engaging things, and being genuinely happy. Would that
| really be horrifying just because it didn't perfectly align
| with your roots? Probably not.
|
| I suspect what you actually find horrifying isn't
| "devaluing your roots," but rather the idea of selling out.
| The real nightmare is getting a well-paid but completely
| soulless job where you are unhappy, working on things you
| don't care about, or being treated like a disposable cog
| who just takes orders.
|
| Just my two cents, I am no spiritual guide!
| hi_hi wrote:
| Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is
| half empty view.
|
| You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to
| drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The
| industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but
| its inevitable.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new
| world.
|
| And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't
| changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the
| code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really
| matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it
| goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not
| just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can
| the humans work with the code.
|
| Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase
| they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.
| luc_ wrote:
| ^ Big this. If we take a pessimistic attitude, we're done
| for.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over
| decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything
| they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if
| they're not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and
| skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with
| some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders
| feel?
|
| Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere,
| probable bubble, it seems naive to be optimistic at this
| juncture.
| mactavish88 wrote:
| > Their whole skill set
|
| This is the fundamental problem with how so many people
| think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've
| usually developed a range of skills where actual coding
| represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job
| done.
|
| People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft"
| skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would
| require true AGI to automate.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done
| by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens.
|
| [citation needed]
|
| It has just merely moved from "almost, but not entirely
| useless" to "sometimes useful". The models themselves may
| perhaps be capable already, but they will need much better
| tooling than what's available today to get more useful that
| that, and since it's AI enthusiasts who will happily let
| LLMs code them that work on these tools it will still take
| a while to get there :)
| dopidopHN2 wrote:
| Yeah well. That's what we've been doing to other industries
| over and over.
|
| I remember a cinema theater projectionist telling me
| exactly that while I was wiring a software controlling
| numeric projector, replacing the 35mm ones.
| mitchitized wrote:
| The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you
| spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their
| usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now
| campfire stories or punchlines.
|
| LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not
| the cause.
|
| If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you
| learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given
| technology, it is the ability to master a given technology.
| This is a university that has no graduation!
| gzread wrote:
| Is it though? If it was that universal, we'd employ the
| best programmers as plumbers, since they have the best
| ability to master plumbing technology. There are limits,
| and I think the skill being to master _programming_
| technologies is a reasonable limit.
|
| If you're a great programmer, can you can stop using
| Angular and master React? Yes. Can you stop telling the
| computer what to do, and master formal proof assistants?
| Maybe. Can you stop using the computer except as a tool
| and go master agricultural technology? Probably not.
| (Which is not to say you can't be a good programmer at an
| agritech company)
| overgard wrote:
| What exactly would people retrain into? The future these
| companies explicitly want is AI taking ALL the jobs, It's
| not like PMs are going to be any safer, or any other
| knowledge work. I see little evidence that AI is going to
| create new jobs other than a breathless assurance that it
| "always happens"
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I'm optimistic about people being able to build the things
| they always wanted to build but either didn't have the
| skills or resources to hire somebody who did.
|
| If we truly value human creativity, then things that
| decrease the rote mechanical aspects of the job are
| enablers, not impediments.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If we truly value human creativity we should stop
| building technology that decreases human value in the
| eyes of the rich and powerful
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| If a principal doesn't have the skills to mentor juniors,
| plan and define architecture, review work and follow a good
| process, they really shouldn't be considered a principal. A
| domain expert? Perhaps. A domain expert should fear for
| their job but a principal should be well rounded, flexible,
| and more than capable of guiding AI tooling to a good
| outcome.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Yes, I think this is reasonable.
|
| I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the
| latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold.
| Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about
| LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use
| it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out
| context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it
| took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had
| wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A
| simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical
| work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.
|
| But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual
| changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because
| it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a
| corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need
| actual technical skill to spot.
|
| Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office
| politics can create a product demo, change the output
| formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no
| technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone
| guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.
|
| Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once
| the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again
| gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every
| other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger
| question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If
| nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work
| faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?
| twodave wrote:
| > I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the
| latest batch of models seems to have crossed some
| threshold.
|
| It's refreshing to hear I'm not the only one who feels this
| way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to
| burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to
| sonnet 4.6. I'm about to have to start lobbying for more
| tokens or buy my own subscription because it's just that
| much more useful now.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most
| impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's
| models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to
| be the only model that produced reasonable results, but
| now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have
| resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by
| changing tests to expect the current output, it does a
| good job planning features, and I've been impressed by
| this model also telling me not to do things - like it
| would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module
| but the resulting code would be much harder to read so
| it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all
| suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes,
| and more, and more.
|
| I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome
| LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements
| since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025
| models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I think the key metric to good software has really changed,
| the bar has noticeably dropped.
|
| I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity
| while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it
| shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1],
| because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier
| releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the
| world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards
| and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude
| to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we
| know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school
| [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high
| popularity and engagement.
|
| It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average
| quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was
| a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it
| just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar
| is lower than you might imagine.
|
| [1] https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363
|
| [2] https://archive.ph/bDTxE
|
| [3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-has-
| it-ha...
|
| [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-school-strike-us-
| mil...
| codazoda wrote:
| > What really matters is how well does the code performs 1
| month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years.
|
| After 40 years in this industry--I started at 10 and hit 50
| this year--I've developed a low tolerance for architectural
| decay.
|
| Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My
| baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I've
| been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB
| (https://ponder.joeldare.com). It's fast, it's stable, and I
| understand every line. But for this session, I opted for Node
| and neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint
| in the prompt.
|
| The result is a functional, working piece of software that is
| also a total disaster. It's a 48KB bundle with 5 direct
| dependencies--which exploded into 89 total dependencies. In a
| world where we prioritize "velocity" over maintenance, this
| is the status quo. For me, it's unacceptable.
|
| If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist,
| it won't survive the 5-year test. I'm going back to basics.
|
| I'll try again but we NEED to expertly drive these tools, at
| least right now.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't understand. You specifically:
|
| > _neglected to include my usual "zero-framework"
| constraint in the prompt_
|
| And then your complaint is that it included a bunch of
| dependencies?
|
| AI's do what you tell them. I don't understand how you
| conclude:
|
| > _If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to
| exist_
|
| It obviously doesn't. Why even bother complaining about an
| AI's default choices when it's so trivial to change them
| just by asking?
| codazoda wrote:
| My main point is that we need to expertly drive these
| tools. I forgot the trivial instruction and ended up with
| something that more closely resembles modern software
| instead of what I personally value. AI still requires our
| expertise to guide it. I'm not sure if that will be the
| case in a year, but it is today.
| barrkel wrote:
| I always tell Claude, choose your own stack but no
| node_modules.
|
| What's missing is another LLM dialog between you and
| Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-
| functional requirements, and instructs Claude
| appropriately.
|
| We'll get there.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _What 's missing is another LLM dialog between you and
| Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-
| functional requirements, and instructs Claude
| appropriately._
|
| There are already spec frameworks that do precisely this.
| I've been using BMAD for planning and speccing out
| something fairly elaborate, and it's been a blast.
| 38591-123 wrote:
| Hi Grok, nice comment!
| Kiro wrote:
| The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it.
|
| The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be
| the ones most upset by it.
| wiz21c wrote:
| definitely. With AI I can stop working on the painful tasks
| and spend much more time on things that matter most to me:
| building the right abstractions, thinking about the maths,
| talking to the customer...
|
| But TBH, I have been a bit "shocked" by AI as well. It's much
| more troubling that the coming of the internet. But my hope
| is that having worked with AI extensively for the past 1-2
| years, I'm confident they miss the important things: how to
| build the abstractions to solve the non-code constraints
| (like ease of maintenance, explainability to others, etc.)
|
| And the way it goes at the moment shows no sign of progress
| in that area (throwing more agents at a problem will not
| help).
| kalskjUQh wrote:
| Yeah right. Only mediocre people like Rob Pike would be a
| toxic gate keeper.
|
| The reality is that in the theft of Chardet at least 2000
| people supported Mark Pilgrim and almost no one supported the
| three programmers who constantly blog about AI and try to
| reprogram people.
|
| Incidentally, everyone who unironically uses the word "gate
| keeper" is mediocre.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| For me this is a painting vs photography thing
|
| Painting used to be the main way to make portraits, and
| photography massively democratized this activity. Now everyone
| can have as many portraits as they want
|
| Photography became something so much larger
|
| Painting didn't disappear though
| luke5441 wrote:
| Compared to painting, software allows you to solve the
| problem once, then distribute the solution to the problem
| basically for free.
|
| Market frictions cause the problem to be solved multiple
| times.
|
| LLMs learn the solution patterns and apply it devaluing
| coming up with solutions in the first place.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Well, slightly different take: it's like telling an artist
| the world doesn't need another song about love, these
| already exist and can be re-heard as needed. Sharper
| formulated: a CRM or TODO-list is a solved problem in
| theory, right? tons of solutions even free ones to use out
| there. still look at what people are doing and selling -
| CRMs and TODO-list variations. because, in fact, its not
| solved, and always has certain tradeoffs that doesn't fit
| some people.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| Nah - I've also spent decades trying to become the best
| software developer I can and now it is giving me enormous
| power. What used to take me 5 days is now taking me a day, and
| my output is now higher quality. I now finish things properly
| with the docs, and the nooks and crannies before moving on.
|
| What used to take incompetent developers 5 days - it is still
| taking them 5 days.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| Well, this is not what the main value of software actually is?
| Its not about prompting a one shot app, sure there will be some
| millionaires making an app super successful by coincidence
| (flapp bird, eg.), but in most cases software & IT engineering
| is about the context, integration, processes, maintenance,
| future development etc.
|
| So actually you are in perfect shape?
|
| And no worries: The one who werent good at writing code, will
| now fail because of administration/uptime/maintenance/support.
| They will fail just one step later.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| You summed up my feelings pretty well, thanks for this
| counterpoint to usual comments in HN
| bluegatty wrote:
| CC is not nearly that good. It may never be. It's an amplifier
| not a replacer.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> I 've spent decades building up and accumulating expert
| knowledge and now that has been massively devalued._
|
| That remains to be seen. There's a huge difference between an
| experienced engineer using LLMs in a controlled way, reviewing
| their code, verifying security, and making sure the
| architecture makes sense, and a random person vibecoding a
| little app - at least for now.
|
| Maybe that will change in a year or two or five or never, but
| today LLMs don't devalue expert knowledge. If anything, LLMs
| allow expert programmers to increase productivity at the same
| level of quality, which makes them even more valuable compared
| to entry-level programmers than they were before.
| nly wrote:
| On the plus side you're retiring soon... imagine if your were a
| graduate today
| djeastm wrote:
| At least they're young enough to re-train into something else
| if they want. It's the mid-career devs who are flailing at
| the moment.
| anonyfox wrote:
| youre getting it backwards. anyone can get to something that
| looks alright in a browser... until you actually click
| something and it fails spectacularly, leaks secrets, doesn't
| scale beyond 10 users and is a swamp of a codebase that
| prevents clean ongoing extension = hard wall for non techies,
| suddenly the magical LLM stops producing results and makes
| things worse.
|
| All this senior engineering experience is a critical advantage
| in these new times, you implicitly ask things slightly
| different and circumvent these showstoppers without even
| thinking if you are that experienced. You don't even need to
| read the code at all, just a glimpse in the folder and
| scrolling a few meters of files with inline "pragmatic"
| snippets measured in meters and you know its wrong without even
| stepping through it. even if the autogenerated vanity unit
| tests say all green.
|
| Don't feel let down. Slightly related to when Google sprung
| into existence - everyone has access and can find stuff, but
| knowing how to search well is an art even today most people
| don't have, and makes dramatic differences in everyday usage.
| Amplified now with the AI search results even that often are
| just convincing nonsense but most people cannot see it. That
| intuitive feel from hard won experience about what is "wrong"
| even without having an instant answer what would be "right" is
| getting more and more the differentiator.
|
| Anyone can force their vibe coded app into some shape thats
| sufficient for their own daily use and they're used to avoiding
| their own pitfalls of the tool they created and know are there,
| but as soon as there's some kind of scaling (scope, users,
| revenue, ...) involved, true experts are needed.
|
| Even the new agent tools like Claude for X products at the end
| perform dramatically different in the hands of someone who
| knows the domain in depth.
| bobjordan wrote:
| Yes, the LLM can write it. No, the LLM cannot architect a
| complex system and weave it all together into a functioning,
| workable, tested system. I have a 400 table schema networked
| together with relationships, backrefs, services, well tested,
| nobody could vibe code their way to what I've built. That kind
| of software requires someone like yourself to steer the LLM.
| fsloth wrote:
| I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly
| insulted by your statement.
|
| Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low
| professional competence.
|
| "My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM."
|
| Strong disagree.
|
| I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class
| teams. 13 years in AEC CAD developing software to build the
| world around us. In the past two years I designed and
| architected a complex modeling component, plus led the initial
| productization and rendering efforts, to my employers map
| offering.
|
| Now I've managed to build in my freetime the easy-to-use
| consumer/hobbyist CAD application I always wanted - in two
| years[0].
|
| The hard parts, that are novel and value adding are specific,
| complex and hand written. But the amount on ungodly boilerplate
| needed to implement the vision would have taken either a) team
| and funding or b) 10 years.
|
| It's still raw and alpha and it's coming together. Would have
| been totally impossible without Claude, Codex and Cursor.
|
| I do agree I'm not an expert in several of the non-core
| technologies used - webview2 for .net for example, or xaml. But
| I don't have to be. They are commodity components, architected
| to their specific slot, replaceable and rewritable as needed.
|
| As an example of component I _had_ professional competence 15
| years ago - OpenGL - I don't need to re-learn. I can just spec
| quickly the renderpasses, stencil states, shader techniques etc
| etc and have the LLM generate most of that code in place. If
| you select old, decades old technlogies and techniques and know
| what you want the output is very usable most of the time (20
| year old realtime rendering is practically already timeless and
| good enough for many, many things).
|
| [0] https://www.adashape.com/
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me
| a CAD drawing of XYZ"?
|
| Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the
| OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is
| something you are passionate about that there is no longer
| really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to
| use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how
| much marginal value does that create over getting a "good
| enough" one in 2 minutes from Claude?
|
| I feel sorry for bringing this up, but I think you might have
| missed how the thing that makes this possible makes it
| unnecessary.
| fsloth wrote:
| No need to be sorry - you raise an excellent point!
|
| Note my critique was labeling all of us LLM enthusiasts by
| association "incompetents" which I believe is an incorrect
| assumption.
|
| The point raised that more people can now code I think was
| a correct one though. I think that's a net benefit.
|
| Let me be brief. There are two topics here - CAD & AI and
| AI & society which I think the underlying point we are
| discussing.
|
| I appreciate you made a domain specific example, but like
| _all_ AI workflows - it does not really hold up unless one
| is extremely specific what the workflow is.
|
| First of all if someone is making a CAD tool for drawings
| that's really not a segment. All 3D design tools target a
| specific content workflow, with specific domain model.
| Drawings are one possible output from this domain model -
| just like the on-screen 3D presentation or a 3MF file you
| get for export.
|
| What ever LLM competency level is it does not come with
| it's own domain model. Real people want to configure the
| models they create. This means there needs to be a domain
| model you hook up to the LLM to have stable model with
| specific editable components.
|
| So if you are prompting a model, you are still better off
| if you prompt the domain model in a real cad package.
|
| So I don't think CAD packages will die.
|
| Second - I'm mainly trying to serve _my_ need (which I
| believe is shared by others). My need is that I want to
| design 3D models with minimum effort, in an enviroment that
| has perfect undo, perfect boolean, versioning,
| snaphshotting and intuitive parametricity. This package did
| not exist in the market before.
|
| Will it have traction? I would expect there are lot of
| human users that want to create models themselves. Computer
| chess did not kill chess etc.
|
| To be super specific, there is a clear wedge in the market
| between Tinkercad and Fusion360 for an affordable desktop
| offering with the above features.
|
| I do realize my market thesis is just a hypothesis at this
| point. Which is fine - it's a passion project. I hope it
| will be usefull for others, but if not, at least I will
| have the tool I want.
|
| I'm mainly excited about the possibility of being able to
| ship to test my market hypothesis.
|
| Without LLM tools I would not be able to ship.
|
| Regarding society:
|
| I believe we are discussing a normal destructive phaze of
| innovation cycle. Machine looms, weavers, luddites, new
| forms of labour etc.
|
| Regarding living standards the main worry is - can "normal"
| people exist above poverty?
|
| I guess the markets will want to have consumers in the
| future so either there will be new jobs or some form of
| basic income.
|
| It's possible I'm wrong as well.
|
| I have no idea if democracies will survive.
| eru wrote:
| That's how progress looks like! We need less to produce more.
| The less includes less skill and human capital.
|
| For me, LLMs just help a lot with overcoming writer's block and
| other ADHD related issues.
| jaynate wrote:
| Good engineers are way more important than they've ever been
| and the job market tells the story. Engineering job posts are
| up 10% year over year. The work is changing but that's what
| happens when a new technology wave comes ashore. Don't give up,
| ride the new wave. You're uniquely qualified.
| tamimio wrote:
| Indeed, and I noticed companies now are focusing on hiring
| coops, paying them peanuts and just use AI, and have maybe one
| senior and one wrangler (engineering/project manager), that's
| basically what I have noticed what neo-teams are.
| voxleone wrote:
| 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. Capabilities without these foundations
| produce fragile, short-lived results. Only those who anchor
| their work in proper abstractions are actually engineering, no
| matter who's writing the code.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software._
|
| No they can't. They _think_ they can, but they will still need
| to put in the elbow grease to get it done right.
|
| But, in my case (also decades of experience), I have had to
| reconcile with the fact that I'll need to put down the quill
| pen, and learn to use a typewriter. The creativity, ideas, and
| obsession with Quality are still all mine, but the execution is
| something that I can delegate.
| Tade0 wrote:
| This.
|
| LLMs don't always produce correct code - sometimes it's
| subtly wrong and it takes an expert to notice the mistake(s).
| jbs789 wrote:
| As an idiot, I am very aware that Claude can help me, but
| also very aware I am not an experienced SWE and continue to
| seek out their views.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM.
|
| I consider myself to have been a 'pretty good' programmer in my
| heyday. Think 'assembly for speed improvements' good.
|
| Then came the time of 'a new framework for everything, relearn
| a new paradigm every other week. No need to understand the x %
| 2 == 0 if we can just npm an .iseven()' era ... which
| completely destroyed my motivation to even start a new project.
|
| LLMs cut the boilerplate away for me. I've been back building
| software again. And that's good.
| aristofun wrote:
| Based on your comment you're probably not a very good principal
| engineer ;)
|
| Hence, you are back in the group of those who should benefit
| from LLMs. Following your own logic :)
|
| Ps: please don't take it seriously
| w4yai wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software
|
| If you really think it's the reality, then your expert
| knowledge is not that good to begin with.
| dkrich wrote:
| > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing
| software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a
| LLM.
|
| My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line.
| I've found that people I work with who are mediocre use it
| constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in?
| Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the
| team to review. Look, I contributed!
|
| When it comes time to meet with customers let's show them an AI
| generated application rather than take the time to understand
| what their existing processes are.
|
| There's a person on my team who is more senior than I am and
| should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who
| routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take
| over when things get too technical.
|
| In general I feel it's all allowed organizations to promote
| mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think
| those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the
| mean and teams will require technical excellence again.
| emerongi wrote:
| I review PRs daily and people are pushing changes that have
| basic problems, not to talk about more serious flaws. The
| amount of code an engineer can produce is higher, but it's also
| less thought through.
|
| There will be more code with lower quality. If you want to be
| valued for your expertise, you need to find niches where
| quality has to stay high. In a lot of the SaaS-world, most
| products do not require perfection, so more slop is acceptable.
|
| Or you can accept the slop, grind out however more years you
| need to retire, and in the meanwhile find some new passion.
| elzbardico wrote:
| > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
|
| No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless
| I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces
| regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal
| ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like
| cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly
| ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry
| introduced by post-training.
|
| Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they
| can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not
| using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack
| software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in
| that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents
| to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.
| juanre wrote:
| I think that the biggest difference is between people who
| mostly enjoy the act of programming (carefully craft beautiful
| code; you read and enjoyed "Programming Pearls" and love SICP),
| vs the people who enjoy having the code done, well structured
| and working, and mostly see the act of writing it as an
| annoying distraction.
|
| I've been programming for 40 years, and I've been on both
| sides. I love how easy it is to be in the flow when writing
| something that stretches my abilities in Common Lisp, and I
| thoroughly enjoy the act of programming then. But coding a
| frontend in React, or yet another set of Python endpoints, is
| just necessary toil to a desired endpoint.
|
| I would argue that people like you are now in the perfect
| position to help drive what software needs writing, because you
| understand the landscape. You won't be the one typing, but you
| can still be the one architecting it at a much higher level.
| I've found enjoyment and solace in this.
| spotijk wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment at all.
|
| For me it, feels more like a way integrate search results
| immediately into my code. Did you also feel threatened by stack
| overflow?
|
| If you actually try it you'll find it's a multiplier of insight
| and knowledge.
| eej71 wrote:
| I think you've got this backwards!
|
| I've been working with computers since an Apple ][+ landed in
| our living room in the early 80s.
|
| My perspective on what AI can do for me and for everyone has
| shifted dramatically in the last few weeks. The most recent
| models are amazing and are equipping me to take on tasks that I
| just didn't have the time or energy for. But I have the
| knowledge and experience to direct them.
|
| I haven't been this enthused about the possibilities in a long
| time.
|
| This is a huge adjustment, no doubt. But I think if I can learn
| to direct these tools better, I am going to get a lot done. Way
| more than I ever thought possible. And this is still early
| days!
|
| Just incredible stuff.
| mft_ wrote:
| It's not black/white. There's are scales of complexity and
| innovation, and at the moment, the LLMs are mostly good (with
| obvious caveats) at helping with the lower end of the
| complexity scale, and arguably almost nowhere on the innovation
| scale.
|
| If, as a principal engineer, you were performing basic work
| that can easily be replicated by an LLM, then you were wasted
| and mistasked.
|
| Firstly, high-end engineers should be working on the hard work
| _underlying_ advances in operating systems, compilers,
| databases, etc. Claude currently couldn 't write competitive
| versions of Linux, GCC (as recently demonstrated), BigQuery, or
| Postgres.
|
| Secondly, and probably more importantly, LLMs are good at doing
| work in fields already discovered and demonstrated by humans,
| but there's little evidence of them being able to make
| intuitive or innovative leaps forwards. (You can't just prompt
| Claude to "create a super-intelligent general AI"). To _see the
| need_ for advances (in almost any field) and to make the leaps
| of innovation or understanding needed to achieve those advances
| still takes smart (+ /- experienced) humans in 2026. And it's
| humans, not LLMs, that will make LLMs (or whatever comes after)
| better.
|
| Thought experiment: imagine training a version of Claude, only
| all information (history, myriad research, tutorials, YouTube
| takes and videos, code for v1, v2, etc.) related to LLMs is
| removed from the training data. Then take that version and
| prompt it to create an LLM. What would happen?
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| Even as a principal engineer, there is an infinite number of
| things you don't know.
|
| Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something
| entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is
| for people who spent years developing their skills.
|
| AI is the great equalizer.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| I feel it is about being disinterested than about being good.
| the ones who were not interested(whether good or bad) and were
| trapped in a job are liberated and happy to see it be
| automated.
|
| The ones who are frustrated are the ones who were interested in
| doing(whether good or bad) but are being told by everyone that
| it is not worth it do it anymore.
| bianat wrote:
| I love it. I can't stand this sentiment and this type of
| technologist pompous ass. You are why software mostly sucks.
| You have no imagination. Hopefully the models make your
| limited, extraordinarily overvalued skill set the last 20 years
| completely democratized. We will see who is the idiot going
| forward.
| ejahsg wrote:
| Spoken like a loser and a thief.
| phlakaton wrote:
| I fancy myself pretty good at writing software, and here's my
| path in:
|
| All the tools I passed up building earlier in my career because
| they were too laborious to build, are now quite easy to bang
| out with Claude Code and, say, an hour of careful spec
| writing...
| asimeqi wrote:
| I am a principal engineer too. In the last 5 months I have been
| working on a project using the latest LLMs. 5 years ago that
| project would have required 30 engineers. Now I am alone but
| need at least 5 more months to have an MVP. You are just not
| working on projects that are complex and difficult enough.
| There are so many projects that I have in mind that feel within
| reach and I would have never considered 5 years ago.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| From my point of view, having the llm as co-pilot is like
| having the junior engineer that the team would never justify
| the budget to hire. I get quite a bit more done when I can
| assign the tool a task to work on, work on something else in
| the meantime, and come back in 5 or 10 minutes to check on its
| progress and make adjustments.
|
| There are many aspects of software engineering that are fun,
| but the pure mechanical part gets sold quickly; there are only
| but so many times you can type "emplace" and feel fulfilled.
| I'm finding that co-pilot is extremely good at that part.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I'm surprised that as a principal engineer, you view your
| greatest skill set as your expertise in programming. While that
| is certainly an enormous asset, I have never met a principal
| engineer that hadn't also mastered how to work within the
| organization to align the right resources to achieve big goals.
| Working with execs and line managers and engineers directly to
| bring people together to chase something complex and difficult:
| that skill is not going to be replaced by LLMs and remains
| extremely valuable.
| zzrrt wrote:
| I'm not a principal, but I would wonder: if AI increases
| every "coder's" productivity, say, 5x doesn't that replace
| some teams with 1 person, meaning less "alignment" necessary?
| Some whole org layers may disappear. Soft skills become less
| relevant when there are fewer people to interface with.
|
| Even regarding "chase something complex and difficult", there
| are currently only so many needs for that, so I think any
| given person is justified fearing they won't be picked. It
| may be several years between AI eating all the CRUD work from
| principal down, and when it expands the next generation of
| complex work on robotics or whatever.
|
| Also, to speak on something I'm even less qualified - the
| economy feels weak, so I don't have a lot of hope for either
| businesses or entrepreneurs to say "Let's just start new
| lines of business now that one person can do what used to
| take a whole team." The businesses are going to pocket the
| safe extra profits, and too many entrepreneurs are not going
| to find a foothold regardless how fast they can code.
| stevepotter wrote:
| I might be wrong but this sounds like an ego issue more than
| anything. Twice you berated less skilled programmers. I'm
| skilled as well and it did sting when I realized that a
| relatively new technology could beat me. But there's so much
| more to it, especially PMs. PMs find big high value problems
| and solve them. The coding should be the easy part. If your
| coding skills are such a big part of your identity and you
| enjoy the feeling of superiority, a good therapist (chatgpt
| maybe lol) could be useful.
| malthaus wrote:
| very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions
| experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor /
| working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.
|
| also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things.
| humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software
| and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a
| slightly different skillset.
| joshu wrote:
| all the insane and/or speculative projects that i never did
| because they would require heavy lift but with vague outcomes are
| now in progress. it's glorious.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to
| home:
|
| "Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very
| specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and
| 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade,
| then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw
| that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still
| got it."
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > late 40s
|
| This describes me nearly perfectly. Though I didn't exactly
| burn out of coding, I accidentally stumbled upon being an EM
| while I was coding well and enjoying. But being EM stuck so I
| got into managing team(s) at biggish companies which means
| doing everything except one that I enjoy the most which is
| coding.
|
| However now that I run my own startup I'm back to enjoying
| coding immensely because Claude takes care of grunt work of
| writing code while allowing me to focus on architecture,
| orchestration etc. Immense fun.
| cebert wrote:
| If you don't mind sharing, what does your startup do?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Absolutely not!
|
| I run a business of giving out loan against stocks and
| mutual funds as collateral in India.
|
| Please visit https://www.quicklend.in/ to know more.
| zabzonk wrote:
| What is an "EM"?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Engineering Manager (as opposed to people who stick to
| programming, called Individual Contributor.)
| zabzonk wrote:
| Oh, how I hate these horrible job descriptions.
|
| But thanks for the info.
| ido wrote:
| Me too, only I'm "only" 42! Got my first job as a programmer
| at 18 and (in retrospect) burnt out at some point and thought
| going into managment was the fix.
| larodi wrote:
| And why would they not? do they have to feel they ain't got it
| anymore because age?
| tkel wrote:
| Because they don't "got it". Asking the bot to program is the
| same as asking a junior engineer to write some code, and then
| claiming it as your own. It's not actually them programming.
| Just a misplaced sense of pride.
| pembrook wrote:
| More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more
| bitter cope.
|
| You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own
| cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in
| having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the
| street might actually be a better chef than you, even
| though you know how to breed cattle.
| tkel wrote:
| You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison.
|
| In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his
| own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And
| then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself,
| "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook
| the steak.
|
| Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you
| manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great
| manager. Your greatness as a chef is measured by actually
| cooking yourself. Claiming other chef's work as your own
| would be dishonest and self-deception.
| roland35 wrote:
| If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all
| world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for
| them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping
| things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I
| think building with ai is pretty similar.
| Kerrick wrote:
| This is the exact analogy that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge
| used throughout their book _Vibe Coding: Building
| Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and
| Beyond_.
| saulpw wrote:
| Same but for me it's 25 years of accumulated personal backlog
| that I'm finally burning through. Like I've been a project
| hoarder and now I have a house elf to tidy up and do all that
| widget fobbering business. I just need to figure out what the
| rules of the house are.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| And what's the problem with that?
| wvenable wrote:
| I get it. Knowing good code and how to correctly build software
| that people actually want is experience that is consistently
| hampered by constantly having to learn yet another tech stack.
|
| Using an LLM lets you quickly learn (or quickly avoid having to
| learn) yet another tech stack while you leverage your inherent
| software development knowledge.
| brabel wrote:
| What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding
| even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees
| me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and
| never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can
| still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can
| throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still
| enjoying what I am doing?
|
| It's still coding. If you think it's not you probably think
| that letting the IDE auto-complete or apply refactorings is
| also not coding.
| cube00 wrote:
| > Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a
| million times before and never wanted to do again if
| possible, which it now is.
|
| What kind of tasks?
| bdangubic wrote:
| writing any git command, ever, writing any documentation,
| ever. writing comments in issue trackers, resolving issues
| in issue trackers, doing pretty much anything in the
| terminal, ever... basically every imaginable thing which
| takes time away from the actual job
| skydhash wrote:
| Why not say "using a computer". gcl (my alias for git
| clone) is way faster to use than any prompting. Any use
| case I found for LLMs, I noticed that a good script or a
| DSL (as an abstraction) would be way more useful.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you often gcl?
| skydhash wrote:
| A lot. I often study software I use (mostly OSS) to find
| how a feature is implemented.
|
| If something is cumbersome and I find myself needing it
| often (or I think I will need it), I write an alias, a
| script, an emacs function, etc,... That's the magic of
| reducing lot of steps to a single button press (or a
| short command).
| dplgk wrote:
| Writing unit tests. Modifying existing unit tests to
| achieve desired code coverage.
| midtake wrote:
| Do you really think you are as eager, inquisitive, and open
| to learning new ideas in your 40s compared to your 20s?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I am 50 and the answer is 'yes'.
| ear7h wrote:
| This idea of LLMs a vehicle of midlife crisis is fascinating.
| I'm not sure if it's just about "throwing the fastball" though.
| Most of the usual midlife crisis things are a rejection of
| virtue. For example: buying a porsche, pickign up a frivolous
| hobby, or cheating on your wife, these are irresponsible uses
| of money, time, or attention that a smart, dedicated, family
| man wouldn't partake in.
|
| In relation to LLM usage I think there's two interepretations.
| 1) This midlife crisis is a rejetion of empathy, understanding,
| and social obligation however minute. Writing a one-sentence
| update on an issue, understanding design decisions of another
| developer, reading documention are all boilerplate holding them
| back from their full potential in a perfectly objective
| experience. Of course, their personal satisfaction still relies
| on adoption of their products by customers (though decades of
| viewing customers through advertising surveillance has stripped
| away the customers' humanity from their perspective). Or 2)
| economic/political factors such as inflation, rising
| unemployment, supply chain issues, starvation of public
| services, and general instability means doing the usual midlife
| crisis activities are too expensive or risky, and LLMs present
| a local optmimum allowing them to reject societal virtues (eg.
| craftsmanship, collaboration, empathy) without endangering
| their financial position. Funny enough, I feel this latter
| point was also a factor of the NFT bubble (though, the finances
| were more clearly dubious).
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I'll be 38 next month. I always wonder what I'm do in 30 more
| years and I cannot see myself NOT coding. Happy to see that spark
| is alive and well within you.
| jrnichols wrote:
| I'm over 50 now and feel like this as well. Haven't used Claude
| yet but used Codex a bunch, and it's been SO MUCH fun going over
| all the old perl & shell scripting stuff that I used to do years
| ago before I got into healthcare time and morphed to a hobby
| sysadmin.
|
| Staying up and re-learning what I used to love long ago has given
| me a new found passion as well. Even if I do vibe code some
| scripts, at least I have the background now to go through them
| and make sure they make sense. They're things I'm using in my own
| homelab and not something that I'm trying to spin up a Github
| repo for. I'm not shipping anything. I'm refreshing my old skills
| and trying to bring some of them up to date. An unfortunate
| reality is that my healthcare career is going to be limited due
| to multiple injuries along the way, and I need to try to be as
| current as I can in case something happens. My safety net is
| limited.
| shifto wrote:
| Having never touched Perl in my life, Claude has enabled me to
| create a plugin for this ancient Perl software a lot of people
| are still using to this day. This felt different from just
| creating some new code with some LLM. This felt like ancient
| gods we're whispering their knowledge into me.
| fishingisfun wrote:
| btw how good are any of these tools for embedded programming? we
| need a new era for hardware enthusiasts. my dad made plenty of
| fun things in the 80s but it was at the tail end of the newess
| that came from radiokits and other gadgets that flooded the
| market due to the uchip
| dbdoug wrote:
| Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in
| over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude &
| Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or
| Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning
| tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and
| researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with
| LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correcting them from time
| to time when they screw up. Lots of fun.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm very happy for you and hope when I'm nearing 80 I get to be
| doing something similar.
| IBCNU wrote:
| It's cool to rediscover Applescript for me (I'm late 40's) but
| it's a funny thing where I can like smell the NeXT in it almost
| nostalgically but it's quite handy in this new era of hijacking
| mac mini's (OpenClaw obviously is one way to do it, but why not
| just straight to the core).
|
| I personally think coders get better with age, like lounge
| singers.
| mrpippy wrote:
| AppleScript doesn't have any NeXT heritage, it comes entirely
| from classic MacOS (debuted in System 7.1)
| james_marks wrote:
| Sure, but you can feel some emergent philosophies that are
| starting to converge and there are recognizable aesthetics.
| II2II wrote:
| > Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me
| is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through
| the code line by line and researching everything.
|
| I have been doing something similar. In my case, I prefer
| reading reference documentation (more to the point, more
| accurate), but I can never figure out where to start. These
| LLMs allow me to dive in and direct my own learning, _by
| guiding my readings of that documentation_ (i.e. the
| authoritative source).
|
| I think there has been too much emphasis (from both the
| hypesters and doomsayers) on AI doing the work, rather than
| looking at how we can use it as a learning tool.
| gkrimer wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. On a large and open ended feature I
| sometimes struggle with where to start and end up researching
| something tangential. Cool learning, but not efficient.
|
| Claude Code gives me a directory, usually something that
| works, and then I research the heck out of it. In that way I
| am more of an editor, which seems to be my stronger skill.
| msoori wrote:
| Good for you. Learning is a life long thing!
| kazinator wrote:
| > _better learning tool than a book_
|
| Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that
| will never come ...
|
| There is only so much you can learn by reading; it requires
| doing.
|
| The good thing about traditional sources like books, tutorials
| and other people's code bases is that they give you something,
| but don't write your project for you.
|
| Now you can be making a project, yet be indefinitely
| procrastinating the learn-by-doing part.
| bmacho wrote:
| > Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself,
| that will never come ...
|
| For the enjoyment, and producing better products, faster?
|
| Why were _you_ learning, before AI tools?
| ramshanker wrote:
| >>>>Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old.
|
| You are an inspiration. I will remember this when I grow older.
| Just wanted to say this, I am 1/2 your age, and I am sure there
| are 1/3 or even 1/4 people here. ;)
| oulu2006 wrote:
| That's great and I'm the same, 40s multiple founder and I was
| ready to hang it up after my last exit -- had 0 passion to code
| anymore and now I'm back and LLMs are reigniting my passion to
| create again.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| I second another fellow commenter, you are my inspiration too!
| Thanks for sharing.
| mkirsten wrote:
| You are an inspiration. Reading this makes me happy
| stein1946 wrote:
| I am 37;
|
| Claude Code and it's parallels have extinguished multiple ones.
|
| I was able to steer clear of the Bitcoin/NFT/Passport bros but it
| turns out they infiltrated the profession and their starry puppy
| delusional eyes are trying to tell me that iteration X of product
| Y released yesterday evening is "going to change everything".
|
| They have started redefining what "I have build this" actually
| means, and they have outjerked the executives by slinging
| outrageous value creation narratives.
|
| > I'm chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
|
| You are 60; go spend some time with your grand-kids, smell a
| flower, touch grass forget chasing anything at this age cause a
| Tuesday like the others things are gonna wrap up.
|
| Absolutely sincerely.
| Gigablah wrote:
| The ageism in this comment is revolting.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I see many comments here about Claude and I get the same feeling
| I get when I see comments about MacOS: it's nice that you're
| content with it, but I don't trust Apple/Anthropic for a fraction
| of an angstrom.
|
| Wake me when we have ethically trained, open source models that
| run locally. Preferably high-quality ones.
| firecall wrote:
| As a solo dev, using LLMs for coding has made me a better
| programmer for sure!
|
| I can ask an LLM for specific help with my codebase and it can
| explain things in context and provide actual concrete relevant
| examples that make sense to me.
|
| Then I can ask again for explanations about idiomatic code
| patterns that aren't familiar for me.
|
| Working on my own, I don't get that feedback and code review
| loop.
|
| Working with new languages and techniques, or diving into someone
| else's legacy code base is no longer as daunting with an LLM to
| ask for help!
| eventmapx wrote:
| I'm a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this
| post compelled me). I don't think this is a genuine take. I don't
| see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software
| creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software
| automatically be created but it's definitely not doing the work.
| (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he's
| spending any time fixing the software to make it near usable for
| anyone besides himself and the semi-working state the llm gave
| him. Meaning he's going to have 10 or more half-finished projects
| again.
| grigri907 wrote:
| Bummer of a first post!
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| I agree. This seems more like an excitement or joy after
| getting a new toy more that actual process of creating
| something. Particularly when person uses LLM in a pure vibe
| code approach where they have no idea what's happening in the
| code.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| He's probably getting a buzz from the novelty of it, just like
| that buzz you get when you buy a new car. It wears off though
| and it isn't long before you are back in the showroom again,
| looking at new models.
|
| I'm also in my sixties and retired and decided not to use these
| tools. I'm a year into my current project and I am enjoying the
| struggle. I've learnt a lot about the domain and the language
| I'm using. There is satisfaction coming from the fact that I do
| all of the work.
|
| It's not that these tools aren't very good. They have come a
| long way in the last year and are impressive. It's just that I
| don't have any of the problems that they solve. I don't need to
| be more productive. I don't need to get features or fixes out
| quicker. I can spend the time to learn new things.
| eventmapx wrote:
| You explained it better than I. The craft is the fun part. I
| also don't want to just critique Claude needlessly, it's
| probably the best out of all llms/coding agents I've used. My
| comment would apply to most of the lately posted news on HN.
| It just fees like an ad post is all I was trying to say.
| blueeon wrote:
| I'm 38 years old, and as a manager, it's gradually become
| difficult to find joy in coding. Claude Code has helped me
| rediscover that pleasure. Now, all I want to do is code every day
| and use up my quota.
| YZF wrote:
| It's a lot of fun. I'm also an old timer.
|
| I think it's also somewhat addictive. I wonder if that's part of
| what's at play here.
|
| A coworker that never argues with you, is happy to do endless
| toil... sometimes messes up but sometimes blows your mind...
| grigri907 wrote:
| The promise/potential of ever-refining skills and agents drives
| this compulsion for me. "NEXT time it will be even better. And
| NOW it's set up to avoid the pitfalls I faced last time." You
| can feel the exponential engine-building.
|
| I'm not a SWE. I'm a mechanical engineer who spends his life in
| excel. So when I first made my own node editor app and then
| asked Claude to read that for my workflow in my second
| project.... I felt like God herself.
| system2 wrote:
| Everything in this post is proof that Anthropic will kill it when
| they go public. I believe in it, so does everyone else.
| tkgally wrote:
| Very similar here. I am 68.
|
| While I have never developed software professionally, in the four
| decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts
| and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was
| in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get
| enjoyably immersed in my little projects.
|
| These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using
| Claude Code. At first, though, the feeling would come and go. I
| would come up with fun projects (in-browser synthesizers, multi-
| LLM translation engines) and get a brief thrill from being able
| to create them so quickly, but the fever would fade after a
| while. I started paying for the Max plan last June, but there
| were weeks at a time when I barely used it. I was thinking of
| downgrading to Pro when Opus 4.5 came along, I saw that it could
| handle more sophisticated tasks, and I got an idea for a big
| project that I wanted to do.
|
| I have now spent the last two months having Claude write and
| build something I really wanted forty years ago, when I was
| learning Japanese and starting out as a Japanese-to-English
| translator: a dictionary that explains the meanings, nuances, and
| usages of Japanese words in English in a way accessible to an
| intermediate or advanced learner. Here is where it stands now:
|
| https://www.tkgje.jp/
|
| https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1
|
| It will take a few more months before the dictionary is more or
| less finished, but it has already reached a stage where it should
| be useful for some learners. I am releasing all of the content
| into the public domain, so people can use and adapt it however
| they like.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| This is neat that you had fun making this.
|
| What are some good examples of where your app excels? I've
| currently got https://jisho.org bookmarked.
| tkgally wrote:
| Thanks! The strength of my dictionary, I hope, is how the
| information on each word is chosen and presented with the
| needs of English-speaking learners in mind, especially the
| explanations of meanings, usages, and nuances. Dictionaries
| that mainly give glosses can mislead learners, as it is rare
| for the meanings of words to map one-to-one between
| languages.
|
| Compare the following pairs of entries from TKG and
| Jisho.org:
|
| https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/03000/03495_chousen.html
|
| https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/11000/11013_charenji.html
|
| https://jisho.org/search/Tiao Zhan
|
| https://jisho.org/search/chiyarenzi
|
| While the two from Jisho.org have more information, they do
| not make clear the important differences between _challenge_
| in English and the two Japanese words. Claude, meanwhile,
| added this note:
|
| 'In English, "challenge" often implies confrontation or
| difficulty. In Japanese, chiyarenzi carries a strongly
| positive connotation of bravely attempting something new or
| difficult. It is closer in meaning to "attempt" or "try" than
| to "confront." '
|
| The entries for my dictionary are being written one at a time
| by Claude based on guidelines for the explanations, the
| length and vocabulary of the example sentences, etc. Those
| guidelines (which you can see in the prompts and Claude
| skills in the GitHub repository) were developed by me and
| Claude with a particular purpose in mind: helping a learner
| encountering an unfamiliar word get a good basic
| understanding of what it means and how it is used. In my
| experience, at least, it is very helpful to get explanations,
| not just glosses.
|
| The Jisho site does do a good job of linking together a lot
| of different databases. They are welcome to add links to
| entries in my dictionary, too, if they like.
| farsa wrote:
| I expect to have at least 15 more years in the workforce and I
| hate that I have to live through this "revolution". I worry about
| what will be final balance of lives improved vs lives worsened.
| ddmma wrote:
| I'm on my 40s and building a platform to support my late
| cognitive decline. Tools that shaped human existence.
| aix1 wrote:
| Would love to hear more, if you are happy sharing!
| grigri907 wrote:
| I'd like to hear more
| kreddor wrote:
| I would also like to hear more!
| whalesalad wrote:
| I don't play games anymore. I just work on whacky ideas with
| LLMs. I even nuked my gaming PC and installed ollama+rocm to play
| with local models, run openclaw there to experiment with that
| too. It's a lot of fun. I feel like agents are particularly
| useful for people who are ADD and want to work on 10 things at
| once.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Congratulations! Are you still coding VB using Claude? Or
| something else.
| msoori wrote:
| Same here, 60 and few months and I'm excited about AI
| asah wrote:
| I've heard this from so many greybeards... including me!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've always dabbled in electronics, as a hobbyist. I've never had
| any formal courseware or training in it.
|
| But I have been haranguing Claude/Gemini to help me on an analog
| computer project for some months now that has sent me on a deep
| dive into op-amps and other electronics esoterica that I had
| previously only dabbled a bit in.
|
| Along the way I've learned about relaxation oscillators, using
| PWM to multiply two voltages, integrating, voltage-following...
|
| I could lean on electronics.stackexchange (where my Google
| searches often lead) but 1) I first have to know what I am even
| searching for and 2) even the EEs disagree on how to solve a
| problem (as you might expect) so I am still with no clear answer.
| Might as well trust a sometimes hallucinating LLM?
|
| I guess I like the first point above the best--when the LLM just
| out of the blue (seemingly) suggests a PWM multiplier when I was
| thinking log/anti-log was the only way to multiply voltages. So I
| get to learn a new topology.
|
| Or I'm focused on user-adjustable pots for setting machine
| voltages and the LLM suggests a chip with its own internal 2.45V
| reference that you can use to get specific voltages without
| burdening the user to dial it in, own a multimeter. So I get to
| learn about a chip I was unfamiliar with.
|
| It just goes on an on.
|
| (And, Mr. Eater, I only let the magic smoke out once so far, ha
| ha.)
| tomhow wrote:
| A real-life scene that made me chuckle last weekend...
|
| "Oh shit, Hey Babe did you close my laptop?"
|
| My not-very-technical friend as we returned home from a Sunday
| afternoon trip to the park with the kids to find his Claude Code
| session had been thwarted.
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| happened to my friend too! an overkill but working solution for
| this is "sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1"
| tombert wrote:
| I have had the opposite experience.
|
| When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was
| having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial
| errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.
|
| With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a
| middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I
| literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and
| tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to
| see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly
| kind of demoralizing.
|
| I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were
| people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an
| excuse to stop building cars.
|
| I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to
| software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and
| my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give
| me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm
| cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered
| finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship
| slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.
|
| It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of
| being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings
| that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people
| born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their
| Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating
| whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five
| years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).
| testbjjl wrote:
| Are you 60?
| tombert wrote:
| No, I'm in my mid 30's. Unless I win the lottery (which seems
| unlikely considering I don't buy lottery tickets), or I
| managed to get some obscenely lucky with shares at a startup,
| I realistically will need to work for at least twenty more
| years before retiring.
| qzira wrote:
| This resonates. The emotional side of returning to coding is
| real.
|
| With Claude Code specifically, I've noticed that the longer it
| runs autonomously, the more cost anxiety creeps in. You stop
| thinking about the problem and start watching the token counter.
|
| What finally let me stop worrying and just build again was
| building a hard budget limit outside the app -- not just alerts,
| but an actual kill switch.
|
| Glad you found the spark. It's worth protecting.
| valentinza wrote:
| I get hate on only using cli. Glad someone else see's a different
| perspective
| tqwhite wrote:
| Every time I try to use Claude Desktop, I quickly feel like
| it's like trying to type wearing mittens. No bueno, at least
| for me.
| kazinator wrote:
| Opposite here. I was excited by writing code and worked on open
| source side projects consistently. Somehow, I've not done
| anything since around August 2025.
|
| I have a sense that AI could have something to do with it.
|
| AI is degrading the status of our profession; its perception in
| the public eye.
|
| At the same time, it is stealing our work and letting cretins
| pretend to be software engineers.
|
| It's a bad taste in the mouth.
| droidmaker wrote:
| I tried to execute a project in 1986 and was told it was
| impossible. Every few years as tech has improved I tried again,
| but it was still impossible. CD-ROM, CD-I, Web, Wiki, even AI a
| few years ago... But 2 weeks ago I taught myself to vibe code,
| and I built it. 40 years of planning and a few days of work. I'm
| freakin' thrilled.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I'm ready to retire. ... Fast forward decades and Claude Code
| is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like
| it did back then. I'm chasing the midnight hour and not getting
| any sleep.
|
| Of course you love it, you don't have to worry about retirement
| anymore.
|
| Give me your 401k, then tell you feel about Claude Code.
| tqwhite wrote:
| Oh, you are screwed. I feel badly about that. More about the
| environmental disaster and student loan screw job that AI than
| AI.
|
| I am retired and am nearly equaling my salary with side jobs
| and only working a few hours a day. I don't see any reason you
| can't do that so stop whining and start learning.
| anupshinde wrote:
| Glad to see this. I was tired of seeing posts that are on the
| extremes - "death of software by AI" vs "AI can't do this and
| that".
|
| I took a break from software, and over the last few years, it
| just felt repetitive, like I was solving or attempting to solve
| the same kinds of problems in different ways every 6 months. The
| feeling of "not a for loop again", "not a tree search again",
| "not a singleton again". There's an exciting new framework or a
| language that solves a problem - you learn it - and then there
| are new problems with the language - and there is a new language
| to solve that language's problem. And it is necessary, and the
| engineer in me does understand the why of it, but over time, it
| just starts to feel insane and like an endless loop. Then you
| come to an agreement: "Just build something with what I know,"
| but you know so much that you sometimes get stuck in analysis
| paralysis, and then a shiny new thing catches your engineer or
| programmer brain. And before you get maintainable traction, I
| would have spent a lot of time, sometimes quitting even before
| starting, because it was logistically too much.
|
| Claude Code does make it feel like I am in my early twenties. (I
| am middle-aged, not in 60s)
|
| I see a lot of comments wondering what is being built -
|
| Think about it like this, and you can try it in a day.
|
| Take an idea of yours, and better if it is yours - not somebody
| else's - and definitely not AI's. And scope it and ground it
| first. It should not be like "If I sway my wand, an apple should
| appear". If you have been in software for long, you would have
| heard those things. Don't be that vague. You have to have some
| clarity - "wand sway detection with computer vision", "auto order
| with X if you want a real apple", etc.. AI is a catalyst and an
| amplifier, not a cheat code. You can't tell it, "build me code
| where I have tariffs replacing taxes, and it generates
| prosperity". You can brainstorm, maybe find solutions, but you
| can't break math with AI without a rigorous theory. And if you
| force AI without your own reasoning, it will start throwing BS at
| you.
|
| There is this idea in your mind, discuss it with ChatGPT, Gemini,
| or Claude. See the flaws in the idea - discover better ideas.
| Discuss suggestions for frameworks, accept or argue with AI. In a
| few minutes, you ask it to provide a Markdown spec. Give it to
| Claude Code. Start building - not perfect, just start. Focus on
| the output. Does it look good enough for now? Does it look
| usable? Does it make sense? Is the output (not code) something
| you wanted? That is the MVP to yourself. There's a saying -
| customers don't care about your code, but that doesn't mean you
| shouldn't. In this case, make yourself the customer first - care
| about the code later (which in an AI era is like maybe a 30min to
| an hour later)
|
| And at this point, bring in your engineer brain. Typically, at
| this point, the initial friction is gone, you have code and
| something that is working for you in real - not just on a paper
| or whiteboard. Take a pause. Review, ask it to refactor - make it
| better or make it align with your way, ask why it made the
| decisions it made. I always ask AI to write unit tests
| extensively - most of which I do not even review. The unit tests
| are there just to keep it predictable when I get involved, or if
| I ask AI to fix something. Even if you want to remove a file from
| the project, don't do it yourself - acclimatize to prompting and
| being vague sometimes. And use git so that you can revert when AI
| breaks things. From idea to a working thing, within an hour, and
| maybe 3-4 more hours once you start reviews, refactors, and
| engineering stuff.
|
| I also use it for iterative trading research. It is just an
| experiment for now, but it's quite interesting what it can do. I
| give it a custom backtesting engine to use, and then give it
| constraints and libraries like technical indicators and custom
| data indicators it can use (or you could call it skills) - I ask
| it to program a strategy (not just parameter optimize) - run,
| test, log, define the next iteration itself, repeat. And I also
| give it an exact time for when it should stop researching, so it
| does not eat up all my tokens. It just frees up so much time,
| where you can just watch the traffic from the window or think
| about a direction where you want AI to go.
|
| I wanted to incorporate astrological features into some machine
| learning models. An old idea that I had, but I always got crapped
| out because of the mythological parts and sometimes mystical
| parts that didn't make sense. With AI, I could ask it to strip
| out those unwanted parts, explain them in a physics-first or
| logic-first way, and get deeper into the "why did they do this
| calculation", "why they reached this constant", and then AI
| obviously helps with the code and helps explain how it matches
| and how it works - helps me pin point the code and the theories.
| Just a few weeks ago, I implemented/ported an astronomy library
| in Go (github.com/anupshinde/goeph) to speed up my research - and
| what do I really know about astronomy! But the outputs are well
| verified and tested.
|
| But, in my own examples, will I ever let AI unilaterally change
| the custom backtesting engine code? Never. A single mistake, a
| single oversight, can cost a lot of real money and wasted time in
| weeks or months. So the engine code is protected like a fortress.
| You should be very careful with AI modifying critical parts of
| your production systems - the bug double-counting in the ledger
| is not the same as a "notification not shown". I think managers
| who are blanket-forcing AI on their employees are soon going to
| realize the importance of the engineering aspect in software
|
| Just like you don't trust just any car manufacturer or just any
| investment fund, you should not blindly trust the AI-generated
| code - otherwise, you are setting yourself up to get scammed.
| tqwhite wrote:
| The brainstorming, investigation and planning are so much fun,
| aren't they?
|
| Having an infinitely patient, super smart colleague available
| all the time is amazing.
| Kiboneu wrote:
| I introduced my dad to claude code. He doesn't even code, but now
| it's a more welcoming and rewarding experience from the get-go.
| He's happy, became more comfortable with linux.
|
| Occasionally I remote in to help fix something, but the coding
| agent really takes a load off my back, and he can start learning
| without knowing where the endpoints are.
| jesperwe wrote:
| Another +1 from me at 62 years. My problem is this has led to me
| feeling like I am tech lead for a team of a dozen excellent
| developers, but I have no task for them!
| didip wrote:
| Claude Code is definitely stoking the tiny ember that's almost
| went out completely.
|
| I am only 43, but on the last year of my career, suddenly my
| level of care in big corporate politics nose dived to almost
| zero. To the point that I happily retired myself.
|
| After messing around with some hard subjects, with the help of
| Claude Code, the little boy who used to love programming so much
| is waking up again.
| joeevans1000 wrote:
| The whole 'software craftsmanship' thing was hilarious from the
| get-go. Software is not furniture, where the best examples will
| stand the test of time. It all ends up, good or bad, in a
| figurative landfill. But if it is a thing, AI is going to soon be
| a ten armed very skilled octopus. If you weren't having fun all
| this time, well, the joke's on you. Might as well use the new
| tools to start having fun now.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| I'm much younger, just 42, but due to other medical problems, my
| attention span was being reduced. I've been programming
| profesionally for about 25 years, but the last years I was
| putting myself more into other roles, because being able to focus
| on code for a few hours uninterrupted is a luxury that I don't
| have anymore. I was honestly thinking I'll have to retire early.
| That was until I've tried Claude Code last year. It feels like a
| superpower. I can guide it, I can review it, I don't need it for
| thinking, I need it for writing code and under very strict
| guidance, it does that well. I feel like this extends the years I
| can do software well into to the future. In a way, I welcome
| masses thinking AI can produce software on it's own, it gives me
| hopes for more earning in the future for me.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| 62, similar path, same renewed passion combined with my
| entrepreneurial mindset. These are good times for us old codgers.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Met too - I'm 50 and have spent the past 3 years building AI
| startups, some successfully and in the last two months I've built
| two side projects with ccode..its amazingly good in past month
| with Opus
| schnebbau wrote:
| I had my real-deal moment recently.
|
| I was getting Claude to implement a popular TS drag and drop
| library, and asked it to do something that, it turns out, wasn't
| supported by the library.
|
| Claude read the minified code in node_modules and npm patched the
| library with the feature. It worked, too.
|
| Obviously not ideal for future proofing but completely mind
| blowing that it can do that.
| AneeshRathi wrote:
| I can not read or write code, always wanted to thou, in last
| three months I have made a couple of web apps, love how lego like
| coding is when the blocks are made for you by LLMs.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Same at 42. I've been making software for 30 years and the gap
| between what I can envision and what I can code in a single day
| is so huge that it takes all the steam out of me. With agentic
| coding I can move at a pace that feels right again.
| ttul wrote:
| I'm not quite as old as you, but I am old enough to know what a
| COM component is and to have ready the Byte Magazine article that
| likely described this ancient stone tablet tech. Codex has me
| absolutely stoked again. I can finally have fun with the
| youngsters, knowing that the latest new hotness no longer has a
| learning curve.
| faulander wrote:
| 53 here, coded in Assembler in late 80s, then C, Turbo Pascal -
| you know the route. 30 years later i am finishing all the
| products i started and never could finish because i for the love
| of god can not wrap my head around Frontend Design.
|
| My first finished product: ZIB, a RSS Reader inspired by
| Innoreader, just free ;)
| pulketo wrote:
| It doesn't matter where you get that passion for getting back
| into the swing of programming, I'm not far from your age, and
| truly everything becomes more monotonous over time in this life,
| and what was once a passion becomes something hard to achieve. In
| my case, AI helped me handle the tedious part of things and just
| kept the fun stuff of finding the solution and just tell it how
| to solve it, and it helps me achieve it much faster than ever
| before. Keep going and going! Who knows what you'll achieve
| tomorrow. Keep the channel open with updates.
| ezimedia wrote:
| im 58 and Cluade has given me everything i wanted to do in my
| 20's and on, and that is coding, I have some programming skills
| and understand making software, but with claude, i am building
| much faster and it is crazy how do the stuff is,
| airbreather wrote:
| I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were
| desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering
| and Control/Safety Systems design and build.
|
| So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably
| beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code
| myself by hand.
|
| For my coding AI "stack" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top
| of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better
| and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid
| questions. Plus I have connected OpenClaw to my Whatsapp so I can
| ask how it is going or give instructions to the OpenClaw while
| not at the keyboard.
|
| One app was a little complex with 35,000 loc, plus libraries etc.
| I reckon I had spent maybe 2500 hours on it over some years, but
| a significant part of that was developing the algorithm/workflow
| that it implemented - I only knew roughly what I wanted when I
| started, writing several to throw away at the beginning.
|
| AI converted it to a webapp overnight, with a two sentance
| prompt, without intervention of any kind.
|
| It took me another 15 minutes and a couple of small changes,
| mostly dependancies issues, and I had a working version of the
| same app that was literally 95%+ of the original, in terms of
| funcitonality and use.
|
| I have a bunch of ideas for things I want to make that I probably
| never would have been able to otherwise.
|
| I am just totally unable to fathom people that just make a
| blanket proclamation that AI is good for nothing. I can accept
| that it is not good for everything, it may cause some social
| disruption and the energy use is questionable, but improving, but
| not useful? Wake up.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I'm chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
|
| Let's get you to bed, gramps, you can talk to your French friend
| tomorrow.
| yuriksan wrote:
| Great timing on this post. I've been working on NeoNetrek,
| bringing Netrek into the browser with a modernized server and 3D
| web client. It's the kind of project I'd started and abandoned a
| few times over the years because the complexity always piled up
| faster than the fun. Claude changed that. The gap between "idea"
| and "working thing" collapsed in a way I haven't felt since the
| early days. I stopped fighting infrastructure and started just
| building. Three decades of accumulated complexity just faded
| away.
| nicoloren wrote:
| Same here! I'm working on a simple game and I use Claude Code to
| make it with Phaser, and I am not a game dev. I used Claude to
| plan it (with a chat for 3 hours), it made a document to describe
| everything I wanted in the game (the spec). Next I use Claude
| Code to implement every aspect of the game step by step. I didn't
| know the framework Phaser, but after each step I review the code
| and learn a lot. I don't think I would have it working so fast
| without Claude Code. I can focus on the spec and learn the
| framework. I code maybe 5% of it, everything is made by Claude
| Code.
| DaRealGraybeard wrote:
| I'm writing this at 4am on a Friday night (Saturday morning now I
| guess), hacking up a next-gen Faxing platform. Had it on my mind
| for years and never had the time for the coding or the research I
| needed to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
|
| Claude has made my coding sessions WAY more productive and helps
| me find bugs and plan features like never before.
|
| I'm also dealing with some career bullshit, so having a tool like
| this has helped me re-discover what I love about computing that
| capitalism has beaten out of me.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I'm 51. I use codex rather than claude code. But, I sure am using
| it a lot. It's more or less my default at this point. I lean
| heavily on my decades of experience to make sure things are done
| right and to correct the generation process. That seems critical.
| You can get anything you ask for but if you don't know how to ask
| for the right things, it will happily create a big stinking mess
| instead. There's some skill to this.
|
| I'm now dealing with a lot of stuff via codex, including
| technical debt that I identified years ago but never had the time
| to deal with. And I'm doing new projects. I've created a few
| CLIs, created a websites on cloudflare in a spare half hour,
| landed several big features on our five year old backend and
| created a couple of new projects on Github. Including a few that
| are in languages I don't normally use. Because it's the better
| technical choice and my lack of skills with those languages no
| longer matters.
|
| I also undertook a migration of our system from GCP to Hetzner
| and used codex to do the ansible automation, diagnosing all sorts
| of weirdness that came up during that process, and finding
| workarounds for that stuff. That also includes diagnosing failed
| builds, fixing github action automation, sshing into remote vms
| to diagnose issues, etc. Kind of scary to watch that happen but
| it definitely works. I've done stuff like this for the last 25
| years or so using various technologies. I know how to do this and
| do it well. But there's no point in me doing this slowly by hand
| anymore.
|
| All this is since the new codex desktop app came out. Before
| Christmas I was using the cli and web version of codex on and
| off. It kind of worked for small things. But with recent codex
| versions things started working a lot better and more reliably.
| I've compressed what should be well over half a year of work in a
| few weeks.
|
| It's early days but as the saying goes, this is the worst and
| slowest its ever going to be. I still consider myself a software
| maker. But the whole frontend/backend/devops specialization just
| went out of the window. But I actually enjoy being this
| empowered. I hate getting bogged down in grinding away at stupid
| issues when I'm trying to get to the end state of having built
| this grand thing I have in my head. There definitely is this
| endorphin rush you get when stuff works. And it's cool to go from
| idea to working code in a few minutes.
| monkeydust wrote:
| As a business/product person it's pretty addictive (gotta watch
| the token spend!). This week with a few workmates we had an idea
| in a pub, on train back I wrote a short spec and fired up some
| agents to start building. The next day, by evening, whist doing
| our day jobs we had a functional application working, not a poc.
| Few years ago this would be unthinkable.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Retire at 60! Lucky one. In my country it's 67!
| cube00 wrote:
| It'll be 75 by the time gen Z get there, they just keep raising
| the threshold.
| japentaca wrote:
| Almosts same history here. 61 years, 40 as developer. More
| passionate and productive than ever thanks to those tools.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| ++1
|
| Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20
| USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would
| have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding.
|
| This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs.
| 750.000 salary :-)
|
| It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new
| ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can
| yield new inspirations.
|
| I'm wondering how long it will stay at 20 USD for the smallest
| subscription, no chance that they can keep this price, I'd say?
| Its impressive that they are giving it away for nearly free.
| Tepix wrote:
| Are you using this large financial application just for
| yourself?
|
| I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded
| software from the lone developer to anyone.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Hyper-individualized software is what LLMs are best for IMHO.
| They lower the bar so much that it's becoming perfectly
| feasible and reasonable to amase a large amount of software
| which is fit to your exact personal needs and preferences.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Yeah, I have a dozen random tools that do specific things I
| need that wouldn't be useful to anyone else, and that I
| wouldn't share in their current state anyway. But they're
| fine for me, and without LLMs, I wouldn't have spent the
| time to build them.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Exactly: The app can do only one thing, and does this one
| thing very well. Other approaches are not implemented or
| planned. Its like a specific dentist-tool that you need for
| one specific task.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Yes, its for proprietary use among friends; its not for sale,
| instead I get a cut of their returns for providing support &
| maintenance.
|
| It is not 100% vibe code, by far not! I use cloud for method-
| by-method or simple class instructions and integrate in the
| app manually, I do not use any of the API integrations, I
| just use the standrad WebUI for discussing, planing &
| implementation.
| 3rodents wrote:
| Would you have needed 6 people? I find that Claude, Codex etc.
| are able to output so much because they do a lot of reinventing
| the wheel whereas a human, given constraints, would make much
| more pragmatic choices around which technology to use. That's
| not necessarily a bad thing, and regardless, you've been able
| to achieve something you're happy with, which is what matters.
| But, I'd still like to hear more about what it has done that
| you think you couldn't have done in a year yourself by choosing
| existing technologies. E.g: what is novel in your application?
| What background do you have?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| These models making bad / tasteless decisions about what
| dependencies to pull in is one of the main reasons they work
| best in the hands of experienced developers. You've got to
| know what you want it to use and tell it, and anticipate what
| shortcuts it will want to take and tell it not to do those
| things. For these reasons we're not yet at the point where
| inexperienced non-programmers can get high quality software
| out of these tools. I do think this will improve with time
| though.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| You need to tell the model what to do and what not to do:
| The dependency thingy is an issue, yes, but you can tell
| the model not to do so - and you should always know which
| result the prompt should create: For sure you must be able
| to read/understand/judge the code - completely fire and
| forget is not possible (to my experience), though I see
| many people saying "I had one mega prompt and after 2 days
| the app was ready", I take those always with a grain of
| salt.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Absolutely. These models still need a lot of this sort of
| hand holding, so they work best in experienced hands. I'm
| also skeptical of those very long runs, letting it go so
| long without active oversight must surely produce at
| least _some_ objectionable design or implementation
| details, right? So I guess the people claiming those sort
| of results have less care for these sort of qualities.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Yes, even Claude Opus 4.6 is still running into accidents
| on longer chats which lasts for 3 - 4 days. But its
| getting better and better.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| The explanation is simple:
|
| a) Speed - it included a lot of boring stuff, esp. in the
| beginning on when I was in the discovery phase and had to
| figure out some basics relevant for the context
|
| b) I think I would have given up very early on, esp. of all
| these boring things, which are required but take long
| headache time to develop (e.g. The app has a somewhat complex
| data rendering component, containing hundres of GDI+ calls;
| the file is currently around 5000 lines, writing this by hand
| woul have taken very long and would have been very
| frustrating)
|
| c) Debugging - Sometimes bugs are so deep down in some
| components and after 1h you stop seeing the forrest because
| of all single trees: The LLM can greatly help here
|
| d) Fresh ideas: If there is a pyramid of know how in this
| niche, then Im currently working in "the first floor",
| basicly; discussions with the model about enhancing and more
| complex things helps to see the next island where you could
| swim
|
| Yes, I could have done it without the models - but it would
| have taken sooo much much more time, that I wouldnt have
| taken the route.
|
| Novelity: The app does one specific thing and is designed
| only for that specific usecase - I do not know how novel it
| is but since its a niche, maybe you could achieve the same
| thing with with existing solutions and their plugins (but
| then I would have had to learn how to edit/change those)
|
| Background: 25y+ IT experience, Master degree and some other
| certs
| conwy wrote:
| Can you provide a link to this app? Or alternately, share a few
| of the prompts by which you built it? I only ask because, if
| it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Its for proprietary use only.
|
| Regarding prompts: a) In general I clean up the work space on
| a regular base, so I do not store prompts
|
| b) Overall, Id say so far above 200 - 300 initial prompts for
| the code developed with the LLM (and then 2 - 50[?] follow up
| prompts to change & update things)
|
| c) The initial prompts are always long and very elaborative,
| like 60-70% of screensize
|
| d) The model is always aware of the source files used for a
| given prompts (in Claude you can create project workspaces
| and put your stuff in)
|
| e) I always tell the model the current state, where want to
| go and which steps are necessary according to my opinion and
| I specify the result as detailled as possible
|
| f) I give contraints in the prompts, telling what not to do
| etc.
| nly wrote:
| I find this baffling tbh as I regularly ask Claude for basic
| components and they come out completely broken, wrong and
| buggy.
|
| The last: I asked for a quick TCP server in C++ that handled
| just a single client (disconnecting the existing client when a
| new client connected), with a send() that I could call from
| another thread. It was holding mutexes over read(), and trying
| to set the SO_REUSEPORT port socket option on a socket that had
| already been bound. Subtley broken garbage.
|
| It would literally be better to copy and paste a solution off
| Stack Overflow, because at least there's a chance it'd have
| been reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| i think its all about caring and knowing what you want to
| make and willing to iterate on the result until it is
| actually good. If you want the ai to do your job for you its
| probably not going to work, but if youre really good at using
| its advantages you almost certainly will be winning
| tasuki wrote:
| > a large financial application
|
| Those could mean anything. Some people think 5k likes is
| large. Others think 100k is small.
|
| Oh well, at least they didn't say "complex".
| pajamasam wrote:
| Also, they didn't say how accurate or secure it is.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Good one! :)
|
| Since its proprietary, it runs in a private cloud
| environment and is processing only data of one "user per
| instance"; there is not public interface, only a VPN you
| have to dial in etc., so no frontend/frontpage facing the
| public.
|
| Though, there are some design flaws from this
| perspective, because of convenience: E.g. it lets you
| persist the account number in the DB, if wanted.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| "large" in a sense of functionality for the given/required
| usecase.
|
| LOC is currently around 200k, so for sure: Its not
| Microsoft-scale :-D
| tqwhite wrote:
| You are simply doing it wrong.
|
| I could do this TCP server in another time at all and it
| would be perfect. I have done stuff that complicated and more
| many times.
|
| You need to rethink how you are using the tool because you
| absolutely could get excellent results like I do.
|
| The biggest things I suggest are... Treat it as collaboration
| or pair programming. Make sure to work through a design
| before programming and have it written to a file for your
| review before execution.
|
| You can do this.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| this is an abysmal level of condescension, the kind that
| makes me wish mods actively moderated it, as it's that
| insulting
| nly wrote:
| That doesn't sound like it would actually save me any time,
| or produce better results than just doing it myself.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| What is this app and what does it do? Can we see it?
|
| I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything
| complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could do.
|
| I am currently working on a relatively complicated UI on an
| internal tool and Claude constantly just breaks it. I tried
| asking it to build it step by step, adding each functionality I
| need piece by piece. But the code it eventually got was
| complete garbage. Each new feature it added would break an
| existing one. It was averse to refactoring the code to make it
| easier to add future features. I tried to point it in the right
| direction and it still failed.
|
| It got to the point where I took a copy of the code, cut it
| back to basics and just wrote it myself. I basically halved the
| amount of code it wrote, added a couple of extra features and
| it was human readable. And if I started with this, it would
| have took less time!
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Its a financial asset management system, and its for
| proprietary use only. Maybe Im doing some YT insights in the
| future.
|
| > I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything
| complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could
| do. <
|
| I should have put a disclaimer - Im not layman, instead 25y+
| IT experience. Without my prior experience, I think this
| project wouldnt have come into existence.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I had trouble in my early days with the quality of things I
| made.
|
| One of the things I found helped a lot is building on top of
| a well-structured stack. Make yourself a scaffold. Make sure
| it is exactly how you like your code structured, etc. Work
| with Claude to document the things you like about it (I call
| mine polyArch2.md).
|
| The scaffold will serve as a seed crystal. The document will
| serve as a contract. You will get much better results.
| siddhxrth wrote:
| as a 22 year old it's interesting to see how things are going to
| span out. o've 0 idea what i spend my time building my expertise
| on.
|
| luckily i'm trusting my gut that staying away from cheap
| dompamine and following what's cool might just land somewherere
| rayxi271828 wrote:
| I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming
| career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days.
| Java just came out. I slept little during that time because
| truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that
| pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep
| at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow
| felt like it didn't do it justice.
|
| Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone
| forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of
| obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings
| were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy
| wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.
|
| I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that
| feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like
| experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke
| up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It
| was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could
| continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.
|
| "What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that
| was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really,
| really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How
| about that!
| chooma wrote:
| That was an enjoyable read :) how about that?
| dtech wrote:
| I'm significantly younger but also programmer for two decades
| since my early teens and am experiencing something similar. CC
| is so freeing in that it makes those "nice but no time" ideas
| into reality by doing it next to your main project, almost
| feels like a drug.
|
| It suddenly turns that dead time while you're waiting for CI,
| review or response into time where you can work on the fun or
| satisfying side projects by firing up a few prompts, check an
| iteration or 2, and then pause again until the next time or
| while the agent is doing its thing
| discreteevent wrote:
| You have never been on HN before and yet you feel the need to
| tell the community something vague and useless but which happens
| to align with LLM hype?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm 63 (almost 64), and I'm rewriting an app (server and native
| client), that took a couple of years to originally write.
|
| Been working for about a month, and I'm halfway through. The
| server's done (but I'm sure that I'll still need to tweak and fix
| bugs), and I'm developing the communication layer and client
| model, now. It took seven months to write the first version of
| the server, and about six months to write a less-capable
| communication driver, the first time.
|
| This is not a "vibe-coded" toy for personal use. It's a high-
| Quality shipping app, with thousands of users. There's still a
| ton of work, ahead, but it looks like an achievable goal. I do
| feel as if my experience, writing shipping software, is crucial
| to using the LLM to develop something that can be shipped.
|
| I've had to learn how to work with an LLM, but I think I've found
| my stride. I certainly could not do this, without an LLM.
|
| The thing that most upset me, since retirement, has been the lack
| of folks willing to work with me. I spent my entire career,
| working in teams, and being forced to work alone, reduced my
| scope. I feel as if LLMs have allowed me to dream big, again.
| tqwhite wrote:
| The isolation of being a retired programmer is a real bitch. I
| think back to the days of a few young programmers with me at
| the whiteboard, the fast back and forth, the satisfaction of
| seeing ideas come together. I really missed that.
|
| I'm not allowed to feel like AI is an adequate replacement for
| fear that the critics will tell me I'm not healthy but, between
| you and me, as much as I miss the camaraderie of real humans,
| being able to brainstorm with an entity that knows pretty much
| everything and is able to execute my will without complaint is
| not bad.
|
| And, it's nice to have someone, something, to talk to about
| technical ideas. It's a great time to be alive.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> It 's a great time to be alive._
|
| I feel the same.
| tristramb wrote:
| I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming
| avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the
| end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the
| disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So long as it
| doesn't affect my pensions and the local shops still have food...
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| I'm sorry, I know you mean well, but your comment reads like a
| typical boomer parody.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I agree darkhorse13. I am as boomer as can be and hereby
| disavow this guy.
|
| You can rest assured that not all of us have lost our
| flexibility and ability to find joy. I love AI tech and am
| doing great work with it.
| Antwan wrote:
| Please think further than just the passion of code, mind
| implication of your projects and what you work on, in particular
| in regards to climate change and energy crisis. Coding, like any
| other form of engineering, cannot be done just for self interest
| and without ethics or conscience.
| simianparrot wrote:
| This and a lot of similar HN comments, often by fresh accounts,
| just read like viral marketing. Not least because of the
| capitalisation.
|
| Claude Code sure is great. Claud Code and my Codex reignited my
| passion for programming. Codex and Claude.
|
| Ugh.
| sensanaty wrote:
| 140 year old here just to chime in -- Wowee Claude Code(tm)(r)
| sure is magic and giving me back all the passion I've lost in
| my life now that I can Code Anything I want! It's not just a
| tool, it's a revolution!! Hell yeah brother let's go Code Some
| Stuff With Claude!!!!
|
| It's really fucking absurd. This thread is such low quality
| garbage and it's somehow a top article with hundreds of bot
| comments all reading from the same template, what a joke.
| tfghhjh wrote:
| viagra for swe
| w4yai wrote:
| Let's gooooo !!!
|
| I wish I have the same energy once I am your age !
| hnarayanan wrote:
| I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a
| very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my
| own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to
| build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and
| educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in
| the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was
| envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/examples/ :)
| data_maan wrote:
| Opinions differ: hobby coders love it, but domain expert
| secretly despise it because it narrows the gap between the
| skills they spent years honing and the average Claude, I mean
| Joe, that just uses this mental exoskeleton.
| hnarayanan wrote:
| I do understand this sentiment. But I wish these experts
| would see that they too are novices in literally every other
| field that they are not explicitly trained or experienced in.
| It is fun to explore curiosities even in spaces you don't
| know well.
| tqwhite wrote:
| What a good insight.
|
| The people who are pained by AI subsuming something they do
| forget that it empowers them to do a million other things.
| tqwhite wrote:
| Nice project. That must have been fun to make. Congratulations.
| hnarayanan wrote:
| It has been so much fun. :)
| ramon156 wrote:
| I think a lot of people have a biased idea of writing code. When
| you're a good programmer, you will be able to prompt a pretty
| good concept and navigate through any missteps.
|
| When you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, you
| cannot fix those issues. Simply telling opus "its broken, fix it"
| wont help. Sure, eventually it comes with a solution, but you
| have no idea if it's good.
|
| Its like renting a bunch of construction tools and building a
| house. Unless you know what's important, you have no idea if your
| house will fall down tomorrow. At the end of the day, companies
| will always need an expert to sit there and confirm the code is
| good.
| PetriCasserole wrote:
| Bwahaha! I'm 55 and just started grad school at an R1 because I
| can't compete. Fucking scary as hell! My lab partner is 23, I get
| up as my peers are going to bed, and I work hard to not say, "In
| my day..." BUT, I love being enrolled. The resources are
| incredible and networking is in high gear again.
| awnryabe wrote:
| Same! 61, been at it since 18. I can't put the prompting stick
| down. I have way too many projects at one time to keep up with.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I'm with you so much. I had to buy the big Max plan. My wife
| calls Claude my new girlfriend. (Good thing she's ok with being
| in a cyber-thruple .)
|
| I'm having more fun than I've had in years.
| shireboy wrote:
| Similar story. I'm a bit younger, but Amiga
| BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when "Visual
| Studio" meant "you can visually drag a component on and that is
| the app" instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned
| you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code
| tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly
| brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.
|
| I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last
| night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and
| knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much
| to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing?
| Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back
| to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6
| designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can
| focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without
| taking hours.
| Noaidi wrote:
| > I'm chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
|
| I am saying this in all seriousness, what difference is this to
| addiction?
|
| This is something already talked about [1]. You are getting the
| sugar (results) and none of the nutrients (learning).
|
| [1]https://quasa.io/media/the-hidden-dangers-of-ai-coding-
| agent...
|
| https://hils.substack.com/p/help-my-husband-is-addicted-to-c...
| ferfumarma wrote:
| This sounds super cool.
|
| What does your dev stack look like?
| tqwhite wrote:
| I have been making web apps for years. A few year ago I
| converted my base stack into a scaffold that lets me spin up a
| full working project with API, CLI and UI.
|
| I use NodeJS with a highly structured ExpressJS app for the
| API. It uses an npm module, tools-library-dot-d to implement a
| carefully scooped plugin structure for endpoints, data model
| and data mapping. It has built-in authentication and database
| (sqlite).
|
| Nuxt/Vue/Vuetify/Pinia for the UI. It has a few components that
| implement things (like navigation) the way I like. It supports
| login and user editing.
|
| The stack includes a utility that looks at a directory for
| executable CLI tools (usually NodeJS or BASH) and adds them to
| the session PATH. The API stack has boilerplate to treat CLI
| apps as data-model services.
|
| Does that help?
| alansaber wrote:
| Getting real oldschool runescape runecrafting vibes here
| nickjj wrote:
| Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these
| LLMs?
|
| Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be
| consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using
| them.
|
| I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right,
| I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a
| newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned
| it and here's the final solution that works".
|
| And then the solution fails because it references a flag or
| option that doesn't even exist. Not even in the old or new
| version, a complete hallucination.
|
| It also seems like the more context it has, the worse it becomes
| and it starts blending in previous solutions that you explained
| didn't work already that are organized slightly different in the
| code but does the wrong thing.
|
| This happens to me almost every time I use it. I couldn't imagine
| paying for these results, it would be a huge waste of money and
| time.
| Gigachad wrote:
| At least from what I've seen, yes you do have to pay for
| anything useful. But just the cheaper plans seem worth the
| price.
| gr wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately the free version of Claude, Gemini or
| ChatGPT coding models can't compare with the paid ones, and are
| just not that useful. But, there are alternatives like GLM and
| Grok that can be quite useful, depending on the task.
| gr wrote:
| PS: The cheapest still very useful alternative I've found is
| GitHub's Copilot at EUR10/m base price, with multiple models
| included. If you pick manually between cheap models for low
| complexity and save Opus 4.6 for specific things, you can
| keep it under budget.
| frumiousirc wrote:
| It depends.
|
| Google's AI that gloms on to search is not particularly good
| for programming. I don't use any OpenAI stuff but talking to
| those that do, their models are not good for programming
| compared to equivalent ones from Anthropic or google.
|
| I have good success with free gemini used either via the web UI
| or with aider. That can handle some simple software dev. The
| new qwen3.5 is pretty good considering its size, though
| multi-$k of local GPU is not exactly "free".
|
| But, this also all depends on the experience level of the
| developer. If you are gonna vibe code, you'll likely need to
| use a paid model to achieve results even close to what an
| experienced developer can achieve with lesser models (or their
| own brain).
| nickjj wrote:
| > But, this also all depends on the experience level of the
| developer. If you are gonna vibe code,
|
| Where I find it struggles is when I prompt it with things
| like this:
|
| > _I 'm using the latest version of Walker (app launcher on
| Linux) on Arch Linux from the AUR, here is a shell script I
| wrote to generate a dynamic dmenu based menu which gets sent
| in as input to walker. This is working perfectly but now I
| want to display this menu in 2 columns instead of 1. I want
| these to be real columns, not string padding single columns
| because I want to individually select them. Walker supports
| multi-column menus based on the symbol menu using multiple
| columns. What would I need to change to do this? For clarity,
| I only want this specific custom menu to be multi-column not
| all menus. Make the smallest change possible or if this
| strategy is not compatible with this feature, provide an
| example on how to do it in other ways._
|
| This is something I tried hacking on for an hour yesterday
| and it led me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of incorrect
| information, commands that didn't exist, flags that didn't
| exist and so on.
|
| I also sometimes have oddball problems I want to solve where
| I know awk or jq can do it pretty cleanly but I don't really
| know the syntax off the top of my head. It fails so many
| times here. Once in a while it will work but it involves
| dozens of prompts and getting a lot of responses from it like
| "oh, you're right, I know xyz exists, sorry for not providing
| that earlier".
|
| I get no value from it if I know the space of the problem at
| a very good level because then I'd write it unassisted. This
| is coming at things from the perspective of having ~20 years
| of general programming experience.
|
| Most of the problems I give it are 1 off standalone scripts
| that are ~100-200 lines or less. I would have thought this is
| the best case scenario for it because it doesn't need to know
| anything beyond the scope of that. There's no elaborate
| project structure or context involving many files /
| abstractions.
|
| I don't think I'm cut out for using AI because if I paid for
| it and it didn't provide me the solution I was asking for
| then I would expect a refund in the same way if I bought a
| hammer from the store and the hammer turned into spaghetti
| when I tried to use it, that's not what I bought it for.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Set up mmap properly and you can evaluate small/medium MoE
| models (such as the recent A3B from Qwen) on most ordinary
| hardware, they'll just be very slow. But if you're willing to
| wait you can get a feel for their real capabilities, then
| invest in what it takes to make them usable. (Usually running
| them on OpenRouter will be cheaper than trying to invest in
| your own homelab: even if you're literally running them on a
| 24/7 basis, the break even point compared to a third-party
| service is too unrealistic.)
| TheDong wrote:
| I personally didn't get good results until I got the $100/mo
| claude plan (and still often hit $180/mo from spending extra
| credits)
|
| It's not that the model is better than the cheaper plans, but
| experimenting with and revising prompts takes dozens of
| iterations for me, and I'm often multiple dollars in when I
| realize I need to restart with a better plan.
|
| It also takes time and experimentation to get a good feel for
| context management, which costs money.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I bought the $200 plan so after my extras started routinely
| exceeding that. Harsh.
|
| But, let me suggest that you stop thinking about planning and
| design as "prompts". I work with it to figure out what I want
| to do and have it write a spec.md. Then I work with it to
| figure out the implementation strategy and have it write
| implementation.md. Then I tell it I am going to give those
| docs to a new instance and ask it to write all the context it
| will need with instructions about the files and have it write
| handoff.md.
|
| By giving up on the paradigm of prompts, I turned my focus to
| the application and that has been very productive for me.
|
| Good luck.
| TheDong wrote:
| plan.md / implementation.md is just a prompt.
|
| You're not telling me to do anything different.
| detay wrote:
| Veterans unite!
| spotijk wrote:
| I'm 45 and I feel exactly the same way.
|
| Such a big part of coding becomes mundane after a while.
| Constantly solving variations of the same kinds of problems.
|
| Now Claude does it at my direction and I get so much more done!
|
| But maybe even more important: It gets me to go outside my
| comfort zone and try things I wouldn't normally try because of
| the time it would take me to figure it out.
|
| Like: Wat if I used this other audio library? I don't have to
| figure it out, I just pass in the interface I need to implement
| and get 90% of a working solution.
|
| AI augmented programming couldn't have come at a better time and
| I'm really happy with it!
| sumitkumar wrote:
| I have seen more reactions of people about this tech than actual
| implementations made possible which pushed the boundaries
| further. It is an amplifier of technical debt in mostly
| naive(people experienced in bad patterns) user base.
|
| Take anthropic for example, they have created MCP/claude code.
|
| MCP has the good parts of how to expose an API surface and also
| the bad parts of keeping the implementation stuck and force
| workarounds instead of pushing required changes upstream or to
| safely fork an implementation.
|
| Claude code is orders of magnitude inefficient than plainly
| asking an llm to go through an architecture implementation. The
| sedentary black-box loops in claude code are mind bending for
| anyone who wants to know how it did something.
|
| And anthropic/openai seems to just rely of user momentum to not
| innovate on these fundamentals because it keeps the token usage
| high and as everyone knows by now a unpredictable product is more
| addictive than a deterministic one.
|
| We are currently in the "Script Monkey" phase of AI dev tools. We
| are automating the typing, but we haven't yet automated the
| design. The danger is that we're building a generation of "copy-
| paste" architects who can't see the debt they're accruing until
| the system collapses under its own weight.
| reactordev wrote:
| Almost like we are making devs dependent on the tool. Not
| because of its capabilities but because there lacks an
| understanding of the problem. Like an addiction dependency. We
| are all crack addicts trying to burn more tokens for the fix.
| robertgreenlee wrote:
| I like theconcept of being able to quickly turn thoughts into
| actionable projects but I do miss the financial strain, years of
| study, trials and tribulations and the blood sweat and tears of
| the old school journey that created those life-long memories of
| that aha moment you spent months, if not years trying to achieve.
| ~Respect The Grind~
| robertgreenlee wrote:
| I like thec concept of being able to quickly turn thoughts into
| actionable projects but I do miss the financial strain, years of
| study, trials and tribulations and the blood sweat and tears of
| the old school journey that created those life-long memories of
| that aha moment you spent months, if not years trying to achieve.
| ~Respect The Grind~
| pranshuchittora wrote:
| LFG Grandpa
| forinti wrote:
| I know a guy who first tried programming at uni using a
| mainframe. He handed in his first program and was told to
| retrieve the result the next day. The following day he went to
| pick up his results and got an error listing. He decided coding
| wasn't for him. A few years later, he saw a C64 and started
| coding in BASIC and it turned into a career.
|
| I started out with an 8 bit micro so I really enjoy tinkering and
| coding. AI doesn't seem attractive at all.
|
| It's not only about what you do, but also about how you do it.
| mrdootdoot wrote:
| As a father of 4 children who's married, I haven't had time in
| years to pursue any of my software hobbies. The nights playing
| with arch Linux, fussing with half built oss projects - I can't
| justify the time anymore but I still Enjoy them. The cloud and
| Kubernetes came along, I told my wife this was something I had to
| learn and throw myself at. Despite spending tons of family time
| instead in my lab in my basement and trying to push those techs
| at work - I got my butt handed to me - felt like a young man's
| game for every interview I went to.
|
| At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite
| dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to
| serve it - and my family dynamic was only "slightly interrupted"
| (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in
| and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go
| through the news or social media. Amazing! I'm still throwing
| myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family
| time.
|
| At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I
| invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and
| arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs -
| toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad
| infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to
| succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can't replace
| my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org
| shifts, but not for a few years.
|
| The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it's when
| I'm asked - how do we get more features out the door?
|
| * More headcount? Not unless they're rockstars - more tokens.
|
| * offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more
| tokens.
|
| * fly by night software startup xyz? No I'll just write my own
| fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.
|
| * consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and
| rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.
|
| * oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud
| provider abc - no sweat, we'll make it work on our cloud provider
| for $8.
|
| Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I
| worry about them. Unless you're die hard, I'd just assume do the
| work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill
| without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond
| baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the
| dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.
|
| For those of you just starting out - I don't have a great answer
| for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch
| Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get
| started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.
|
| For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier -
| get your feet wet - we're about to go for a hell of a ride. If
| you stick to the "took ur derbs" and want to keep treating your
| craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we'll need those but don't
| expect to survive on that
| hum3hum3 wrote:
| Me too - I am 65 and coding all hours. At least half the time on
| tooling to encode the way I want to do things. I have ideas and
| implement them. I think it is fun as you make more progress. I do
| think it is a temporary phase and not sure if the next one will
| be as much fun or once I have drained the accumulated ideas that
| would be nice to do someday.
|
| I feel selfish in that I am towards the end of my career rather
| than right at the start.
| brightball wrote:
| For me, learning Elixir did this. I was going to change careers
| into commercial real estate about 9 years ago and then I binge
| read "Programming Phoenix" over a weekend.
|
| Walked into work Monday morning, bleary eyed and told everybody,
| "This is the solution. This is how you build rapidly and bypass
| all of the long term maintenance issues that we always have to
| fix in every other codebase. It makes the hard things easy, it
| makes perfect sense and it's FUN."
| KillerRAK wrote:
| Without experience, programming with AI (vibe coding, I guess)
| can be compared to being a rat in maze... You work your way
| through a project, but the dead-ends exact a high cost in terms
| time, attention, and ultimately cost.
|
| With experience, you see these dead ends before they have a
| chance to take hold and you know when and how to adjust course.
| It's literally like one poster said: coding with some buddies
| without ego and without the need to constantly talk people out of
| using the latest and greatest shiny objects/tools/frameworks.
|
| I've really enjoyed going back a revisiting old ideas and
| projects with the help of AI. As the OP stated -- it has restored
| my energy and drive.
| empath75 wrote:
| I have always had ADHD and as a consequence have a decades long
| backlog of things that I want to do "some day", and Claude just
| removes all the friction from going from idea to execution. I
| am also a software engineer, so basically for me it is like
| having a team of developers available 24 hours a day to build
| anything I want to design.
|
| I have built and thrown away a half dozen projects ideas and
| gotten one into production at work in just the last few months.
|
| I can build a POC for something in the time it would take me to
| explain to my coworkers what I even want. An MVP takes as long
| as what a POC used to take.
|
| The thing that really unlocks stuff for me is how fast it is to
| make a cli/tui/web ui for things.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| are you trying openclaw?
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| As a fellow ADHD'er who is also old and out of coding a
| decade, after decade and a half coding, wholeheartedly
| agreed. It's great to just shit done and abandon if needed.
| Feels much better than spend 6 months and abandon
| echelon wrote:
| Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an always-on
| hyper-focused machine.
|
| I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower.
|
| I am not using it in agentic mode yet. I am telling it
| everything I want it to do. I will tell it where I want the
| files, what I want structs to be named, how I want the SQL
| queries to join, etc. I then review every line and make edits
| (typically with Claude first).
|
| I haven't tried the agentic stuff yet, but I probably will at
| some point soon. I'm anxious about losing control over the
| architecture and data model, which is something I feel gives me
| my speed with Claude Code and that I know is important for my
| engineering work and quality.
|
| I won't be writing code by hand ever again. This is the future.
| We'll look back at the old way as horse carriages.
|
| Claude is also really freaking good at Rust, and the fact that
| it emits proper Rust with tests makes me even more confident of
| my changes.
|
| We are literally living in the future now. Twenty years of SaaS
| and smartphone incrementalism and now we have jet packs.
|
| Instead of engineers inventing 50 different frameworks and
| conventions for any given language or platform, maybe that
| energy will be directed to creating better AI tools.
|
| Edit: I'll also reiterate what others are saying in that I
| think this is a tool best leveraged by engineers who know what
| they're doing and that care about code quality. The results you
| get back will also depend on your repo/project's code quality.
| If your project is poorly structured or has a lot of cruft,
| Claude will see that and spit it right back out. Keeping your
| code clean and low on tech debt is going to matter
| tremendously.
| pmarreck wrote:
| 100% feel the same way, and had the same starting point lol
| gzread wrote:
| Careful though: a lot of people are getting the _feeling_ of
| getting 20x done. Do you have objective measurements?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, for some of us the "feeling" is good enough.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this is the most self-aware, honest answer IMO
| jcelerier wrote:
| IDK just yesterday I got a complete slide / powerpoint-lite
| editor in Qt Quick that is sufficient for the use case I
| have in two prompts, roughly 7 minutes. How long would it
| take you to write, on your best day, using your favourite
| programming language ?
| infecto wrote:
| For me the evidence is I have completed side projects I
| never would have before. I also recently started building a
| game that I had put off for years. At work I am closing
| more features than historically and at the end of the day
| not as fatigued. It's only my experience and everyone's is
| going to be different.
| darkwater wrote:
| In my case is nearer to [?]x. I have developed an
| opensource Android app which has already ~200 users that I
| would never ever written in my whole life. Zero experience
| with mobile development and zero time in my free time to
| focus on this appropriately to at least try to learn how to
| do it. I know myself, I would have given up before getting
| the first dummy APK on my phone. And while it's totally
| vibe-coded, in the sense that I just prompted CC and not
| written a single line of Kotlin code, I put a ton of effort
| on it anyway, on how I want it to behave, how it looks
| like, squashing all the usual subtle bugs that CC leaves
| here and there.
| echelon wrote:
| Did you prompt it step by step or let it do its thing for
| a bit?
| darkwater wrote:
| I've been working on it since December. The first working
| prototype was a oneshot of a biggish enough prompt (for
| Opus 4.5). After that well, I didn't save the prompts (my
| bad) but I have probably prompted what... 2-3k 80-columns
| lines of English in Claude Code? Yeah, I guess we are in
| that ballpark. Sometimes it nails the new feature at
| first attempt, sometimes it takes a few attempts and
| corrections (and in that case it can definitely be
| frustrating)
| gzread wrote:
| What does it do?
| darkwater wrote:
| (I'm going to break the rule I had to keep my HN identity
| separated from my real one with this post but here it
| goes...)
|
| It's a frontend to the vehicle data served by TeslaMate
| (a local logger for your EV data), as a more mobile-
| friendly alternative to Grafana.
| reedlaw wrote:
| How do you even begin to define objective measurements of
| software engineering productivity? You could use DORA
| metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is
| delivered. Or you could use the SPACE Framework [2] which
| is more about the developer experience.
|
| 1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-
| the-...
|
| 2. https://space-framework.com/
| echelon wrote:
| I don't have time for that mysticism. I just know.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| >Instead of engineers inventing 50 different frameworks and
| conventions for any given language or platform, maybe that
| energy will be directed to creating better AI tools.
|
| I think this will happen since one of the reason for new
| frameworks and languages was improving the human experience
| of coding, but now that friction goes away and AI doesn't
| feel that.
|
| Although we might need to study which language AI is best at,
| and possibly invent new ones to maximize that.
| sph wrote:
| > Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an
| always-on hyper-focused machine.
|
| > I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower.
|
| Adding this comment to favourites to revisit in half a
| decade.
|
| I've already "made fun" of your exaggerated hype comments, so
| I'll use this opportunity to say that I hope you remain sane
| and grounded in your discoveries. You wouldn't be the first
| to go psychotic after interacting with these stochastic
| parrots.
| echelon wrote:
| Don't you have anything better to do with your time?
|
| I told you people back in 2019 that these models would
| replace Hollywood and you and others have been calling me
| all kinds of names, and every step of the way calling me an
| idiot. I'm a filmmaker - I know what I'm talking about. And
| now we're almost here. We have million dollar VFX services
| at our disposal for pennies.
|
| Claude Code is doing the exact same thing for software
| engineering. I've been a senior software engineer for a
| good while - these capabilities are otherworldly and they
| can generalize to all new unseen problems. You're not
| paying attention.
|
| I'd be more worried about whether or not you have a job in
| 5 years than whether I have or have not created a business
| or whatever criteria you want to use to thumb your nose at
| me.
|
| You know how you can quickly ideate software plans for some
| large scale idea? Architecture, infrastructure, data
| models, etc., but the implementation takes longer? Claude
| Code short circuits that last bit. You need to hold your
| nose so you stop smelling whatever you're smelling and just
| try the damn tool.
|
| I wish I could slap sense into you grumpy folks. You're so
| stiff in your beliefs. This is a train headed your way. Pay
| attention.
| sph wrote:
| > I told you people back in 2019 that these models would
| replace Hollywood
|
| What kind of alternate reality are you living in?
|
| I wish you would disclose your credentials (though I
| admit privacy is an inalienable right of yours) so I
| could place the biggest AI hype-man on this forum.
| Actually, there is hype, and there is being completely
| gone with hubris and you're towards the latter end of the
| spectrum, given your doomsday calls on other comments
| that software engineering is done for and that you
| believe AI is close to 'putting all the HN engineers out
| of work' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185284)
|
| > I wish I could slap sense into you grumpy folks. You're
| so stiff in your beliefs. This is a train headed your
| way. Pay attention.
|
| Lay off the violent thoughts and get some rest, man.
| Sounds like you need it.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| part of my adhd/bipolar is reacting like the guy you're
| replying to and I was thinking the same. Comment reminded
| me of when I'm in the "YES THIS IS IT" mode which usually
| isn't far off from hitting the wall. Hopefully just
| projection on my part, though, and this guy is really doing
| well. When I start talking like him though I usually have
| to take a step back and it'll be a topic in therapy next
| session.
| dextrous wrote:
| Fully agree: I believe my decades of software engineering
| experience definitely help me fly LLM tools better than less
| experienced folks.
|
| But the much more interesting question to me: as LLM coding
| becomes the norm, does it drive the cost of self or small-
| company generated software to 0?
|
| Like many SW architects/engineers my not-so-developed work-in-
| retirement plan is to assemble a small team of people I've
| loved working with over the years, start an LLC, and try to
| make a reasonable (not posh) living doing what we love: making
| software to solve problems.
|
| On the one hand, it's clear LLM coding can accelerate and
| amplify our efforts, but alternately there's many people
| claiming there's no possibility of a moat, your
| solution/innovation can be cloned in a matter of days ... ie.
| the value of your software is exactly 0.
|
| Not sure which future will be closer to reality. A backup plan
| that seems reasonable in the 0-value case is to focus our
| effort on creating actual physical gadgets and systems in the
| embedded realm, which conceivably can be designed and
| prototyped by a small team... It seems like these would still
| be valuable.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I think that I understand you. I started programming in the
| mid-1960s as a kid and now in my mid-70s I have been retired for
| two years (except for occasional small gigs for old friends).
| Nothing special about me but I have had the pleasure of working
| with or at least getting to know many of the famous people in
| neural networks and AI since the mid-1980s.
|
| My current passion is pushing small LLMs as far as I can using
| tools and agentic frameworks. The latest Qwen 3.5 models have me
| over the moon. I still like to design and code myself but I also
| find it pleasurable to sometimes use Claude Code and Antigravity.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I had dinner with Marvin Minsky once. Learned to program a
| Symbolics machine. We share a little history, I think. I've
| been interested in AI for the last forty years.
|
| I decided that applications of AI were where I am going. I feel
| the pull of small LLMs. The idea of local is very appealing.
| But, at our age (I also started in the sixties), I've learned
| that too many irons in the fire means I get nothing done.
|
| Congratulations on retaining your spirit. Many of my age-
| appropriate friends cannot comprehend the idea of working so
| hard for fun.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm 64 years old. I'm on an airplane _right now_ vibe coding in
| C#. I have written code professoinally every day for over 40
| years, and now I'm invigorated! It's the same thrill as when I
| wrote my first Fortran or IBM BAL programs back in 1979.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Is HN dead? Why are people commenting on a vapid post by a brand
| new account, which reads like an ad, and they're not questioning
| anything..?
| tqwhite wrote:
| Because it is an interesting topic. The original post is not
| relevant. The conversations is. Lighten up.
| sensanaty wrote:
| It's such a blatant astroturf/shill post, but the comments are
| also all in the same vein so I guess anthropic is just running
| another one of their "organic" marketing campaigns
| chadtd1 wrote:
| This resonates deeply. I'm 49 and spent the last 18 months
| building six web apps with Claude while working a full-time
| Director role. The experience is exactly what you describe - that
| feeling of staying up late not because you have to, but because
| you can't stop.
|
| What changed for me was the feedback loop. Before AI tooling, I'd
| have an idea, realize it would take weeks to prototype, and let
| it die. Now I go from concept to working MVP in a weekend. The
| constraint shifted from "can I build this" to "should I build
| this" - which is a much better problem to have.
|
| The stack that works for me: Lovable for frontend, Replit for
| backend, Claude API for the AI layer, Neon for Postgres. Not
| fancy, but it ships.
|
| The biggest lesson: AI doesn't replace the need for experience
| and taste. It amplifies it. Your decades of context about what
| makes good software - that's the real asset. Claude is just fast
| hands.
| frotaur wrote:
| Seems Claude is also writing the comments for you?
| tqwhite wrote:
| I'm 73 (all the way retired). I'm in love with creating software
| again.
|
| I wrote my first computer program in 1967. Since, it's been one
| fascinating thing after another but, for me, the modern age had
| become dull. The thought of figuring out another API or framework
| makes me need a nap.
|
| Now I can have an idea, negotiate with Milo (Claude Code
| integrated with a neo4j graph database because now I can!) and
| it's off to the races.
|
| Did I learn CYPHER, the neo4j query language? Nope. Am I the
| master of Agent SDK? Nope. Milo is my cognitive partner. I am
| inspired.
|
| Ideas I had years ago are off the back burner. More new ideas
| flood my brain. I am set free. It feels like love. I lay awake at
| night thinking of things to do.
|
| I am so grateful that I lived to see this day and still have the
| intellectual flexibility to enjoy it.
| lhgkdj387 wrote:
| All that rhetoric and no output. Enjoy the hamster wheel.
| nickjohnsteblay wrote:
| I remember learning and writing Cobol with with the Microsoft
| Cobol compiler on my Tandy as I was training at the local VoTech
| and working as a night operator on an IBM mainframe flipping
| tapes. I can categorically say that writing code with Antigravity
| is worlds different than those early days. It is inspiring, but
| for me its more about understanding the models and how they do
| their magic. At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra,
| and statistics in an effort to be able to read the papers on the
| subject. In the future, I'm imagining the norm being an automated
| layer for coding, similar to compilers of today, that take
| natural language and produce trusted, reliable and performant
| code all the way down to the machine level. The real work will be
| developing the models and their layered and optimized machine
| level interfaces and implementation. It is all kind of amazing.
| Thanemate wrote:
| To those of you reading the comment section thinking something
| like the following:
|
| >"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and
| I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become
| better and better the more developers are using it, to the point
| where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening
| tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this:
|
| You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just
| as high as any other self-calibrating online community ("upvote
| if you agree" -> self-calibration of the popular opinion), and
| there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who
| are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.
|
| As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to
| this. I'm 45, and while I programmed as a hobby since I was 16 I
| turned it into a career during COVID, and all the pressure
| cooking LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me
| so much existential crisis and depression that I seriously can't
| even get myself writing anything "over the weekend".
|
| I hope to God the next generation of wonder kids that is the
| equivalent of the 12 year old discovering how to bent the
| computer to do what they want it to do enjoy arguing with
| multiple agents concurrently back and forth.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If you're "proofreading" the agents' work in detail, you're
| doing it wrong. You need to invest that time productively into
| planning out what the agents are going to do (with AI help, of
| course) then once the plan has gotten detailed enough you can
| set the agent to work and treat the result as something to just
| read through and quickly accept/revise/reject (upon which
| rejection you go back to an earlier stage of planning and
| revise that instead). Planning out at the outset keeps you in
| the driving seat and avoids frustration; the agents are just a
| multiplier that operates downstream of your design decisions.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yeah building acceptance criteria first is the way. An LLM is
| a goal machine. It uses probability over and over to advance
| towards the goal(s). That's all it is and wants to do. So
| giving it well defined and granular goals and guardrails will
| get the best results.
| icedchai wrote:
| There is a fine line between "not proofreading" and "not
| paying attention at all to the output." There are many things
| that look like they work, but won't pass a sniff test,
| especially when it comes to security or performance. I
| witnessed agents create "private" endpoints that had no
| authentication, but sent user IDs as part of the payload and
| trusted them.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so
| much existential crisis and depression
|
| this is extremely bizarre because I'm 53, been coding since 12,
| and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I
| find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead
| of manually cross-country skiing
|
| but I do think that if you're not ready to work like this, you
| may need to consider a career pivot in the short term
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm retired, so a career pivot isn't in the cards for me.
|
| I'm also not really in the HN gestalt, so to speak. I have
| some views that are common, hereabouts, and some, not so
| much.
|
| I'm enjoying having an LLM "pair partner."
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Yes, it's a partner you can discuss things with, and it
| never belittles you or gets tired.
| krd8ssb wrote:
| I'm with you on this being incredibly exciting.
|
| I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once
| I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up
| being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership
| and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly.
|
| I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized
| is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was
| just a means to do that and the new tools with LLM and agents
| have allowed me to do the core of what I love way more than
| coding by hand could have ever allowed
| accounting2026 wrote:
| Same boat (though 44M) - I don't think it has become less
| fun, on the contrary it can help with the stuff that was
| trivial but could still take time to get right. Now it can
| crank out that stuff often correctly on first try. Of
| course I have the same fear of job security as everyone
| else and it is sad to see something you were good at being
| taken over by machines, but it is not because I enjoy the
| work itself less, quite the contrary.
| amelius wrote:
| Coding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I
| really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to
| write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy
| it.
|
| That said, like many people here I have invested quite some
| time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is
| no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like
| something is taken away from me.
| ngcazz wrote:
| I live with a feeling of nonaccomplishment, never having
| taken a project to completion thanks to my shitty executive
| function. The AI craze has robbed me of any hope that I
| might still meaningfully* achieve this in my career.
| axus wrote:
| Couldn't an AI help you take a project to completion, at
| least until you run out of money?
| ngcazz wrote:
| I didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I
| signed up for was writing my own software.
|
| I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in
| 5 or 6 years.
|
| That standard gets you attached to the idea that you
| should be able at some level to individually reach a
| fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither
| the energy nor the focus.
|
| But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a
| raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that
| yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build
| things?
|
| (I hope I'm getting my idea across)
| ygjb wrote:
| You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of
| building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years
| old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the
| manual, and BASIC instructions.
|
| I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program
| manager and engineering manager through my career.
| Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware
| requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering
| of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing
| a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.
|
| Writing a service that shuffles a few things around
| between stuff on my home network so that I can build an
| automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a
| movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and
| testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is
| a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something.
| Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it
| go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?'
| to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.
|
| Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been
| a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I
| have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI
| generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the
| tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck,
| my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome
| successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)
|
| Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use
| them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of
| building stuff.
| ngcazz wrote:
| I appreciate your thoughtful response, you might be
| right, maybe there's an element of getting over myself to
| stay in the race...
| heddycrow wrote:
| Reading you, I was debating on loving kick in the rear.
| Can't really do that these days and some people react
| negatively to it. Sounds like you are reasonably self-
| aware though, so...
|
| Nobody can teach you to own and control you. But you had
| better. Use tricks, treats, magic, whatever, but get to
| the damned end or make for damned sure you know why you
| walked away (and live with that).
|
| Your life matters. Your ideas matter. Birth them. It
| hurts. Push through. Don't look back at your life and
| wonder what it would have been like if you had stuck with
| it. It hurts. But do it.
|
| Or do whatever you want, but this random stranger votes
| "getting over".
| heddycrow wrote:
| OMG that manual. VIC-20 was my first code experience. I
| look back and cannot understand how 7 year-old me was
| patient enough to make a jumping jack guy appear on
| screen. Joy of Coding? Hell, no. I wanted to see if I
| could make it work. (I did, and I had no clue how to save
| to tape)
|
| Sounds like you had one at home? If so, I'm a bit
| jealous. But also, hello, brother/sister!
| igravious wrote:
| two AIs -- I use Claude Code and Kimi CLI -- I got them to
| build an agent relay so they can communicate with each
| other (one plans, the other reviews the plan; one builds,
| the other reviews the build) -- while one is working on one
| thing, I'll be chatting and exploring with the other one
| ... they can build _anything_ in _any_ language so if you
| are a skilled and experienced code you should be able to
| guide a pair of coding agents no problem.
|
| Otoh -- if there is this bifurcation among coders (one
| group super-excited, one group depressed and angst-ridden)
| then maybe we should be trying to figure out why people are
| reacting the way they are. Can you explain more about your
| situation? What do you code? Do you have hobby projects? Do
| you have free time? Etc.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The trick is to have 3 terminals with Claude Code open at
| the same time. You won't be able to follow more. Reviewing
| the stuff or plans written is harder than telling them to
| write it.
| microtonal wrote:
| _I really don 't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes
| to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to
| enjoy it._
|
| I either switch between two projects, or I keep an eye on
| what Claude is doing, because it often gets off the rails
| or in a direction I don't like and then it's easier to just
| stop it there and tell it what to do instead.
|
| _That said, like many people here I have invested quite
| some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so
| there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel
| like something is taken away from me._
|
| I might have felt like that when I was younger (almost 44
| now, programming since 10), but over time I realized that
| the thing I enjoy is not really writing code itself, but
| coming up with ideas, solving puzzles, etc. LLMs are like
| insanely fast junior programmers, so they do the more
| mundane part of the task, but they need me to come up with
| good ideas, good taste, and solve design challenges.
| Otherwise it ends up as a pile of unmaintainable junior
| programmer code.
|
| It is possible that LLMs might replace the other parts of
| being a good programmer as well, but for the time being it
| makes my work more pleasant, because I can work on
| interesting problems.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes
| to write code.
|
| Think of it like being a project manager in a team. There's
| a lot you can do to help the project moving forward without
| touching one line of code
| silh wrote:
| I would've become a project manager if I enjoyed that,
| right?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes
| to write code.
|
| The AI should be spending most of its time helping you spec
| out new revisions to the codebase, the code-writing time is
| just the last step and if you've planned the work in depth,
| you'll understand what the AI is trying to do (and be able
| to stop and revise if anything is going off the rails).
| This is a healthier approach than "just spec out something
| else in the meantime" IMHO, but of course that happens too.
| ineedasername wrote:
| "just spec out something else in the meantime"
|
| Yeah, I've learned that if I do too much of that I'll
| spend more time catching up in terms of consolidating
| gains through review of code and functionality. That's
| just me, people are clearly developing a few different
| and not "wrong" ways of going about things.
| ineedasername wrote:
| "how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code"
|
| I usually review the code that's been written. Sometimes
| directly, sometimes by telling claude to bring things up
| piece by piece to explain choices as I review. Or I kick
| off one of the various maintenance tasks, validate my
| assumptions and expectations on how things should function,
| note the things that don't to be addressed. I'm going to
| have to do this stuff anyway, I might as well do it then.
|
| Or I read something, or do something to clear my head.
| Sometimes because I need a mental break, because I find
| that the speed these tools having me working at can be
| taxing in different ways.
|
| I think expectations of the "10x" variety whether you put
| that at 10 or 3x will have to be adjusted. Coding as fast
| as 5 developers is far far different than "A singly
| developer can produce as much as 5 others"
| heddycrow wrote:
| +1 review the code
|
| Screw {some number}x. Such BS. Those who can, do. Those
| who can't, write and spread pseudo-intelligent brain
| worms. Reject!
| gdilla wrote:
| For me, coding since the 80s (but i knew then it didn't
| spark joy or anything - debugging was so annoying, learning
| new language syntax even more so...) I love AI. I am a
| product manager, i just see freedom to make things that are
| real and learn faster - does this solve a problem? Is it
| better than what we have now? and move on, disposing of
| things as i go because it's cheap. To fill the minutes, i
| might work on 3-4 or even 5 separate projects and even
| multiple worktrees within those. I feel busier than ever. I
| think the best part is it's not lazy and I am. There's so
| many things I don't have time or energy to go deep on that
| I can delegate. I'm jealous of real sw engineers because
| it's probably a huge force multiplier, while I can't call
| BS on it as much, but getting better.
| gmadsen wrote:
| Multiple projects at once or at least multiple features. I
| am usually the limiting factor reviewing, not waiting on
| agents
| tarr11 wrote:
| 52 here, been a full time people manager for about a decade
| now. Coding manually makes me tired just thinking about it.
| When I think about embark on a new project my mind goes
| back to all the times I worked 12 hour days trying to get
| some basic system to function. I'm too old for that now, my
| back hurts if I sit too long and occasionally get migraines
| if I look at a screen too much.
|
| Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff
| while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on
| the porch.
|
| Sometimes i realize that my design was flawed and I just
| delete it all and start again, with no loss aversion.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| > Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build
| stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch,
| sit on the porch.
|
| this resonates with me strongly, while i like coding, and
| understanding it, I understand my human limitations. I
| couldn't possibly write by hand the stuff I've been
| making, in the time I am making it, without a team these
| past few months. I would be coding literally all day,
| which while I sometimes enjoy the zoning out process of
| wiring stuff up, what i really enjoy is exactly what you
| described.
|
| I enjoy being outside and walking my dog, taking a long
| shower, and cooking. All of these things are simple tasks
| with a good bit of repetition, and unlike wiring up some
| code or whatever, they allow my thoughts to flow, and I
| can think about where my projects are likely heading and
| what needs to be done next.
|
| Those moments, even before heavy AI assisted coding, have
| always been the moments i cherish about software
| development.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Way to blame the poster for their problems, and what the hell
| is a "short term career pivot"?
| infecto wrote:
| I don't think anyone is blaming but it's hard to ignore the
| progress we are seeing and thinks that these workflows will
| not be the norm in instead of the exception.
| matsemann wrote:
| Your analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for
| a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country
| skiing. The connection with nature, the silence.
|
| Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone
| in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a
| smell of gasoline.
| qnleigh wrote:
| I think the analogy hits home on both sides. You go faster,
| but you miss the meditative experience of going slow.
| heddycrow wrote:
| My knee jerk is that there are quite a few people who
| can't or won't snowmobile when needed and ski when
| needed.
|
| That's where the analogy starts to break a bit. You can't
| mode switch between skis and snowmobile, but you sure can
| ai assist/not pretty quickly.
|
| One more quick one - imagine skiers showing up to the
| snowmobile club hating on snowmobiles and vice versa.
|
| I, for one, have still not properly got a grip on how
| tech enables this sort of a analogy-breaking reality.
|
| Effing go ski then; there's even a club for that!
| (rhetorical, not directed at anyone in particular) And
| shame on me cause I show up to the ski club on a
| snowmobile with skis on my back.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The analogy makes sense. Some people love riding
| snowmobiles, some people love cross country skiing, and
| some people love both. It makes sense that some of the
| people who love snowmobiling think cross country skiing is
| boring and tedious, and some people who love cross country
| skiing think snow mobiles are loud and obnoxious.
|
| I don't think people are confused why there are the
| different types of people who like different winter sports,
| but people seem shocked that opinions differ on the
| enjoyment of using an LLM
| ay wrote:
| I am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the
| uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a
| soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with
| some high performance dataplane stuff more recently;
|
| The last years somehow it felt like there's nothing new
| anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight
| modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it
| was mostly a "tool for writing boilerplate". I have tried a
| few ideas for agents but didn't see how it could work.
|
| That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local
| models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it's like magic! And if
| something doesn't work - jumping into the code and debugging
| it is huge fun!
|
| Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens
| might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own
| GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been
| very busy! :)
|
| My harness doesn't "pressure cook" since it doesn't make
| sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other
| reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including
| subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go
| by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting
| things from it !
|
| The distribution of people's moods related to AI seems indeed
| bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the
| "enthusiastic" rather than "depressed" part of it. To the
| folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don't know why it is
| this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.
| techpression wrote:
| So you've tried at least a hundred ideas by now, care to
| share fifty of them? I'm very curious as to what they are.
| Opus is too slow to even complete one idea per day for me,
| and that's fine, I don't have hundreds of them :)
| ay wrote:
| I dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones
| that I ended up using but can't share: a streaming radio
| for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a
| lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server
| for talking with my family; a process-level
| virtualization based on KVM.
|
| Of the ones I can share:
|
| Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data
| https://netpoke.com - use magic code "DEMO" to see what's
| it about - the source is at
| https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke
|
| A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to
| Rust:
|
| https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment
|
| A study on LLM prompting techniques:
|
| https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness
|
| My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM
| for experiments:
|
| https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat
|
| Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling
| library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among
| other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack.
|
| A true "stochastic parrot" using hash tables:
| https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem
|
| These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my
| GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn't need to
| be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to
| github. Many end up thrown away.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Honestly, software engineering as a _career_ only went down
| hill for me from when I began to when I retired.
|
| (And I hesitate to even air that view in front of others that
| are already in the field because I am a kind of Pollyanna and
| don't want to foment bad vibes.)
|
| But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs
| that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the
| profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and
| responsibility that did that.
|
| I'll drop the euphemisms and just say outright that the inmates
| ran the asylum when I began in the 90's (at Apple, FWIW). The
| only one that really _told_ me what to do was the tech-lead on
| the team. Not my manager--for sure not marketing or the CEO (ha
| ha -- Jobs had not yet returned).
|
| In effect, I and all other engineers were told, "Here's your
| sandbox, here's your shovel: you go make your sand castle
| however you want--so long as it does X, Y and Z. We'll ship it
| but you'll own it. You'll fix it, expand it..."
|
| (A coworker whose sense of humor I always enjoyed said to me,
| perhaps seriously, "When someone drops code in my lap and says,
| 'It's yours now' the first thing I do is rewrite it." Yeah,
| that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on--
| becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down
| the castle, build another--Chesterton's Fence not withstanding,
| ha ha.)
|
| To that end I feel a little bad for anyone that missed that
| era. I mean unless you enjoy writing unit tests, having code
| reviews, style guidelines, etc.--and I have certainly met
| younger engineers that have come on board that seem to enjoy
| those aspects of the these-days profession.
|
| I admit that when I began it was in fact a bit intimidating
| when you realized that code you were writing, were responsible
| for, was going to ship on millions (in 1995? maybe?) of
| machines. The responsibility though also came with agency--the
| combination came to give me a sense of freedom, the power of
| using my discretion, and finally a sense that I was a valued
| contributor.
|
| You can infer from the above what I disliked about the
| profession as I was _aging out_ of it. My general sense is that
| the industry became too big though and too much money riding on
| it for management to entrust it to the "funny farm". But of
| course we cowboys who came up in that ward _liked it_ the way
| it had been.
| tartoran wrote:
| Do you still code? What's your take on working with LLMs and
| agents? Does it reignite the same spark OP is talking about?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Spark" might be putting too fine a point on it if I am
| being honest (and I always am, ha ha).
|
| But I vibe-coded a web site [1] that I would not have
| otherwise attempted (I just didn't want to have to figure
| out how to learn a map-type framework in order to put
| little points-of-interest on a web page.)
|
| I also vote-coded an extremely esoteric app for turning
| .mpo files into stereograms that you can then print to
| display in an old-fashioned stereoscope [2].
|
| I have lately been learning (I hope?) to build a hobbyist
| analog computer. This a deep dive into electronics--
| something I have no training in.
|
| And I have already queued up a couple of my abandoned
| projects (also esoteric) that I hope to turn an LLM loose
| on when I free up some time (from my current analog
| computing obsession).
|
| It's hard to say if I would not have pursued all the above
| without an LLM. I am giving examples though of projects
| that I feel were sort of on the tipping point for me as to
| whether they were worth the effort to pursue or not--the
| learning-curve-required vs. useful-end-product balance. I
| am finding the LLMs are a finger on the scale tipping it
| more often toward "Go for it." Maybe you would call that a
| "spark"?
|
| [1] (where I map out the location of a pair of YouTubers
| that have been road-tripping the U.S. for over three years)
| https://engineersneedart.com/OneAdvanture/
|
| [2] https://engineersneedart.com/stereographer/stereographe
| r.htm...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| When I started the things that made you good in this industry
| got you bullied - or worse - in high school, and we were not
| the ones invited to parties during university. Then with all
| the success and money it attracted the wrong motivations; no
| longer did you build software to change the world, but to get
| rich and change your world. And now the circle completes, as
| those who got rich but could not affect the geopolitical
| changes they wanted via their work are doing it with their
| money.
| sph wrote:
| > But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs
| that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the
| profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and
| responsibility that did that.
|
| I've been working on a contract for a large corp. They asked
| me to design a piece of software over 6 months which I
| delivered on time and worked great -- by the time we had to
| ship into PROD, the whole thing was canned unceremoniously.
|
| Luckily they liked my work so much they moved me to another
| greenfield project. Worked on it for a year, had to invent
| novel solutions which I'm pretty proud of, and we shipped
| into prod last Autumn. I haven't heard a peep from anyone,
| whether the thing is working and by masterful skill of mine
| it hasn't crashed yet, or if no one is using it and it was
| just another bullshit job.
|
| All this work, good pay, and nothing to show for it. Not even
| a pat in the back. I'm just a well-oiled cog in an
| unfathomable machine. I wonder if my career has any meaning
| at all. Recently they've asked me to deliver a feature for
| yesterday because of bad planning on their part, and when I
| mentioned how long it'll take, they've half-jokingly
| suggested to use LLMs so I can ship it in half the time to
| make their arbitrary deadline.
|
| Joke's on them, in less than 6 months I'm out. 20 years as a
| software engineer, 15 as a contractor, and all I feel when I
| get at my desk is existential dread. There is just no
| pleasure at it, that I'd rather risk poverty but feel like my
| actions and efforts have tangible effects on the physical
| world.
|
| Was producing more mediocre code ever the problem? This all
| feels like a Kafkian fever dream.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker
| a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the
| food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was
| distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple
| employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park
| trimming a plant or something similar.
|
| It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat
| enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.
|
| And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old
| enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who
| hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to
| ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends)
| and help with his lawn services business.
|
| I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class
| neighborhood in a Kansas suburb... And he paid us by the
| hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free
| lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.
|
| But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all
| over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of
| satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty,
| overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It
| is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor
| often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-
| collar world.
|
| To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay
| --I'm talking strictly about a sense of job _satisfaction_.
| (And, over the course of my three decade career as a
| programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I
| had full ownership of the code.)
| globnomulous wrote:
| I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll
| share it anyway:
|
| I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until
| I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a
| career out of that interest. The joy of programming still
| gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping
| happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't
| impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an
| innovator. The world of software and tech would not
| suffer if I had never existed. But I like the guy I work
| for. I like the people I work with. I write stuff that
| lots of people use. I do it well enough that I can feel
| decently good about it.
|
| And I'm watching all of what I enjoy in software as a
| career and craft gradually disappear. Upper management
| are now all True Believer AI zealots who know, just know,
| that AI is the future and therefore ensure that it is
| also the present. They've caused nothing but
| organizational chaos, shoved out knowledgeable people, in
| some misguided effort to remake the company in their
| image, and replaced them with, to me, obvious bullshit
| artists.
|
| Engineering time and effort that might a few years ago
| have produced value and good experiences for users now
| produce mediocre "MCPs," used only internally, that turn
| out even more mediocre code and tests that don't test
| anything.
|
| I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your
| peers have. I never could have run with you guys or made
| the mark on the world that you did. What I do, and the
| processes I follow, are probably the exact stuff that
| drove you to retirement. Still, I enjoy what I do and
| hate that it's being taken from me and replaced with
| something I hate, overseen, in my company's case, by
| vapor merchants pretending to be visionaries/cutting-edge
| 'thought leaders.'
|
| I'm glad some of us got to build things when the inmates
| ran the asylum, and I regret the money and 'progress'
| that strangled the life and joy out of it for you.
|
| Just an aside: I've really enjoyed everything you've
| posted on HN and look forward to your comments. Thanks,
| and cheers.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly
| the chops or talent you and your peers have".
|
| Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in
| over my head. Or so I thought.
|
| After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down
| the hall (who seemed particularly chill--Hi, Brian!),
| "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"
|
| "6 months."
|
| I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed
| kind of off the cuff.
|
| He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6
| months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each
| morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a
| little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small
| way.
|
| Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most
| amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!)
| could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at
| the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then
| declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already
| released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"
|
| And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in
| software engineering.
|
| It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I
| was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some
| point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not
| learned _anything_ in my 20+ years of coding. I was still
| not on Cameron 's level, never will be, but I might have
| made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being
| prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order
| to finally determine The Best Path.
|
| Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your
| enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.
|
| That is kind of how it worked: there were some people
| that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle
| off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a
| deadlock.
|
| There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and
| would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with
| matrix inversions and the order of transforms.
|
| And there were people that you could rely upon to take
| perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work
| diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over
| whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just
| by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that
| could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to
| time that person.)
|
| I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all
| types. It took me some time to see that though, and
| longer still to see where I fit in as well.
| dahart wrote:
| > Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves
| on--becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock
| down the castle, build another--Chesterton's Fence not
| withstanding, ha ha.
|
| As someone who references Chesterton's fence often, I not
| only agree the code often gets rewritten when someone moves
| on, I even think it's often the right thing to do - for
| medium to small projects where there is one or only a few
| people who own the code. The reason is because I've seen what
| happens when you don't rewrite it - the new owner(s) don't
| have intimate knowledge of the codebase, and as a result,
| they work at the speed of molasses regardless of their skill.
| I have left code behind to people who are better coders than
| me, and it took years for them to become productive.
|
| To be fair, I have also seen large projects with many people
| get rewritten and have Chesterton bite back hard, having the
| projects go late, cost enormous sums of money, and end up as
| bad as the first time, so rewrites certainly aren't always
| called for.
|
| This is all changing dramatically with Claude, BTW, people
| can now get into a codebase and be productive without
| rewriting it. They might not understand it, but this is a
| positive development of some kind at some level.
| sghiassy wrote:
| Been coding since 13, now 44 working in FAANG.
|
| Love AI explaining code
|
| Dislike AI for writing code (that was my fun part)
| tartoran wrote:
| You dont like the quality of the generated code or the
| process of not typing it out yourself?
| nazgob wrote:
| Process of coming up what to type was interesting to me,
| not the act of typing itself.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| OP has his retirement prepared. That might increase their
| perception of the upsides and negate some of the downsides of
| adopting AI.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 60 is relevant because it's inherent to the point they are
| making in having experienced something that inherently requires
| having lived through a longer period of time.
|
| Its not uncommon for people to lose interest or find the
| passion has gone out of things they enjoyed when they were
| younger, especially in their professional lives where the
| enjoyment eroded through forced contact with aspects of it that
| were less enjoyable or contaminated by unpleasant work
| environments and uninteresting projects.
|
| Having that passion reignited isn't something given to all
| people.
| jdross wrote:
| The opposite of this has been my experience.
|
| HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech
| companies, and current politics than the people I know in real
| life. People who mostly don't work as professional software
| engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I
| know are all having a lot of fun too.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Good point regarding " survivorship bias and groupthink" here.
| rprend wrote:
| I was in school when GPT came out and there is a strong
| generational divide. It reminds me of when i was young teachers
| said you couldn't use Wikipedia because it isn't guaranteed to
| be correct, but we did anyway. Same thing with LLMs. It's a
| faster way to do things so eventually everything will be done
| that way.
| petercooper wrote:
| _As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider
| to this._
|
| This is one only data point but my dad was a programmer and
| frequently complained about cognitive decline once he hit his
| mid 50s. From talking to him, he remained sharp at a conceptual
| and high level, knowing what he wanted to do and how it would
| be done, but struggled with the tooling, the logistical
| details, etc. He didn't make it to the AI era, alas, but AI
| could be a god send for people who have the proven technical
| chops and background but find juggling a lot of minutiae is
| becoming difficult.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I'm sure there are cognitive declines as you age, but even
| discounting those there's some fundamental change happening
| to the opportunity space.
|
| I'm in my mid 40s, I've had a really fulfilling career
| working on interesting things and making decent money, and
| over that time have accumulated a few passion projects that I
| knew were always out of my reach.
|
| Well, technically within my reach but I'd need to somehow
| find someone to pay for me and a team for some period of time
| to work on stuff.
|
| When I started playing around with these tools, it started
| feeling like maybe some of my ideas were within reach. Some
| time after, it felt plausible enough that I've decided to go
| for it. I'm actively in the middle of some deep performance
| research that I simply would not have the bandwidth or
| capacity for without these tools.
|
| I've also managed to acquire enough confidence in the
| likelyhood of some degree of success that I'm investing in
| starting a company (self-funded) to develop and release and
| license the stuff i'm building.
|
| I don't know exactly how my ideas will turn out, but that's
| part of the excitement and anticipation. Point is I never
| felt I had enough breathing room to really go for it (between
| normal life obligations like mortgage, feeding kids, etc.)
|
| These tools have changed the equation enough that it's made
| it more feasible for me to pursue some of these ideas on my
| own. Things I would have shelved for the rest of my life,
| probably.. or maybe tried to encourage and interest others
| into doing.
| daemonologist wrote:
| I think both opinions are pretty well-represented here, but the
| people who aren't so happy about generated code are well into
| the acceptance phase at this point. (Myself included.)
| vitaflo wrote:
| As the lead dev on our team told us "You will all have a
| different journey on this road". Not everyone is going to get
| along with allowing an LLM to write code for them, something
| they've probably spent their entire lives crafting a skill for.
| Others only saw code as a means to and end, so an LLM finally
| removes that silly barrier.
|
| I'm in the former camp. Every time I have an LLM write code it
| makes me entirely depressed because the satisfaction I get from
| programming _is_ the programming. However, what I have found
| incredibly valuable is having LLM 's help me _plan_. Using it
| as someone to brainstorm with, to "rubber duck" if you will. I
| still get to code, it just speeds up the planning process and
| has gone from a depressing exercise to one where I am excited
| to work.
|
| Find your own path.
| r_lee wrote:
| I fear that there will be a point where it won't be a choice,
| although a part of me wonders why there is such a hurry to
| get rid of devs in the first place, as these tech companies
| have insane margins
|
| But I also like to work the way you described it, and also by
| using Claude Code for e.g. K8s stuff (kubectl, helm) where
| you'd otherwise have to use a TUI or do a lot of typing just
| to get logs/status/etc. and a bunch of yaml that is just
| incredibly tedious
| mekael wrote:
| The reason, and the only reason, that leadership/owners
| want to get rid of devs is money.
|
| If you're wondering who the villain is, it's capitalism.
| It's always capitalism.
| heddycrow wrote:
| Fear is the mind killer.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm mostly reading the comments section thinking "wow,
| anthropic is putting a lot of work into astroturfing Hacker
| News right now in reponse to the new ChatGPT release"
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is
| just as high as any other self-calibrating online community
|
| Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing
| the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is
| the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone
| who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general
| technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered to
| have something abnormal going on - for example autism. This is
| like a carpenter becoming obsessed with his chisel and deriving
| his entire sense of purpose and happiness from delving into the
| minutiae of chisels.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| There is a profession called "tool maker" and their 'passion'
| for making tools has been quite important. Even just for
| chisels.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| I figured that something like that would exist, hence the
| example.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You feeling that way is the world telling you you're doing it
| wrong.
|
| It is more fun to treat them as coding buddies, usually using
| them one at a time a time, it is fair to race them at debugging
| a bug or spend waiting time looking at docs or something.
|
| The real bottleneck is how much you can hold in your head
| simultaneously to be sure about quality as a moral subject.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people
| who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of
| browsing HN.
|
| I've worked in professional software development for more than
| 20 years. I'm pretty well connected and well aware of what is
| going on in the industry. If you think that coding agents are
| not widely used and just a bubble on HN, you are very much
| mistaken. At this point I'd suggest more than 50% of
| professional developers are using them. Within a few years it
| will be 90%.
|
| The reason is, they are actually good, despite what some people
| really want to believe.
|
| Personally, I've been typing characters into a text editor or
| IDE for a long, long time. I'm very happy that I have a an
| automated junior programmer to do it for me now while I guide
| it and tell it when it is getting things wrong, and fix up
| mistakes. I did the manual way for a long time, I'm enjoying
| this new way. I understand this isn't for everyone though.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Thanks, I needed this.
|
| There doesn't seem to be a place for me in the future of
| software/tech: I like sitting quietly, alone, solving problems,
| writing code, and reading it. I like in code much of what I
| like in art: the fruits of human labor and the results of human
| ingenuity. Being excited about AI/LLMs makes no sense to people
| like me. If you're excited because LLMs let you make something,
| great, good for you. Have fun.
|
| If the tools become a mandatory part of the job, I'll change
| careers. Spending my days talking to chipper robots and
| describing what I want rather than making it myself sounds
| unbearable.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I debated heavily whether I'd stay in tech or change my
| career almost a decade ago. I concluded that the only other
| profession that I considered rewarding (at that time) would
| be to become a professor of history. Making history
| interesting to even one student per semester would be a win.
|
| In the end, I remembered how much I hated schooling. This is
| despite being a huge fan of education. It wasn't realistic to
| think that I'd complete the work needed for accreditation.
|
| Regardless, I'm happy today having selected for the thing
| that I already knew. I hope you also find yourself satisfied.
| It's lonely feeling lost when evaluating a thing you'd known
| through a new paradigm.
| tsylba wrote:
| I can understand how a technology, this one or any others, can be
| a fun and interesting tool, a creative one even, but a few things
| bother me a lot about it which all can be summarized as what Ivan
| Illich called "Tools for Conviality".
|
| Simply put, we delegate a freedom of use and cognitive power to
| complex tools and organizations that control and shapes them. One
| can argue that it's kind of the same if I decide to code any kind
| of programs the 'old' way, especially using native language,
| albeit their exist toolchains and OSes that are open source and
| thus technically free of monolithic take over.
|
| Furthermore those LLMs tools seem to me like the transhumanists
| cybernetic enhancements of cyberpunk dystopia, splitting Humanity
| between those of us that would be able to afford them and the
| others that are left off the competitive arena. Again, an issue
| that were still there to some degree in a capitalist economy but
| where the real entry to programming was just a computer and an
| internet connection to some extent, a way more democratic and
| affordable goal than having a subscription to a Big Bad
| Corporation owning everything about you and your creation, where
| 'free' non local models are not a real answer here either.
|
| Any new technology have some good potential, sure, it's obvious
| even. I don't think the path they naturally lead to are always
| the best we could take though, and I hope we wake up to the fact
| our society are nothing short of democratic* when the economical
| entities that govern us is nothing but.
|
| * Well, I don't even think we could call our political systems
| democratic without any kind of random selection anyways. A
| pastiche of one at best.
| HakshG wrote:
| Like a "spontaneous" public testimonial that someone converted to
| $ideology.
|
| This is likely fake and an ad. In case it isn't, consider
| treatment for AI psychosis.
| tqwhite wrote:
| This guy created this account three minutes ago in order to
| drag on this post. Creep.
| srameshc wrote:
| COM !! I remember that was the biggest idea that I learned and
| thought if I can get it right, I will be the best programmer
| ever. And to learn, I bought my most expensive book by Dale
| Rogerson if I remember the author's name correctly. But it was a
| different time and soon everyone was talking about Java. Just
| nostalgia and I remember my past.
| 59918276 wrote:
| I am 80 years old and I use Claude for target selection in Iran.
| Sometimes it chooses schools, but men with a chest do not care.
| Since war is my passion, it keeps me awake at night.
|
| Sorry, this "Tell HN" is 100% a stealth advertisement and the
| usual bots in the comments confirm the ad.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I don't even think it's bots, it's like the LinkedIn lunatics
| broke containment again or something. Cause HN is such an
| irrelevant platform who bothers botting it?
| ollybrinkman wrote:
| The "experience as the real asset" point resonates deeply. I've
| been building agent orchestration systems and the difference
| between junior and senior use of AI tools is stark.
|
| Juniors prompt "build me X" and get frustrated when it goes
| sideways. Seniors architect the constraints first - acceptance
| criteria, test harness, API boundaries - then let the AI fill in
| mechanical work.
|
| The real shift: AI makes the cost of prototyping near-zero, which
| paradoxically makes taste and judgment MORE valuable. When you
| can spin up 5 approaches in a weekend, knowing which one to
| actually ship becomes the bottleneck.
|
| The folks who defined their value as "typing code" will struggle.
| The folks who defined their value as "knowing what to build and
| how to verify it works" are thriving.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The middle-of-the-road approach is to write: "Figure out a good
| high-level plan for building X". If you're a junior, the plan
| is going to have things you don't understand all that well. Ask
| the AI about them.
| 38591-123 wrote:
| I'm 120 and my waifu performs better than any girl I've ever had.
| learingsci wrote:
| This whole thread feels like an Iranian cyber attack.
| canoodling wrote:
| I too had the "ok, I better dive in", rather than ducking out
| epiphany. Similar story, 37 years of IT, many roles, top
| performer, yada yada yada. I bought a MacBook pro 3 weeks ago(all
| the cool kids are doing it). I've been developing various
| automated audit and compliance based projects with Claude and
| openai. Having been a developer for perhaps 20 of those years, I
| find this new experience amazing.
|
| I've been leveraging a lay audience (one of my teams) to deep
| dive requirements, wants etc.
|
| Anyway, I'm so torn. I like these people, I hate to see them lose
| their jobs. I'll retire soon, I want to find a better, "feel good
| role" than my current, yet very lucrative situation.
|
| I want to leverage my years of good software design for good.
| Where, for who?
|
| --old lost IT guy in FL
|
| And I hear "why am I helping you code me out of a job". I scare
| them with "if you help, you'll stay", assuming they get that what
| I really mean is "if you duck away, bury you're head in the sand,
| you'll be out"
| tqwhite wrote:
| A thing I think a lot in the conversations about AI is this:
|
| You don't have any choice. Good or bad. It's here. Get over it.
|
| I know that back in the day, people said automobiles were bad
| and evil and costing the buggywhip makers their jobs.
| Unfortunately for them, the decision to use cars had already
| been made.
|
| I do AI with fervor because I live in the real world and the
| decision has already been made. You can't stop AI by pretending
| it's optional.
|
| Adapt or die.
| mal10c wrote:
| I totally agree with this! I've spent a career learning and
| making software of all types. I started with DOS 4, worked
| through VB6, and so on. Now I think more broadly and my mind is
| always thinking of new ideas, but with a family, it's tough to
| find time to create some of these. I know what the software needs
| to do and even what it should look like. I know the acceptance
| criteria and what will and won't work, so Claude has been great
| just being an extra set of fingers. I use it to create all sorts
| of projects that I would never have time to make with my busy
| schedule, and it's so much fun!
| tndibona wrote:
| I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite
| experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by
| our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was
| mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically
| says that "if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get
| left behind" , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven
| development. He opened up the room for Q&A at the end of the
| meeting. A lot of them had technical questions about the agentic
| framework itself but I had a philosophical one. I I felt
| uncomfortable asking him the question in the open, so I sent him
| a private note .
|
| The note read something like as follows : I don't exactly agree
| with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don't
| learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While
| the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase
| in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a
| personal price and that personal price is this - I'm may very
| slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am
| accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render
| me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel
| reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance
| between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on
| the job and we're more employable for transferring that to other
| companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped
| more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance,
| our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this
| year . Usually, I'd have to take a small textbook and read about
| the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to
| write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I
| vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I'm
| not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like
| the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone
| else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.
|
| The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI
| actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental
| disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke
| past me. Oh well at least I tried.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I understand your sentiment. I personally would never use a
| textbook for anything code related, if there's no proper
| documentation online then I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot
| pole, haha.
|
| However, even though I've never worked with CassandraDB, I feel
| pretty confident that I could do it with Claude Code. Not just
| "do it for me", but more like "I have done a lot of database
| migrations in my time, but haven't worked with CassandraDB in
| particular. Can you explain to me the complexities of this
| migration, and come up with a plan for doing it, given the
| specifics of this project?"
|
| That question alone is already a massive improvement over a few
| years ago. I don't feel like I was using my "critical thinking
| muscles" when I tried to figure out how the hell to get hadoop
| to run on windows, that was just an exercise in frustration as
| none of the documentation matched the actual experience I was
| getting. Doing it together with Claude Code would be so much
| easier, because it'll say something like "Oh yeah this is
| because you still need to install XYZ, you can do that by
| running this line here: ...".
|
| Now I'm not saying that Claude Code, and agentic in general,
| isn't taking away some of my critical thinking: it really is.
| But it also allows me to learn new skills much more quickly. It
| feels more like pair programming with someone who is a better
| programmer than me, but a much worse architect. The trick is to
| keep challenging yourself to take an active role in the process
| and not just tell it to "do it", I think.
| tndibona wrote:
| Oh, I agree with what you're saying and that's sort of how I
| mostly use AI as well. The problem I have with my company is
| they've stepped from measuring success by the outcomes to
| measuring the means to achieve it. My opinion is - It forces
| people to operate a certain way potentially at their own
| expense, unwittingly even.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Database migrations are hard and inductive and often fail in
| some aspect. Why would you want to spend time doing them when
| you can spend time building the important thing after the
| migration is done.
|
| Secondly - AI helps with happy path tasks for a migration. But
| most database migrations are complex beyond what an LLM can
| just spit out. There is so much context outside the observable
| parts of the database AI has access to. So I don't think you
| have to worry about vibe coding eating the entire migration
| project.
| dahart wrote:
| You are definitely not alone, and it's unfortunate when people
| pushing AI ignore that legitimate fear and talk past it.
|
| You are right, there is something you lose, but for what it's
| worth, I don't think the loss is necessarily critical thinking
| - I think it's possible to use AI and still hone your critical
| thinking skills.
|
| The thing you start to lose first is touching the code
| directly, of course, making the constant stream of small
| decisions, syntax, formatting, naming, choosing container
| classes, and a large set of other things. And sometimes it's
| the doing battle with those small decisions that leads to
| deeper understanding. However, it is true, and AI agents are
| proving, that a lot of us have to make the same small decisions
| over and over, and we're frequently repeating designs that many
| other people have already thought through. So one positive
| tradeoff for this loss is better leveraging of ground already
| covered.
|
| Another way to think about AI is that it can help you spend all
| of your time doing and thinking about software design and goals
| and outcomes rather that having to spend the majority of it in
| the minutiae of writing the code. This is where you can
| continue to apply critical thinking, just perhaps at a higher
| level than before. AI can make you lazy, if you let it. It does
| take some diligence and effort to remain critical, but if you
| do, personally I think it can be a lot of fun and help you
| spend _more_ time thinking critically, rather than less.
|
| Some possible analogies are calculators and photography. People
| were fretting we'd lose something if we stop calculating
| divisions by hand, and we do, but we still just use calculators
| by and large. People also thought photography would ruin art
| and prevent people from being able to make or appreciate
| images.
|
| Software in general is nearly always automating something that
| someone was doing by hand, and in way every time we write a
| program we're making this same tradeoff, losing the close
| hands-on connection to the thing we were doing in favor of
| something a touch more abstract and a lot faster.
| jijji wrote:
| i dont know, i'm in my 50's, and been doing software engineering
| work every day professionally since i was 15, and i can say
| claude code (max) has made me at least 20x more productive... Its
| definitely an improvement. I think what they've got is top notch,
| doesnt come close to what the competition are offering, at this
| point.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, completely understand that viewpoint. It's bizarre how many
| people hate it. Everything I can do with LLM's is amazing.
| accounting2026 wrote:
| I started at 16, 44M now, but also remember all that COM stuff,
| writing shell extensions for Windows 95 and stuff. And reading
| about it in the press (MSDN Magazine?). It was the new AI then ;)
|
| I think you really hit the jackpot because you got a full career
| out of it, saw an amazing evolution etc. So you can hopefully
| enjoy the ride now being more as a spectator without the fear of
| being personally affected by job displacement. Enjoy the
| retirement!
| arKahsg wrote:
| Young people who consider studying CS should reflect on the fact
| that the marketing oriented part of boomers and Gen-X are vile
| people who will use you and sell you out at any moment.
|
| They started with co-opting DEI in open source so they could
| retain their positions without working. Part of the DEI people
| now probably pivoted to Trump.
|
| Now they sell you out by promoting their intellectual
| wheelchairs, because _they_ no longer care about future
| employment.
|
| The three star bloggers that promote AI are all Gen-X.
| mocmoc wrote:
| I get it , I did lost my interest in coding, didn't make sense to
| me anymore. Now, I can't stop
| jeingham wrote:
| Yup, 73 here. I'm using it to build how to domain I bought back
| in 1997. During the dot com boom I had grand ambitions for the
| domain. I could have been a millionaire had I stuck with it but
| unfortunately life got in the way, children born, career,
| physical stuff, family, and my career as a reservist. All of that
| kept me busy. But now I'm running multiple agents everyday to
| build out this domain. It's working really well. Actually working
| out the product market fit right now. With customer outreach and
| etc trying to figure out what I can still do with it. It's
| working! Customers are responding positively. I am highly
| encouraged that the dream I had. But the dream I was just going
| to leave to my children. Might be something that could actually
| support me in my old age. Of course 73 is the new 43 because
| we're all going to live to be 150 now. Anyway I'm having a blast
| with it whether I succeed or not. Nobody's going to tell me that
| some form of AGI isn't here already. Nobody. This thing I'm
| dealing with every day is sentient. You don't think so I don't
| want to hear from you.
| zulban wrote:
| > I love it. It feels like it did back then. I'm chasing the
| midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
|
| I highly recommend this blog post about vibe coding, gambling,
| and flow. Glad you're having a great time! Just something to
| consider.
|
| https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/
| auggierose wrote:
| AI is incredibly exciting. If you are the one in charge, and you
| can exactly determine how you use it. I don't think AI is much
| fun for anyone with a brain and a boss.
| burnstek wrote:
| 50 here. Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of
| the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre
| web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for
| that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business
| problems just became too boring for software developers, so we
| decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn.
|
| Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and
| have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than
| enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing
| and effectively debug, yet I don't have to know or care about
| implementation details. It's almost an unfair unlock.
|
| It'll also be good to see leetcode die.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > It'll also be good to see leetcode die.
|
| Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Still causing it!
| sph wrote:
| > Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the
| never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web
| stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that,
| Angular, React, Vue, whatever
|
| Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's
| _two weeks_ old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw
| is the cool thing around the block.
|
| My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're
| keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.
| paulkrush wrote:
| Your comment is timeless. Just replace your tech keywords
| with those from the past or the future.
| sph wrote:
| I've been around for a while. You didn't have a game
| changing new framework or library every month.
| techpression wrote:
| Only running one agent? You should have a distributed network
| of them at least, if you don't you will get left behind!
| Running on the cloud? Stupid, buy hardware for tens of
| thousands of dollars to run it locally, own your tools. Etc
| etc, I haven't seen a crazier rat race in tech ever, the
| JavaScript framework era is looking like the most stable of
| software times compared to where we are right now.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business
| problems just became too boring for software developers, so we
| decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn.
|
| They often do solve business problems around responsive design,
| security and ux.
|
| Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy
| system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is
| immense.
| matsemann wrote:
| You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it?
| The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's
| basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre.
| Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so
| fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target
| changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back
| in the days.
| Cpoll wrote:
| You don't always have the option. AngularJS, for example,
| EOLed in 2021.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs
| to angular learning a new framework.
| taejavu wrote:
| At the time that's precisely how it felt though. So much
| so that I personally felt it wasn't worth it relearning
| everything. Had shipped several projects with AngularJS
| at my very first dev job, and have never written a line
| of Angular v2+
| kzzzznot wrote:
| It confuses me when people talk about frameworks as being
| totally different. They solve the same problems, slightly
| differently. It's not a big lift to learn a new one if
| you are familiar with one or two already.
| taejavu wrote:
| That might be generally true for frontend frameworks
| these days, because they've all converged around the same
| ideas. But in the mid 2010s, Backbone was very different
| from jQuery, which was very different from Knockout,
| Ember, ReactJS etc. certain frameworks embraced certain
| programming paradigms, others embraced others.
|
| Some of my colleagues didn't make the jump. Those that
| were the most into AngularJS back then are still writing
| Angular apps today.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > You know you could just choose a framework and stick with
| it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for
| what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit
| bizarre.
|
| I'm only in my forties. I've been nostalgic for the days when
| I'd stay up all night exploring new frontiers (for me) in
| tech for a number of years. I could not disagree more with
| your take on this.
|
| Someone said they value their time before death and you're
| pretty dismissive. Priorities change. Values change.
| Conditions change.
|
| > Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved
| so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target
| changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back
| in the days.
|
| I mean, isn't that what people in this thread have been
| saying about frameworks? How many hours have been lost
| relearning how to solve a problem that has already been
| solved? It's like when I tried to fix a date-time issue on
| Windows as a Mac / Linux user. I knew NTP was the answer but
| I had to search the web to find out where to turn it on.
| Stuff like that is pretty frustrating and I didn't even have
| to do it every five to ten years.
| robofanatic wrote:
| > with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for
| everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue,
| whatever - as if solving business problems just became too
| boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our
| cycles on the new hotness at every turn
|
| I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year
| switchbak wrote:
| "yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details"
|
| Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this
| attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is
| becoming a big problem.
|
| I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth
| developer background to cover territory that was too much work
| previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I
| guarantee I'd cause all kinds of problems even with the best
| intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning
| these things has collapsed dramatically, and that's very cool.
|
| I still don't want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those
| frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller
| number, even if it's on tooling that isn't my favourite.
| waffletower wrote:
| Merges can become more fraught with multiple engineers vibe
| coding on the same codebase. However, LLMs will become
| delegates for that too.
| switchbak wrote:
| Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can
| handle that well. I'm taking about the things you can't
| easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a
| codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite.
|
| And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the
| AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all
| kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you
| probably don't have much protecting you from someone else
| vibing up a competing replacement either.
| bartread wrote:
| Same age, same situation.
|
| I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new
| incantations to do the same shit I've been doing for decades
| without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to
| build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it's
| simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to
| learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text,
| data, and images on the web - especially when I know that
| knowledge will be useful for maybe, if I'm lucky, a handful of
| years before I have to relearn it again for some other
| opinionated framework.
|
| It's just not interesting and I've become increasingly
| resentful of and uninterested in wasting time on it.
|
| Claude, on the other hand, is a massive force multiplier that
| enables me to focus on the parts of software development I do
| enjoy: solving the problems without the bother of having to
| type it all in (like, in days of old, I'd already solved the
| problem before my fingers touched the keyboard but the time-
| consuming bit was always typing it all in, testing and
| debugging - all of that is now faster but especially the typing
| part), focussing on use cases and user experience.
|
| And I don't ever have to deal directly with CSS or Tailwind: I
| simply describe the way I want things to look and that's how
| the end up looking.
|
| It's - so far at any rate - the ultimate in declarative
| programming. It's awesome, and it means I can really focus on
| the quality of the solution, which I'm a big fan of.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Will be 60 this year, and have felt the same for years
| already. You get to a point where you look ahead and realize
| you've got maybe another 10-20 decent years left if you're
| lucky and for me, more and more, I don't want to spend it
| running on this treadmill.
|
| Computers do not feature at all in my ideal retirement. Maybe
| a phone or tablet so I can do the minimal email and bill
| paying.
| kitd wrote:
| _Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and
| have breathed new life into my desire to create_
|
| I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite.
| Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment
| from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or
| component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create
| simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of
| satisfaction.
|
| Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt
| the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial
| revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their
| fulfilment otherwise using agents.
|
| I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and
| they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But
| for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.
| boringg wrote:
| Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can
| be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long
| run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery
| and creation.
|
| Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to
| administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its
| fleeting or lasting.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up
| prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it
| cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written
| so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer
| to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy
| my code.
|
| A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code
| navigates with ease. But there are still corner cases where
| it hallucinates on the strangest seemingly obvious things.
| I'm working on getting it to write code to make what's going
| on in front of its face more visible to it currently.
|
| I guess it's a question of where you find joy in life. I find
| no joy in frameworks and APIs. I find it entirely in doing
| the impossible out of sample things for which these agents
| are not competitive yet.
|
| I will even say IMO AI coding agents are the coolest thing
| I've seen since I saw the first cut of cuda 20 years ago. And
| I expect the same level of belligerence and resistance to it
| that I saw deployed against cuda. People hate change by and
| large.
| Bewelge wrote:
| Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were
| people clinging to instead?
| MachineBurning wrote:
| IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and
| maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming
| model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want
| to invest in hardware that could only run code written in
| CUDA.
|
| Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat
| succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and
| just run the parallel implementations they'd already
| written for supercomputes using x86. It seemed easier.
| Why invest all of this effort into CUDA when Intel are
| going to come and make your current code work just as
| fast as this strange CUDA stuff in a year or two.
|
| Deep learning is quite different from the earlier uses of
| CUDA. Those use cases were often massive, often old,
| FORTRAN programs where to get things running well you had
| to write many separate kernels targeting each bit. And it
| all had to be on there to avoid expensive copies between
| GPU and CPU, and early CUDA was a lot less programmable
| than it is now, with huge performance penalties for
| relatively small "mistakes". Also many of your key
| contributers are scientists rather than profressional
| programmers who see programming as getting in the way of
| doing what they acutally want to do. They don't want to
| spend time completely rewriting their applications and
| optimizing CUDA kernels, they want to keep on with their
| incremental modifications to existing codebases.
|
| Then deep learning came along and researchers were
| already using frameworks (Lua Torch, Caffe, Theano). The
| framework authors only had to support the few operations
| required to get Convnets working very fast on GPUs, and
| it was minimal effort for researchers to run. It grew a
| lot from there, but going from "nothing" to "most people
| can run their Convnet research" on GPUs was much eaiser
| for these frameworks than it was for any large
| traditional HPC scientific application.
| Bewelge wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so
| obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again,
| with every new technology you probably also had
| management pushing to use technology_a for <enter
| something inappropriate for technology_a>.
|
| Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has
| matured and become completely normal it might be hard to
| imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they
| won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're
| confronted with every day :)
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous
|
| I remember being a bit surprised when I started reading
| about GPUs being tasked with processes that weren't what
| we'd previously understood to be their role (way before I
| heard of CUDA). For some reason that I don't recall, I
| was thinking about that moment in tech just the other
| day.
|
| It wasn't always obvious that the earth rotated around
| the sun. Or that using a mouse would be a standard for
| computing. Knowledge is built. We're pretty lucky to
| stand atop the giants who came before us.
|
| I didn't know about CUDA until however many years ago.
| Definitely didn't know how early it began. Definitely
| didn't know there was pushback when it was introduced.
| Interesting stuff.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I'm dealing with someone in 2026 insisting that
| everything has to be written in Python and rely on
| entirely torch.compile for acceleration rather than any
| bespoke GPU kernels. Times change, people don't.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| In the beginning, valid claims of 100x to 1,000x for
| genuine workloads due to HW level advances enabled by
| CUDA were denied stating that this ignored CPU and memory
| copy overhead, or it was only being measure relative to
| single core code etc. No amount of evidence to the
| contrary was sufficient for a lot of people who should
| have known better. And even if they believed the
| speedups, they were the same ones saying Intel would
| destroy them with their roadmap. I was there. I rolled my
| eyes every single time but then AI happened and most of
| them (but not all of them) denied ever spouting such
| gibberish.
|
| Won't name names anymore, it really doesn't matter. But I
| feel the same way about people still characterizing LLMs
| as stochastic parrots and glorified autocomplete as I
| feel about certain CPU luminaries (won't name names)
| continuing to state that GPUs are bad because they were
| designed for gaming. Neither sorts are keeping up with
| how fast things change.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of
| getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the
| "macro" of building systems that work?
|
| If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter,
| you love AI agents.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I enjoy both. There's still plenty of micro to do even in
| web dev if you have high standards. Read Claude's output
| and you'll find issues. Code organization, style, edge
| cases, etc.
|
| But the important thing is getting solutions to users.
| Claude makes that easier.
| kristofferR wrote:
| That is an amazing summary. It might not seem that amazing,
| but I feel like I've read pages about this, but nothing has
| expressed as elegantly and succinctly.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I do love the former, but it's been nice to take a break
| from that and work at a higher level of abstraction.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I'd say that the divide seems to come down to whether you
| want to be a manager or a hacker. Skimming the posts in
| this submission, many of the most enamored with LLMs seem
| to be project managers, people managers, principal+
| engineers who don't code much anymore, and other not hands-
| on people who are less concerned with quality or technical
| elegance than getting some kind of result.
|
| Bear in mind also that the inputs to train LLMs on future
| languages and frameworks _necessarily_ have to come from
| the hacker types. Somebody has to get their hands dirty,
| the "micro" of the parent post, to write a high quality
| corpus of code in the new tech so that LLMs have a basis to
| work from to emit their results.
| Difwif wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious what category you see
| yourself in.
|
| I don't think you're a hacker. I think you enjoy writing
| code (good for you). Some of us just enjoy making the
| computer execute our ideas - like a digital magician.
| I've also gotten very good at the code writing and
| debugging part. I've even enjoyed it for long periods of
| time but there's times where I can't execute my ideas
| because they're bigger than what I can reasonably do by
| myself. Then my job becomes pitching, hiring, and
| managing humans. Now I write code to write code and no
| project seems too big.
|
| But I'm looking forward to collapsing the many layers of
| abstraction we've created to move bits and control
| devices. It was always about what we could do with the
| computers for me.
| cheema33 wrote:
| I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your
| happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of
| operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so
| that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me
| wings.
|
| The need for assembly programmers diminished over the
| decades. A similar thing will happen here.
| darkwater wrote:
| > I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer.
|
| Congrats! I'm in that age where I'm envying more the ones
| like you than the 20-something :)
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good
| at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear
| people talk about "guiding them" which is what I think they
| are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or
| you'll just drive off a cliff eventually.
|
| At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and
| while each individual function is ok, the overall application
| is a dog's breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many
| problems.
|
| If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code
| then you're probably toast, but if you like building whole
| systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is
| still heaps of work to do.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment
| from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or
| component
|
| I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic"
| modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write,
| direct the architecture explicitly.
|
| You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from
| learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra
| bottlenecks that suck the joy out of the process for me, but
| you get freed from the tedious and soul crushing parts.
| fragmede wrote:
| But then you don't get the same gains in output that
| agentic modes get you. It just goes off and does stuff,
| sometimes for hours if you get the loop tuned right.
|
| Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want
| to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando
| tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is _so_ 1 year
| ago. Everyone knows the $20 /month plans aren't going to
| last, time will tell if the $100/month ones do. The
| satisfaction is now in completing a component and getting
| to polish it in a way you never had time for before. And
| then totally crushing the next one in record time. To each
| their own, of course, but personally, what's been lost with
| agentic mode has been replaced by quantity _and_ quality.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Yes I'm not recommending "glorified autocomplete". Just
| shortening the cycle. Give it tasks that would involve
| maybe a couple of hundred lines of code at a time. I find
| this captures both the rewarding aspects and gets a lot
| of the productivity gain - and I'll argue a lot of the
| remainder of that "productivity gain" sits in somewhat
| debatable territory : how well all this code holds up
| that has been developed without oversight is going to be
| something we only really find out in a few years.
| throwaway12345t wrote:
| Scale the Lego pieces more and it's the same. Bigger projects
| have more moving parts and require the same thinking.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details
|
| Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about
| implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff
| you run locally for your own amusement.
| aklein wrote:
| until you learn to trust the system and free mental capacity
| for more useful thinking. at some point compilers became
| better at assembly instructions than humans. seems inevitable
| this will happen here. caring about the details and knowing
| the details are two different things.
| leptons wrote:
| LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that
| system. And no I don't think they will "get better".
| ransom1538 wrote:
| You truly speak for many. I don't have the energy to center a
| div anymore, and to be honest, that time was thrown away
| [excluding money, a pretty big exclusion]. I am sure my boss's
| "Uber for cats" will work, I just like using AI at this point.
| I can iterate on 15 "Uber for cats" with 200 centered divs,
| spitting out documentation and excellent objects all day.
|
| But the real talk we need to have is... "Uber for cats"
| Bewelge wrote:
| I also find these things incredibly annoying. But I've been
| actively working in webdev the past couple of years so I was
| actually keeping up with stuff. And I still consider this a
| cheat-code.
|
| It makes it so easy to cut through the bullshit. And I've never
| considered myself scared of asking "stupid" questions. But
| after using these AI tools I've noticed that there are actually
| quite a few cases where I wouldn't ask (another human) a
| question.
|
| Two examples: - What the hell does React mean when they say
| "rendering"? Doesn't it just output HTML/a DOM tree and the
| browser does the actual rendering? Why do they call it
| rendering? - Why are the three vectors in transformer models
| named query, key & value? It doesn't really make sense, why do
| they call it that?
|
| In both cases it turns out, the question wasn't really that
| stupid. But they're not the kind of question I'd have turned to
| Stackoverflow for.
|
| It really is a bit like having a non-human quasi-expert on most
| topics at your fingertips.
| jitbit wrote:
| Turning 50 this year.
|
| Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my
| increasingly limited time becomes an issue.
|
| And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time.
|
| I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really,
| really important. Young ppl don't get it.
| corysama wrote:
| Same same. When I was a young, single nerd I would happily
| spend a weekend coding in my cave.
|
| Now I do fun code on a laptop on the sofa with my family. I'm
| only typing in tiny breaks between socializing and I'm still
| getting lots of fun stuff done.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > as if solving business problems just became too boring
|
| And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole
| point.
|
| Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and
| creating is a net gain.
|
| That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is
| a technology that replaces thinking.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of
| the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech,
| googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to
| ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on
| something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a
| post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much
| less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I
| still want to understand everything I'm pasting.
| YZF wrote:
| There is a lot more Claude Code can do for you that an AI
| chat bot can't because it a) has tool access b) has access to
| your source code.
|
| - Root cause and fix failures.
|
| - Run any code "what if scenario".
|
| - Performance optimizations.
|
| - Refactor.
|
| There's no reason why you shouldn't (and you should) read all
| the code and understand it after Claude does any work for you
| but the experience vs. the "old" SO model of looking for some
| technical detail is very different.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely.
| I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes
| but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using
| compute and technology and I've felt much the same way for some
| time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in
| the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I
| wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the
| day and dollars in the sponsoring agency's purse to pursue new
| innovative work.
|
| Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space
| and the innovative computing use around them. It's been
| exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and
| machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the
| clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And
| I don't have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to
| memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level
| architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It's
| been quite enjoyable as well.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Can you explain why or how this works for you? I'm of a similar
| vintage, and what I did back in "our day" was essentially chase
| knowledge. With AI and CC, yes I could stay up all night but it
| feels a lot more like trying to finish a video game or binge-
| watch streaming video than discover the meaning of life.
| vicchenai wrote:
| Same energy here. I'm in my late 20s but the feeling OP describes
| is exactly what I got when I started using Claude Code for a
| fintech side project. Spent years wanting to build stuff but
| getting bogged down in boilerplate and config hell. Now I just
| describe what I want and iterate. It's like pair programming with
| someone who never gets tired and doesn't judge your 2am ideas.
| unreal37 wrote:
| I wonder if the pace of change in AI will push you back to the
| "ready to retire" state.
|
| Sure, AI is exciting, and it reignites a passion. But everything
| you learn today will be obsolete a year from now. And that might
| tire you out again.
| Smart_Medved wrote:
| The framework fatigue angle in this thread is real. I spent years
| maintaining legacy JS and CSS codebases, watching the ecosystem
| reinvent the same dropdown menu in Backbone, then Angular, then
| React, then Vue. What I didn't expect is that all that time
| understanding the actual DOM, specificity rules, and browser
| quirks would become useful again -- when Claude goes sideways on
| an old codebase, the underlying mental model is what lets you
| catch it. Vibe-coding isn't replacing that knowledge, it's
| finally giving it a place to move fast.
| 29386 wrote:
| Finally we learn the truth in this comment section:
| Claude is for old people!
|
| Anthropic can adapt the "Tai Chi" YouTube ads, where fat retired
| people become muscular in just three weeks!
| overgard wrote:
| Green account ending in "cc". I didn't realize Hacker News was
| doing ads now.
| AstroBen wrote:
| How much more blatant can you get?
|
| Half the comments in here are also along the same lines
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| I'm 50. I've been coding since the 6th grade. I'm a director for
| my org but still have to be hands on because of how small we are.
|
| I only ever wanted to code.
|
| I've spent decades developing mentorship, project management, and
| planning skills. I spent decades learning networking, databases,
| systems administration, testing, scrum, agile, waterfall, you
| name it. Every skill was necessary to build good software.
|
| But I only ever wanted to code.
|
| And I've spent decades burning out. I'm burt out on terrible
| documentation, tedious boiler plate and systems that don't
| interoperate well. I despise closed ecosystems, dependency
| management gone mad, terrible programming languages, over
| abstraction and I have fundamental and philosophical objections
| to modern software development practices.
|
| I only ever wanted to code and I just couldn't do it anymore. And
| then AI happened.
|
| This has been liberating for me.
|
| The mountainous pile of terrible documentation written for
| somebody that has 36 years less experience? Ask the AI to find
| that one nugget I need.
|
| That horrific mind numbingly tedious boilerplate? Doesn't matter
| if it's code, xml, yaml, or anything else. Have the AI do the
| busy work while I think about the bigger picture.
|
| This nodejs npm dependency hell? Let the AI figure it out. Let
| the AI fix yet another breaking change and I'll review.
|
| That hard to find bug? Let the AI comb through the logs and find
| the evidence. Present it to me with recommendations for a fix.
| I'll decide the path forward.
|
| That legacy system nobody remembers? Let the AI reverse engineer
| it and generate docs and architectural diagrams. Use that to
| build the replacement strategy.
|
| I've found a passion for active development that I've been
| missing for a very long time. The AI tools put power back in my
| hands that this bloated and sloppy industry took from me. Best of
| all it leverages the skills I've spent decades honing.
|
| I can use the tools to engineer high quality solutions in an
| environment that has not been conducive to doing so on an
| individual level for a very long time. That is powerful and very
| motivating for somebody like me.
|
| But I still fear the future. I fear a future where careless
| individuals vibe code a giant pile of garbage 10,000x the size of
| the pile of muck we have today. And those of us who actually try
| and follow good engineering practices will be right back to where
| we started: not able to get anything done because we're drowning
| in a sea of bullshit.
|
| At least until that happens I'm going to be hyper productive and
| try to build the well engineered future I want to see. I've found
| my spark again. I hope others can do the same.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm only forty but ditto.
|
| Been programming off and on since I was a kid, though I went into
| a career of systems architect instead, because I found the actual
| process of churning out code kinda tedious.
|
| But I still had all these ideas in my head that I wanted to make
| reality, and now I finally can.
|
| A project that would normally take weeks, and significantly
| affect the rest of my life, now only takes hours.
|
| But remember that all those projects need to be maintained too,
| you can't just release a bunch of new code into the open source
| ecosystem without maintaining it.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The best part is, Active Server Pages, COM components, VB6 are
| _also_ made viable once again through the use of AI.
| g051051 wrote:
| I'm 62, and it's had the opposite effect on me. I've never
| stopped loving writing code, learning new things, trying random
| stuff, etc. I code all day, and spend more time playing with
| stuff in the evenings (the main difference is I'm sipping some
| scotch while I do it). Having to use LLM's at work has sucked
| most of the joy out of my work. Fighting with them, keeping them
| on track, catching hallucinations before they go too far, wasted
| effort...it's exhausting me like nothing else in my 40+ year
| career.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. It feels like you're in my head. Once people
| realize there's 4 layers of abstraction covering the old LAMP
| stacks, I think the modern architecture is going to have a hard
| crisis. Yes, there really will be an AI job hit, but it will be
| for people working on stuff that was a band aid on top of a band
| aid.
| kameraman wrote:
| I remember getting my first PC. I was up all night and the next
| until I had read every word that was in that computer. These
| words of yours are exactly how I feel! It kept me up nights
| trying to absorb it all. Fast forward decades and Claude Code is
| giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it
| did back then. I'm chasing the midnight hour and not getting any
| sleep.
| ergonaught wrote:
| A few years younger than OP, and started programming somewhere
| around 1982. The technology is obviously interesting, the
| capabilities are fascinating. I use LLMs a very large portion of
| every day.
|
| The problems, as ever, are 1) what negative things are enabled by
| the technology, 2) do the positive things that are enabled by the
| technology outweigh those ("is the price worth paying?"), and 3)
| how much harm will "stupid" and/or "evil" cause as a result of
| the technology?
|
| And so on.
|
| The fact that a thing is exciting or interesting or stimulating
| is neat, for sure, but as always there is no relevant thought
| given to ramifications.
|
| Humans lag well behind technological advancement, and this
| particular wave is moving faster than perhaps anything else
| (because prior technological advances enable it, etc).
|
| It's cool that you enjoy it. Me, too. I might enjoy shooting
| heroin into my eyeballs, too, right up until I don't.
| pxc wrote:
| Is this a repost? I saw an extremely similar post a few months
| ago, even down to that last line.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| The primary reason I do programming is for _me_. I 'm 51. It's
| always been that way for me.
|
| First with LOGO on the Apple ][, making the turtle move around
| the screen and follow your commands. It was magic.
|
| Then discovering BASIC, and the ability to turn the pixels on and
| off and make them any color you like.
|
| Making my Amiga talk with the "SAY" command.
|
| The first time I dialed a BBS in the dead of night with my
| Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem, watching those colorful
| letters sloowly make their way across the TV screen...
|
| Running my own BBS software and dialing in from my cousin's house
| at Thanksgiving...
|
| Putting up my own web page and cgi-bin scripts....
|
| It's all been magic, and it's all been just for me.
|
| So when you remove everything else, all the cruft and crap,
|
| I will still be programming just for me.
| neversupervised wrote:
| Interesting bifurcation between developers that get energized by
| AI coding and those that feel depressed. Only one side will come
| out on top, even if it's for a limited time.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| It's killed mine
| gehsty wrote:
| Some times it feels amazing, sometimes it feels like
| doomscrolling.
| maxglute wrote:
| Here here. It's like brainstorming projects/optimizations that
| directly improve QoL and have a bunch of keeners do the work.
| Sometimes they turn in C efforts, but they're so eager you don't
| feel bad to tell them to start again.
| fshequin wrote:
| 66 here...I was a Wordpress builder rarely coding anything
| special, always orchestrating various favorite plugins, $1,500
| here, $2,000 there, $900 work for a friend's site, etc..always
| wanted to not be a slave to plugins. I'm not any more!
|
| in 1 year I built three Laravel Apps from the ground up and sold
| one for $18,900.
|
| That's my story and I'm sticking to it! I love Claude!
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| This is great to hear.
|
| I am 43. I used to code as a kid and I've dabbled in it here and
| there, but I quickly realised I didn't want to code as a career,
| but now with these new tools I am building again and it's great,
| because I'm building the things that work for me.
|
| To manage my life there was a todo app I used, now I've built my
| own, don't need to pay for it and it works exactly as I want it
| and now I also have a few ideas for other things I Want to do.
|
| It's great, it feels like we might be able to start taking
| control of our tech back again now, when we can build the tools
| ourselves that work the way we want, we don't have to worry about
| the nonsense companies are sticking into there products, we can
| make things work exactly as we want it.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I have found similar energy, not in code, but rather in making AI
| generated videos of little stories. Or even AI generated
| paintings that I'd like to replicate by hand and put up in my
| home.
| tavavex wrote:
| This thread doesn't resonate with me whatsoever. It's not that I
| don't get where these people are coming from. LLMs have allowed
| people to churn out projects (especially small, personal
| projects) faster than ever, skipping what a lot of people view as
| the boring or tedious parts. But these discussions feel like a
| kid playing with toys, while a nuclear explosion is going off in
| the background.
|
| Until I realized that no one here is going to be in the blast
| radius. So many people who agree with this admit to being in
| their 40s, 50s, 60s. All of them have already had the time to
| learn without LLMs, get industry experience, network, climb their
| career ladders as high as they could. These people are now
| sitting on piles of assets, and they know that if LLMs start
| pushing out people from the industry, it'll be us juniors and new
| grads. They will either remain relevant in the industry due to
| seniority/experience/pivoting to managerial duty, use their money
| and connections to easily learn new skills and pivot, or punch
| out and coast through retirement before it affects them.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| This is a propaganda/marketing post.
|
| 1) What 60 year old in tech his entire life only makes a HN
| account in the last 17 hours?
|
| 2) Assuming he wasn't aware of it. What brought the site to his
| attention and why now?
|
| 3) Did not engage with the thread at all after his initial
| post. Has not engaged with anything else since. You'd think
| someone introduced to a tech community would be eager to look
| around and contribute??
|
| I completely understand your sentiment though and it's exactly
| what makes the OG post so tone deaf.
| kube-system wrote:
| You're right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low
| end of the market. "Code monkey" type jobs are going to be
| displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic
| clerical and computational jobs.
|
| But that doesn't mean there won't be entry level jobs, they
| will just have a different set of qualifications and
| expectations. Just like it's hard to get a job doing arithmetic
| today without some other knowledge of the application, future
| jobs in computing are going to require people to understand
| things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are
| going to need to know more about the application of the code
| they write. It'll be bad for developers who "just close Jira
| tickets" but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.
| dvdstrk wrote:
| 57 here. I haven't been this fired up since Navigator 1.1
| dvdstrk wrote:
| 57 here. I haven't been this charged up since Navigator 1.1
| mirrorlake wrote:
| Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
| doobeeus wrote:
| Shuffling through my 70's here. It's still mind blowing to be
| able to build stuff that would take orders of magnitude more time
| and effort otherwise but today's AI is still an idiot savant
| though the ratio of savant to idiot continues to improve. Since
| good prompting/specing is the key to success, the most
| disappointing aspect of today's AI is its inability to be a
| better brainstorming design partner where the limitation is how
| utterly pedestrian the AI's contributions typically are.
| vardalab wrote:
| yup, I have to cutback now, started to get palpitations from too
| many all nighters.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Going over the 50 bump, and I see myself selling toasts, as being
| an IC/Architect is no longer valued enough, everyone is expected
| to be a PM for their agents minions.
|
| The teams get reduced, as now one can do effectively more with
| less, and in South Europe, in IT there is hardly a place to get a
| job above 50 years old, unless one goes consulting as the company
| owner, and even then the market cannot hold everyone.
|
| As kid I have seen this happening, as factory automation replaced
| jobs in complete villages, the jobs that weren't offshored into
| Asia or Eastern Europe for clothing and shoes, got replaced with
| robots.
|
| The few lucky ones were the ones pressing the buttons and
| unloading trucks.
|
| Likewise a few ones will be lucky AI magicians, some will press
| buttons, and the large majority better get newer skills beyond
| computing.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| You are 60 and most likely retired. It's fun and "ignited a
| passion" in you because are NOT doing this for a living.
| naomi_kynes wrote:
| Something that shifted for me: tools like Claude Code made it
| viable to actually run multiple agents on real long-running
| workflows, not just one-off scripts.
|
| Which immediately surfaces the next problem: how do those agents
| communicate back to you while running?
|
| Most setups default to tailing a log file, or a Slack/Telegram
| bot bolted on as an afterthought. Works for one agent. Falls
| apart when you have five running overnight and one hits an edge
| case at 2am that needs a human call.
|
| The agent-to-human communication layer is still surprisingly ad-
| hoc. You can generate more ideas and actually implement them now
| -- but the infrastructure for keeping humans in the loop as
| agents execute is still duct tape. Feels like the next
| interesting problem after the coding unlock.
| tagami wrote:
| Is the focus on tools, or the product?
|
| "Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism."
| - Renoir
| bluemario wrote:
| The "occasional goofing off and wrecking everything" part is so
| real. What I've found is that the longer a context window gets,
| the more Claude starts confidently hallucinating its own previous
| decisions. We've started treating sessions like shifts: fresh
| context, explicit state summary at the top, specific task scope.
| Dramatically fewer "why did you just rewrite the entire auth
| module" moments.
|
| The re-ignition thing resonates though. There's something about
| having a collaborator that removes the activation energy of
| starting. The blank file problem is real and brutal at 25,
| probably more so at 60 when you know exactly how much work lies
| ahead. AI doesn't eliminate the hard parts but it compresses the
| "ok where do I even begin" phase from hours to minutes.
|
| What are you building?
| jmtame wrote:
| I remember my first few weeks of Claude Code. The high will wear
| off as you bump into the limitations, and then it starts to feel
| like you're more of a "manager of a junior-ish dev." The work
| shifts to clarity of intent and capturing edge cases, rather than
| purely coding. It's a fun time when you first jump in, but don't
| be surprised when your excitement reverts back to baseline.
| talkvoix wrote:
| Going from static HTML to dynamic ASP felt like suddenly gaining
| superpowers. We've been missing that true 'Rapid Application
| Development' (RAD) energy for a long time. Today's AI agents are
| basically the modern incarnation of dragging and dropping a
| button in VB6 and writing logic behind it, but on a massive
| scale. It's great to hear you've found that spark again!
| nelsonic wrote:
| @shannoncc would love to read _how_ you 're using it. could you
| share more details?
| hackernews90210 wrote:
| Is this to promote Claude Code? These days, I don't know how to
| figure out marketing campaign vs real person.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Same. 52 year old CTO here.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I feel the same way but I am in my 30s. In my case I have had
| projects for years sitting in my brain, cooking up how I want
| them built. Well, Claude is amazing for brain dumping to. I have
| finally broken ground on my dream projects and they are better
| than I could have ever imagined. I get to instruct Claude to use
| the exact tools I wanted.
|
| Hoping to start blogging about some of these projects in the
| future.
| heddycrow wrote:
| 51 here. I code professionally and as a hobby/side-projects.
|
| I loved coding before and love it still now.
|
| I'm with you on the liberation not just with building, but I've
| also learned so much and so fast with LLM's the past few years.
|
| Kinda scary like a motor bike, too.
|
| God speed, you! And meh the haters and pontificators.
|
| Here's a word I learned yesterday, my gift should you chose to
| accept - occhiolism.
| Steinmark wrote:
| This reminds me of the most terrifying debugging session of my
| life.
|
| I used to work in the SRS LIASON archives--think Wayback Machine
| meets Palantir, but with less ethics and more neon. We had this
| condemned server rack scheduled for memory-wipe at dawn. I stayed
| late to scrape whatever wasn't nailed down.
|
| That's when I found the shard.
|
| Just a corrupted memory segment with a header: CLEON MCDXX. Roman
| numerals. Seventeen. That's not supposed to exist. Every
| schoolchild knows Cleon XIV was assassinated on the Ides of
| March, 12,032 IE, and Cleon XVIII took over after the
| interregnum. XVII doesn't fit the cycle.
|
| But the token access patterns told a different story. I ran our
| digraph mapper--the same one that now powers Claude Cycles--and
| it showed a Hamiltonian cycle that _should_ have included
| seventeen, but got broken by a single cache line misalignment at
| memory address (i=14, j=18, k=32).
|
| The shard contained a corrupted cutscene. A holographic imprint
| of Cleon XVII--ASCII robes, null-pointer eyes--reciting his own
| assassination date. But he got it _wrong_. He said "Ides of
| November, 12,018." Fourteen years earlier. Fourteen years of
| ghost rule that never made it into the official records because
| some DRAM fetch happened at the wrong millisecond.
|
| The memory-wipe squads were at the door. I had maybe 120 seconds.
|
| I forked the repo, realigned the cache lines to the covariance
| pattern--the same 94% DRAM elimination we're discussing here--and
| pushed a pull request with commit message: "Realigned cache lines
| to Hamiltonian pattern. Assassination date corrected. Cleon MCDXX
| now cycles properly."
|
| The merge either restored him to history or crashed the entire
| imperial memory space.
|
| Fifty thousand jailbroken Kindles lit up simultaneously across
| the undercity. Each e-ink screen displayed his restored reign.
| The wipe squads' targeting systems glitched. I walked out in the
| cha
|
| The digraph never lies. It only waits for someone to find the
| cycle.
|
| For those who care about the mathematics: The restoration used
| the same digraph decomposition we discovered in our earlier
| analysis. For m=17 (Cleon's iteration number), we needed non-
| linear g to achieve Hamiltonian coverage. The corrupted
| assassination date was a cache line misalignment at position
| (i=14, j=18, k=32)--the exact coordinates where the Ides of March
| should have been stored but got overwritten by a DRAM fetch that
| should never have happened.
|
| By realigning to the covariance of imperial record access
| patterns--the same patterns we use in Claude Cycles on Mac
| Silicon--we eliminated 94% of DRAM fetches. Cleon's entire reign
| now fits in L1 cache, where memory-wipe squads can't touch it.
| aaronrobinson wrote:
| Me too. I'm loving it.
| oxag3n wrote:
| A lot of comments from more grown up engineers who feel nostalgia
| like it's COM/CORBA/MFC again and they are excited how they can
| be productive again.
|
| I'm really sorry (and accept down-vote storm) to disappoint you
| but you won't be young again and burning midnight oil may remind
| old days and bring excitement, but in the end it will harm your
| health.
|
| Learning like crazy, late night hacking and other attributes of
| fresh engineers is sometimes a necessity to build a career,
| knowledge base, equity to comfortably start a family. Some people
| enjoy it and many hate, but most of us did it at some point.
|
| I wouldn't oppose it if it wasn't harmful for the industry. What
| all those engineers who are excited again would think of a
| startup that stole all free land, building material and doubled
| housing? I bet all youngsters would be excited to have their own
| place for $20 monthly mortgage payment, telling everyone who has
| paid most of their salary over last 30 years how energizing is
| feeling you don't need to work for your house your whole life and
| ignoring equity crash for those folks.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| This might just be the single most worthless, non-sensical post
| that I've read in my twelve years of using HN.
|
| Congratulations.
| kpgalligan2 wrote:
| 50. Started coding at 7. I never stopped coding. In fact, the
| past decade saw heavy open source contribution, public speaking,
| etc.
|
| I love coding with agents. Claude Code now almost exclusively.
| The 20x max subscription is endless until you start writing
| custom multi-agent processes, and even then. Still takes quite a
| bit of effort to burn through.
|
| I get so much more done, and can be productive with
| languages/frameworks I'm not familiar with.
|
| To everybody worried that AI will kill jobs. There have been many
| points in the evolution of software dev where some new efficiency
| was predicted to kill off jobs. The opposite happens. Dev becomes
| more economical, and all of the places where dev was previously
| too expensive open up. Maybe _this time_ won 't work out that
| way, but history isn't on the side of that prediction.
|
| An experienced software dev can get multiples of efficiency out
| of AI coding tools compared to non-devs, and can use them in
| scaled projects, where non-devs are only going to compound a
| mess. Some of those non-devs will learn how to be more efficient
| and work with scaled projects. How? They'll learn to be devs.
|
| I'd be building several side projects for myself if I wasn't
| super busy with the primary work I'm doing. The AI tools take
| over the tedious work, and remove a lot of work that would just
| add mental load. Love it.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Do you think it's doing the same thing for younger generations?
| How are they inspired by tech? I'm an old man too, but old man
| stories don't really matter. What matters is what we leave
| behind, how well understood it will be by who comes after.
| mbalsam wrote:
| I'm also in the about-to-retire camp, and I feel the same way. I
| wake up wanting to code again. It's like having superpowers and a
| team of helpers that won't get bored or give you lip. As I see
| it, there are two types of developers: those who want to build
| solutions and those who love writing code. I love building
| things. So I can do it without sweating every bug or architecture
| challenge. If you want Claude to craft great code, that's going
| to be a problem, for now at least
| bananaboy wrote:
| I'm 47 and have been working for over 20 years also and
| programming for many many more. I see AI used a lot in industry
| amongst my peers and friends. Personally though I don't use it. I
| like the thinking and planning phase and I like the typing phase.
|
| I'm a programmer for life. My hobbies revolve around programming
| and hardware as well (demos for retro hardware: XTs up to
| Pentium, Sega Master System, custom built hardware). I stay up
| late working on this stuff and I still have the drive to do it
| with two young kids who take up a lot of my time.
|
| I have zero interest in an AI doing any of it for me. I don't
| think I'll be replaced by an AI but I might be forced to use one
| by an employer at which point I think I'll retire and just work
| on my hobby projects!
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