[HN Gopher] Grief and the AI split
___________________________________________________________________
Grief and the AI split
Author : avernet
Score : 214 points
Date : 2026-03-12 22:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.lmorchard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.lmorchard.com)
| simonw wrote:
| This sounds right to me:
|
| > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day.
| Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages,
| the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-
| it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products,
| looked indistinguishable. The _motivation_ behind the work was
| invisible because the process was identical.
|
| Helps explain why some people are delighted to have AI write code
| for them while others are unhappy that the part they enjoyed so
| much has been greatly reduced.
|
| Similar note from Kellan (a clear member of the make-it-go group)
| in https://laughingmeme.org/2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-
| the... :
|
| > That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand
| emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were
| addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively
| awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into
| it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically
| delightful.
| rudedogg wrote:
| I think the real divide is over quality and standards.
|
| We all have different thresholds for what is acceptable, and
| our roles as engineers typically reflect that preference. I can
| grind on a single piece of code for hours, iterating over and
| over until I like the way it works, the parameter names, etc.
|
| Other people do not see the value in that whatsoever, and
| something that works is good enough. We both are valuable in
| different ways.
|
| Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people
| formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed
| a lot. There's also some effort requires in honing your skill
| using them. The "default" output is average quality, but with
| some coaxing higher quality output is easily attained.
|
| I'm happy people are skeptical though, there are a lot of
| things that _do_ require deep thought, connecting ideas in new
| ways, etc., and LLMs aren't good at that in my experience.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I think this is a false dichotomy because which approach is
| acceptable depends heavily on context, and good engineers
| recognize this and are capable of adapting.
|
| Sometimes you need something to be extremely robust and fool-
| proof, and iterating for hours/days/weeks and even months
| might make sense. Things that are related to security or
| money are good examples.
|
| Other times, it's much more preferable to put _something_ in
| front of users that works so that they start getting value
| from it quickly and provide feedback that can inform the
| iterative improvements.
|
| And sometimes you don't need to iterate at all. Good enough
| is good enough. Ship it and forget about it.
|
| I don't buy that AI users favor any particular approach. You
| can use AI to ship fast, or you can use it to test, critique,
| refactor and optimize your code to hell and back until it
| meets the required quality and standards.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Yes, it is a false dichotomy but describes a useful
| spectrum. People fall on different parts of the spectrum
| and it varies between situations and over time as well. It
| can remind one that it is normal to feel different from
| other people and different from what one felt yesterday.
| allenu wrote:
| > I think the real divide is over quality and standards.
|
| I think there are multiple dimensions that people fall on
| regarding the issue and it's leading to a divide based on
| where everyone falls on those dimensions.
|
| Quality and standards are probably in there but I think risk-
| tolerance/aversion could be behind some how you look at
| quality and standards. If you're high on risk-taking, you
| might be more likely to forego verifying all LLM-generated
| code, whereas if you're very risk-averse, you're going to
| want to go over every line of code to make sure it works just
| right for fear of anything blowing up.
|
| Desire for control is probably related, too. If you desire
| more control in how something is achieved, you probably
| aren't going to like a machine doing a lot of the thinking
| for you.
| bandrami wrote:
| This. My aversion to LLMs is much more that I have low risk
| tolerance and the tails of the distribution are not well-
| known at this point. I'm more than happy to let others step
| on the land mines for me and see if there's better
| understanding in a year or two.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I think there is more to it than that.
|
| I am a high quality/craftsmanship person. I like coding
| and puzzling. I am highly skilled in functional leaning
| object oriented deconstruction and systems design. I'm
| also pretty risk averse.
|
| I also have always believed that you should always be
| "sharpening your axe". For things like Java delelopment
| or things where I couldn't use a concise syntax would
| make extensive use of dynamic templating in my IDE. Want
| a builder pattern, bam, auto-generated.
|
| Now when LLMs came out they really took this to another
| level. I'm still working on the problems.. even when I'm
| not writing the lines of code. I'm decomposing the
| problems.. I'm looking at (or now debating with the AI)
| what is the best algorithm for something.
|
| It is incredibly powerful.. and I still care about the
| structure.. I still care about the "flow" of the code..
| how the seams line up. I still care about how extensible
| and flexible it is for extension (based on where I think
| the business or problem is going).
|
| At the same time.. I definately can tell you, I don't
| like migrating projects from Tensorflow v.X to Tenserflow
| v.Y.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I'm looking at (or now debating with the AI) what is
| the best algorithm for something.
|
| That line always makes me laugh. There's only 2 points of
| an algorithm, domain correctness and technical
| performance. For the first, you need to step out of the
| code. And for the second you need proofs. Not sure what
| is there to debate about.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Not true. There is also cost, money or opportunity.
| Correctness or performance isn't binary -- 4 or 5 nines,
| 6 or 7 decimal precision, just to name a few. That drives
| a lot discussion.
|
| There may be other considerations as well -- licensing
| terms, resources, etc.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I think it's a little bit more complicated.
|
| I, for example, would claim to be rather risk-tolerant, but
| I (typically) don't like AI-generated code.
|
| The solution to the paradox this creates if one considers
| the model of your post is simple:
|
| - I deeply love highly elegant code, which the AI models do
| not generate.
|
| - I cannot stand people (and AIs) bullshitting me; this
| makes me furious. I thus have an insanely low tolerance for
| conmen (and conwomen and conAIs).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many
| people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has
| changed a lot.
|
| People have been saying this every year for the last 3 years.
| It hasn't been true before, and it isn't true now. The models
| haven't actually gotten smarter, they still don't actually
| understand a thing, and they still routinely make basic
| syntax and logic errors. Yes, even (insert your model of
| choice here).
|
| The truth is that there just isn't any juice to squeeze in
| this tech. There are a lot of people eagerly trying to get on
| board the hype train, but _the tech doesn 't work_ and
| there's no sign in sight that it ever will.
| domlebo70 wrote:
| Maybe I'm solving different problems to you, but I don't
| think I've seen a single "idiot moment" from Claude Code
| this entire week. I've had to massage things to get them
| more aligned with how I want things, but I don't recall any
| basic syntax or logic errors.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I saw a few (Claude Sonnet 4.6), easily fixed. The
| biggest difference I've noticed is that when you say it
| has screwed up it much less likely to go down a
| hallucination path and can be dragged back.
|
| Having said that, I've changed the way I work too: more
| focused chunks of work with tight descriptions and sample
| data and it's like having a 2nd brain.
| domlebo70 wrote:
| Very good way to describe it. I am enjoying Opus a lot.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| With the better harness in Claude code and the >4.5 model
| and a somewhat thought out workflow we've definitely
| arrived at a point where I find it very helpful. The less
| you can rely on one-shot and more give meaningful context
| and a well defined testable goal the better it is. It
| honestly does make me worry how much better can it get
| and will some percentage of devs become obsolete. It
| requires less hand holding than many people I've worked
| with and the results come out 100x faster
| cableshaft wrote:
| All I know is it feels very different using it now then it
| did a year ago. I was struggling to get it to do anything
| too useful a year ago, just asking it to do a small
| function here or there, often not being totally satisfied
| with the results.
|
| Now I can ask an agent to code a full feature and it has
| been handling it more often than not, often getting almost
| all of the way there with just a few paragraphs of
| description.
| swader999 wrote:
| And yet I just eliminated three months (easily) of tech
| debt on our billing system in the past two weeks.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm
| using the past few months. Where I work, Claude Code is
| developing major changes to our very large code base (many
| repos, millions upon millions of lines of really important
| code) and pushing to prod regularly. Even the most bearish
| of engineers are now using it to ship important code daily.
| It still has issues and you have to know how to use it, but
| it is a shocking productivity increase (although Amdahl's
| Law applies for software engineering, too. Coding is only a
| relatively small percentage of what is done)
| qsort wrote:
| I think the argument is "a bit too nice," it isn't a binary,
| motivations are complicated and sometimes both feelings
| coexist.
|
| If I reflect for a moment about why I personally got into tech,
| I can find at least a few different reasons:
|
| - because I like solving problems. It's sad that the specific
| types of problems I used to do are gone, but it's exciting that
| there are new ones.
|
| - because I like using my skills to help other people. It's sad
| that one specific way I could do that is now less effective,
| but it's exciting that I can use my knowledge in new ways.
|
| - because I like doing something where I can personally make a
| difference. Again, it cuts both ways.
|
| I'm sure most people would cite similar examples.
| magicalist wrote:
| Eh, it also feels like a classic "maybe we somehow have enough
| perspective on this watershed moment _while it 's happening_ to
| explain it with a simplistic dichotomy". Even this piece
| interrogates the feeling of "loss" and teases out multiple
| aspects to it, but settles on a tl;dr of "yep, dichotomy".
| There's more axes here too, where that feeling can depend on
| what you're building, who you're building it with, time and
| position in your career, etc etc.
|
| (I'll admit, though, that this also smells to me a bit too much
| like introvert/extrovert, or INTP/INTJ/etc so maybe I'm being
| reflexively rejective)
| adriand wrote:
| I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I
| feel like the change that sucked the most was when software
| engineering went from something that nerds did because they
| were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in
| it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time
| ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is
| what we have now. It became all about the bottom line a long
| time ago.
|
| The two emotions I personally feel are fear and excitement.
| Fear that the machines will soon replace me. Excitement about
| the things I can build now and the opportunities I'm racing
| towards. I can't say it's the most enjoyable experience. The
| combo is hellish on sleep. But the excitement balances things
| out a bit.
|
| Maybe I'd feel a sense of sadness if I didn't feel such urgency
| to try and ride this tsunami instead of being totally swept
| away by it.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I see developers talking about this idea of intense and
| unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them,
| like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I
| find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not
| disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing
| towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards"
| sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean?
| What I see people doing with AI is making slop and CRUD apps
| and maybe some employee replacement systems or something but
| I don't see this transcendental experience that people are
| describing. I could see a mortgage collapse or something like
| that, maybe that's what is so exciting? I don't know.
| k32k wrote:
| I think those comments are signalling something much deeper
| about the individual.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Signalling what? Please expand.
| simonw wrote:
| Getting a 53% performance boost on a 20+ year old codebase
| by running a bunch of experiments is pretty exciting to me:
| https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056
| discreteevent wrote:
| Developers make these kinds of improvements all the time.
| Are you saying that it would have been impossible without
| AI?
| simonw wrote:
| That codebase existed for 20 years and had contributions
| from nearly 200 people.
|
| Sure, they could have come up with those optimizations
| without AI... but they didn't. What's your theory for why
| that is?
| skydhash wrote:
| Maybe because it's a non issue. I saw that those
| improvements are in the order of micro seconds, while the
| transfer time of a page is measure in 1/10 seconds or
| even several seconds. Even a game engine have something
| like 15 ms to have a frame ready (60hz).
| simonw wrote:
| Lots of small improvements add up - the total performance
| improvement is 53%. That's significant.
|
| If you're the size of Shopify that represents a huge
| saving in server costs and improved customer-facing
| latency.
| skydhash wrote:
| > the total performance improvement is 53%. That's
| significant.
|
| This percentage is meaningless on its own. It's 4 ms
| shaved off a 7 ms process. You would need to time a whole
| flow (and I believe databases would add a lot to it,
| especially with network latency) and figure out how
| significant the performance improvement is actually. And
| that without considering if the code changes is not
| conflicting with some architectural change that is being
| planned.
| simonw wrote:
| I'll take a 53% performance boost in my template language
| any day of the week.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Well, I have a backlog of at least 20 graveyard game
| projects that I stopped working on from one frustration or
| another over the past 20 years, or getting excited by a new
| exciting idea and leaving it alone, that I wouldn't mind
| resurrecting and finally putting some of them out there.
| Even if not a ton of people play them.
|
| In fact it being easier to get them out there I might care
| less that they should be marketable and have a chance to
| make serious money, as opposed to when I was sinking
| hundreds of hours into them and second guessing what
| direction I should take the games to make them better all
| the time.
|
| The art wasn't the problem (the art wasn't great, but I
| could make functional art at least), it was finding the
| time and energy and focus to see them through to completion
| (focus has always been a problem for me, but it's been even
| worse now that I'm an adult with other responsibilities).
|
| And that hasn't always been the issue, I did release about
| a dozen games back in the day (although I haven't in quite
| a few years at this point).
|
| Of course someone may say 'well that's slop then', and
| yeah, maybe by your standards, sure. These games aren't and
| never were going to be the next Slay The Spire or Balatro.
| But people can and do enjoy playing them, and not every
| game needs to be the next big hit to be worth putting out
| into the world, just like not every book needs to be the
| next 1984 or Great Gatsby.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > What exactly is so exciting?
|
| Money, opportunity, status. It is all status games. Think
| of it as a nuclear war on old order and new players trying
| to take the niche. Or maybe commies killing whites and
| taking over Russia?
| adriand wrote:
| > What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when
| you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that
| mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic
|
| For me specifically it means two products, one that is
| something I have been working on for a long time, well
| before the Claude Code era, and another that is more of a
| passion project in the music space. Both have been vastly
| accelerated by these tools. The reason I say "racing" is
| because I suspect there are competitors in both spaces who
| are also making great progress because of these tools, so I
| feel this intense pressure to get to launch day, especially
| for the first project.
|
| And yes it is very frenetic, and it's certainly taking a
| toll on me. I'm self-employed, with a family to support,
| and I'm deeply worried about where this is all going, which
| is also fuelling this intense drive.
|
| A few years ago I felt secure in my expertise and confident
| of my economic future. Not any more. In all honesty, I
| would happily trade the fear and excitement I feel now for
| the confidence and contentment I felt then. I certainly
| slept better. But that's not the world we live in. I don't
| know if my attempts to create a more secure future will
| work, but at least I will be able to say I tried as hard as
| I was able.
| antod wrote:
| I think the rise of Facebook was possibly my first sense that
| our victory for "open" on the web was going to be short
| lived. Eg our (well not mine, I never used it) comms were
| moving to proprietary platforms.
|
| Then with AWS our infra was moving to proprietary platforms.
| Now our dev tools are moving to expensive proprietary
| platforms.
|
| Combined with widespread enshittification, we've handed
| nearly everything to the tech bros now.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Excitement about the things I can build now and the
| opportunities I'm racing towards.
|
| What opportunities? Anything you spend effort over, like PMF
| and discovery, etc... I can now clone with a few bucks of
| Claude Code and charge less than you for the same product, at
| the same quality level :-/
|
| Where is the opportunity here? Technology and knowledge used
| to be the moat a startup or bootstrapped individual could use
| to produce a sustainable business.
|
| Why exactly are you excited about producing something that
| can be cloned for less cost than it took you? Especially as
| the quality will be almost exactly the same?
| sublinear wrote:
| The divide was never invisible and there has always been _at
| least three camps_.
|
| The "make-it-go" people couldn't make anything go back then
| either. They build ridiculous unmaintainable code with or
| without AI. Since they are cowboys that don't know what they're
| doing, they play the blame game and kiss a ton of ass.
|
| The "craft-lovers" got in the way just as much with their
| endless yak shaving. They now embrace AI because they were just
| using "craft" as an excuse for why they didn't know what they
| were doing. They might be slightly more productive now only
| because they can argue with themselves instead of the rest of
| the team.
|
| The more experienced and pragmatic people have always been
| forced to pick up the slack. If they have a say, they will keep
| scope narrow for the other two groups so they don't cause much
| damage. Their use of AI is largely limited to google searches
| like it always was.
| saulapremium wrote:
| Let me guess: you happen to be one of these lone pragmatists
| in the sea of incompetent ass-kissers and yak-shavers who use
| AI for writing code?
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm saying the majority of devs are neither ass-kissers nor
| yak-shavers.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| I strongly disagree. There's _always_ been two camps ... on
| everything!
|
| Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS
| Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have
| _always_ split on technology choices.
|
| But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi,
| IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they
| boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything
| subjective will vary between different humans.
|
| What makes AI different to me is the fear. Nobody decided not
| to use emacs because they were afraid it was going to take
| their job ... but a huge portion of the anti-AI crowd is
| motivated by irrational fear, related to that concern.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| It doesn't help that the CEOs of these companies are hyping
| up the fear. It's no wonder people are afraid when the people
| making the products are spouting prophecies of doom.
| monknomo wrote:
| what about the fear is irrational?
| g-b-r wrote:
| A huge portion of the pro-AI crowd is motivated by irrational
| hype and delusion.
|
| LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up
| code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who
| enjoyed software development could like that.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Pretty much anyone who's not you, will make code in an
| unpredictable way. I review other people's code and I go
| 'really, you decided to do it that way?' quite often,
| especially with coders with less years of experience than
| me.
|
| That's kind of how this is starting to feel to me, like I'm
| turning more into a project manager that has to review code
| from a team of juniors, when it comes to A.I. Although
| those juniors are now starting to show that they're more
| capable than even I am, especially when it comes to speed.
| bandrami wrote:
| Certainly those of us who maintain and administer it don't
| like that
| ofrzeta wrote:
| For the sake of argument let's assume we have a common goal:
| produce a software product that does its job and is
| maintainable (emphasis on the latter).
|
| Now given that LLMs are known to not produce 100% correct
| code you should review every single line. Now the production
| rate of LLMs is so high that it becomes very hard to really
| read and understand every line of the output. While at the
| same time you are gradually losing the ability to understand
| everything because you stopped actively coding. And at the
| same time there are others in your team who aren't that
| diligent adding more to the crufty code base.
|
| What is this if not a recipe for disaster?
| antihipocrat wrote:
| I think differences in the business determine whether the
| maintenance/understanding aspect is important. If
| developing an MVP for a pitch or testing markets then any
| negatives aren't much of a consideration.. if working in a
| mature competitive or highly regulated domain then yeah,
| it's important
| ehnto wrote:
| It's not a pure dichotomy though. I have always been both, and
| slowly mixing in agentic coding for work has left me some new
| headspace to do "trad" programming on side projects at home.
|
| I love the exciting ideation phase, I love putting together the
| puzzle that makes the product work, and I also take pride in
| the craft.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| I agree with this. Using agents at work has increased the
| possibility of me having energy left to code by hand at home.
| So much coding at work is not fulfilling, it is boilerplate
| and I do not learn anything from writing the Xth variation of
| the same thing.
|
| Yes, those things should have been automated long ago, but
| they weren't, and now with coding agents much of them are.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Enjoying something and getting satisfaction out of it are two
| different things. I don't enjoy the act of coding. But I enjoy
| the feeling when I figure something out. I also think that
| having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve
| my brain plasticity as I age. I'm not sure I'll get either of
| those from claude.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of
| my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age.
|
| Yeah, this is a concern. I remember when I took a break from
| coding to work as a video game producer for a couple of years
| and I felt like my ability to code was atrophying and that
| drove me nuts.
|
| Now I'm not so sure. There's just so much dumb garbage that's
| accumulated around coding nowadays, especially with web dev.
| So much time just gluing together or puzzling out how to get
| APIs or libraries to works and play nice together.
|
| It's not like back in the days where it was relatively simple
| with PHP and HTML, when I first started. Much less you could
| do back then, sure, but expectations were a lot lower back
| then as well.
|
| I might just content myself with doing Sudoku or
| playing/designing board games to help keep that brain
| plasticity going, and stop fighting so hard to understand all
| this junk. Or finally figure out how to get half-decent at
| shader math or something, at least that seems less trivial
| and ephemeral.
| XorNot wrote:
| Everytime I've had to do any any webdev, I've usually just
| been frustrated by the fact that there's a vision of how
| powerful any particular architecture should be, and then
| all the confusion and boilerplate to try and get it there.
|
| And then it changes every 6 months or goes in circles - and
| I suppose now we just gave up and are letting LLMs YOLO
| code out the door with whatever works.
|
| Like I remember learning all about Redux Sagas, and then
| suddenly the whole concept is gone, but also I'm not
| actually particularly clear on what replaced it (might be
| time to go back to that well since I need to write a web
| interface soon again).
| suzzer99 wrote:
| My mom used to play Sudoku as part of her recommended
| therapy to stave off cognitive decline. Now she just plays
| solitaire on the iPad for hours on end, which I know isn't
| burning any new neural pathways.
|
| I'm afraid my inherent laziness will lead to something like
| that if I don't have to do it for my job.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| > nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow
| aesthetically delightful.
|
| To this day I remember being delighted by Perl on a regular
| basis. I wasn't concerned with the aesthetics of it, though I
| was aware it was considered inscrutable and that I could read &
| write it filled me with pride. So yea, programming Perl was
| delightful.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Yes, this is what I thought, too. I did program in Perl
| because it was beautiful. No other computer language compares
| so favorably with human language, including in its ambiguity.
| Not everyone considers this a good feature :)
| lmorchard wrote:
| > The web was objectively awful as a technology
|
| I, for one, remember when I could crash Netscape Navigator by
| using CSS too hard (i.e. at all) or trying to make a thing move
| 10px with DHTML. But I kept trying to make browser to thing.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| "The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each
| other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable."
|
| Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an
| open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance
| which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code
| quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce
| brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a tendency to
| produce as many or more problems than it solved, and on more
| than one occasion I've seen developers of this stripe lose
| commit access to FOSS projects as a result of the low quality
| of their contributions.
|
| "nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow
| aesthetically delightful."
|
| Compared to trying to get stuff accomplished in C Perl was an
| absolute dream to work with and many devs I knew gravitated to
| web development specifically for their love of the added
| flexibility and expressiveness that Perl gave them compared to
| other commonly used languages at the time. Fortunately for us
| all language design and tooling progressed.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Generalize much? How would you feel if code-as-craft people
| were called out to be anti-social nerds who spent times on
| umpteenth rewrite and refactor, didn't care what impact that
| had on the actual user they were building for?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I'd thank you for the laugh and assume you worked in
| project management, marketing, or some other low info
| industry segment. I've worked with hundreds of developers
| over my career and the only time I've brushed up against
| anyone who even approximates what you are describing would
| be in HN comment threads. The craft-oriented women and men
| I've had the pleasure of working with have without
| exception held user experience and the future sanity of
| other developers interacting with the code they wrote as
| core requirements, every project, every line of code.
| Getting it right the first time tends to cut down
| significantly on refactoring.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely
| amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was
| somehow aesthetically delightful.
|
| As an old school Perl coder, not true. Lots of people had a
| taste for Perl. TIMTOWTDI was sold as an actual advantage.
|
| Perl caters to things almost nobody else does, like the way you
| have a negative "if" in "unless" and placing conditions after
| the code. So you can do things like:
| frobnicate() unless ($skip_frobnicating);
|
| Which is sure, identical function-wise to:
| if (!$skip_frobnicating) frobnicate();
|
| But is arguably a bit nicer to read. The first way you're
| laying out the normal flow of the program first of all, and
| then tacking on a "we can skip this if we're in a rare special
| mode" afterwards. Used judiciously I do think there's a certain
| something in it.
|
| The bigger problem with Perl IMO is that it started as a great
| idea and didn't evolve far enough -- a bunch of things had to
| be tacked on, and everyone tacked on them slightly differently
| for no real benefit, resulting in codebases that can be
| terribly fragile for no good reason and no benefit.
| camgunz wrote:
| I think SWEs are genuinely pretty shocked and awed that codegen
| models can code at all, let alone code well. My guess is a lot
| of the agita around this is that people thought "I can code
| therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and then a machine comes by
| that can do pretty equivalent work and they're entirely
| unmoored. I sympathize with that, and I don't mean to dismiss
| it, but that's not what I feel. I really dislike this "doer vs.
| maker" binary stuff that comes up every now and again, as
| though everyone who thinks codegen models aren't perfect
| doesn't want to make anything. I really want to make things--
| good things--and I dislike the current hype wave behind codegen
| models because they often make it harder for me to make good
| things.
|
| I've used Claude Code to build a few big things at work; I ask
| it questions ("where does this happen", "we have problem X,
| give me 3 potential causes", etc); I have it review things
| before I post PRs; our code review bot finds real heisenbugs. I
| have mixed success with all of this, but even so I find it
| overall useful. I'd be irritated if some place I worked,
| current or present, told me I couldn't use Claude Code or the
| like.
|
| That said, I've not gotten it to be useful in:
|
| - building entire, complex features in brownfield projects
|
| - solving systemic bugs
|
| - system design/evolution
|
| - feature/product design and planning
|
| - replacing senior engineer code review
|
| It will confidently tell you it's done these things, but when
| you actually force yourself through the mental slog of
| reviewing its output, you'll realize it's failed (you also have
| to be an expert to perform this analysis). Now, maybe it fails
| in an acceptable way; maybe only slight revision is required;
| maybe it one-shots the change and verifying success isn't a big
| mental slog. Those are the good cases. More annoying are the
| times it fails totally and obviously, but the real nightmares
| are when it fails totally, yet imperceptibly. It also sometimes
| _can_ do (some of) these things! But it 's inconsistent, such
| that its successes largely serve to lower your guard against
| its failures.
|
| And the mental slog is real. The artifacts you have to
| produce/review/ensure the model adheres to are ponderous. The
| code generated is ponderous. Code review is even more tedious
| because there's no human mind behind the code, so you can't
| build a mental model of the author. Getting a codegen model to
| revise its work or take a different approach is very hit or
| miss. Revising the code yourself requires reading thousands and
| thousands of lines of generated code--again with no human
| behind it--and building a mental model of what's happening
| before you can effectively work, and that process is time-
| consuming and exhausting.
|
| I'm also concerned about the second-order effects. Because
| switching into the often-required deep mental focus is very
| difficult (borderline painful), I've seen many, many people
| reach for LLMs in those moments instead, first a little, then
| entirely. I've watched people copy/paste API docs into Gemini
| prompts to explain them. I've watched people unable to find
| syntax errors in code and paste it into ChatGPT to fix it. I'm
| confident I'm not the only person who's observed this, and it's
| a little maddening it's not getting more play.
|
| ---
|
| I'm not saying SWEs don't fail in similar ways. I've approved--
| and authored--human PRs that had insidious flaws with real
| consequences. I've been asked to "review" PRs pre-ChatGPT that
| were 10x the size they needed to be. I've seen people
| plagiarize code, or just copy/paste Stack Overflow constantly.
| The difference is we build process around these risks,
| everything from coding patterns, PR size limits, type systems,
| firing people, borderline ludicrous amounts of unit tests,
| CI/CD, design docs, staging environments, red/green deploys, QA
| lists, etc.
|
| I hate all of it! It's a constant reminder of my flaws and it
| slows down mean time to dopamine squirt of released code. I'd
| be the first person to give all this shit the axe. I would love
| to point Claude at the crushingly long list of PRs I have to
| review. But I can't, because it still has huge, huge flaws.
| Code review bots miss obvious problems, and they don't have
| enough context/knowledge about the system/bug/feature to
| perform a sufficiently comprehensive review. It would be a net
| time waste because we'd then have to fix a bug in prod or
| revise an already-deployed feature/fix--things I like even less
| than code review, if you can believe it.
|
| These models cannot adequately replace humans in other parts of
| the SDLC. But, because pesky things like design and code review
| cap codegen models' velocity, our industry is "rethinking" it
| all, with no consideration of the models' flaws; "rethinking"
| here meaning "we're considering having an LLM handle all our
| code review, or not doing it at all". The only way to describe
| that is reckless disregard. It's unprofessional and unethical.
|
| So, I think my grief isn't about "the craft". I don't think
| that's gone and I don't think I'd care if it were. My grief is
| about the humiliation of our profession, the annihilation of
| our standards and the betrayal of any representation we made to
| our users--indeed to ourselves. We deserve software systems
| that do what they say they do, and up until recently I really
| thought we were working hard to get there. I don't think that
| anymore; like many other things in our era (community, truth,
| curiosity, generosity, trust, learning, rationality, practice,
| compassion) it has retreated in the face of some flavor of
| self-interested, shallow grift. I really don't know how or why
| this happened, but regardless of the cause we truly are in a
| dark time.
| ugtr3 wrote:
| Excellent post!
|
| "I'm also concerned about the second-order effects. Because
| switching into the often-required deep mental focus is very
| difficult (borderline painful), I've seen many, many people
| reach for LLMs in those moments instead, first a little, then
| entirely. I've watched people copy/paste API docs into Gemini
| prompts to explain them. I've watched people unable to find
| syntax errors in code and paste it into ChatGPT to fix it.
| I'm confident I'm not the only person who's observed this,
| and it's a little maddening it's not getting more play"
|
| That's exactly why I stopped using LLM's. Then people turn
| around and say "but.. you'll get left behind."
|
| Yeah, nah. I value my ability to hold concepts and reason
| deeply and sit in those painful moments - I'm not letting go
| of this conditioning that pays dividends over the long term.
| ssk42 wrote:
| I'm sorry but in this day and age, why would you not use AI
| with safeguards? With giving it the proper context and best
| practices you're looking for. These are all very solved in
| Claude and any agentic system. Are you saying that you don't?
| This just feels insulting to those of us who do care about
| code but do love Claude
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > My guess is a lot of the agita around this is that people
| thought "I can code therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and
| then a machine comes by that can do pretty equivalent work
| and they're entirely unmoored.
|
| It was hard to believe the same person wrote the thoughtful
| rest of the comment and this insulting assumption.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are far more divides than just that one.
|
| For instance, the ones that look at it from an economics
| perspective, security perspective, long term maintainability
| perspective and so on. For each of these there are pros and cons.
| ares623 wrote:
| all this so people like us can do a job that wasn't that hard
| to begin with and was actually very comfortable all things
| considered, just a tiny bit easier in a way that isn't even
| measurable.
| randlet wrote:
| > a job that wasn't that hard to begin with
|
| The more experience I get the harder the job seems tbh
| Avicebron wrote:
| Have you gotten to the part where you barely even get to
| write code anymore and just manage people's expectations
| full time yet?
| mekael wrote:
| Ah, management without managing. Its depressing and
| engaging at the same time. Depressing because palace
| intrigue is exhausting and fraught with peril. Engaging
| because I love explaining things to people and watching
| everything click into place for them (see the 1 of 10k
| xkcd comic).
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| The divide is a matter of perspective.
|
| I'm a 23+ year dev; among the highest level ICs in my org.
|
| It's still craft, its just that the craft is different. I don't
| write *.ts, *.cs files anymore; I write *.md files that other
| devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that
| we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift
| every developers level up by several notches.
|
| I went from building one kind of framework/platform level
| artifact to another type of framework/platform level artifact.
|
| If one's perspective is that it's just a shift in what "craft"
| means, then it's still craft. I'm still building systems; just a
| different kind of system.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're using it as a 'super compiler', effectively a code
| generator and your .md file is the new abstraction level at
| which you code.
|
| But there is a price to pay: the code that you generate is not
| the code that you understand and when things go pear shaped you
| will find that that deterministic element that made compilers
| so successful is missing from code generated from specs dumped
| into an AI. If you one-shot it you will find that the next time
| you do this your code may come out quite different if it isn't
| a model that you maintain. It may contain new bugs or revive
| old ones. It may eliminate chunks of the code and you'll never
| know and so on.
|
| There is a reason that generated code always had a bit of a
| smell to it and AI generated code is no different. How much
| time do you spend on verifying that it actually does what's
| written on the tin?
|
| Do you write your own tests? Do you let the AI write the tests
| _and_ the code? Are you familiar with the degree to which AIs
| can be manipulated to do stuff that you thought they weren 't
| supposed to? (A friend of mine just proved this to his boss by
| bribing an AI with a 'nice batch of pure random data' to put a
| piece of unreviewed code into production by giving itself the
| privileges required to do so...)
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| We have human reviews on every PR.
|
| Quality and consistency are going _up_ , not down. Partially
| because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than
| humans do and there is far less variance. Shortcuts that a
| human would make ("I'll just write a one-off here"), the
| agent does not...so long as our rules guide it properly ("Let
| me find existing patterns in the codebase.").
|
| Part of it is the investment in docs we've made. Part of it
| is that we were already meticulous about commenting code. It
| turns out that when the agents stumble on this code randomly,
| it can read the comments (we can tell because it also updates
| them in PRs when it makes changes).
|
| We are also delivering the bulk of our team level
| capabilities via remote MCP over HTTP so we have centralized
| telemetry via OTEL on tool activation, docs being read by the
| agents, phantom docs the agent tries to find (we then go and
| fill in those docs).
| jacquesm wrote:
| > We have human reviews on every PR.
|
| There are some studies about maintaining attention over
| longer periods of time when there is no action required. It
| will be difficult to keep that up forever so beware of
| review fatigue and bake in some measures to ensure that
| attention does not diminish over time.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| The point of reviews is that the process of reviews is a
| feedback cycle where we can identify where our docs are
| short. We then immediately update the docs to reflect the
| correction.
|
| Over enough time, this gap closes and the need for
| reviews goes down. This is what I've noticed as we've
| continued to improve the docs: PRs have stabilized. Mid-
| level devs that just months ago were producing highly
| variant levels of quality are now coalescing on a much
| higher, much more consistent level of output.
|
| There were a lot of pieces that went into this. We
| created a local code review skill that encodes the exact
| heuristics the senior reviewers would use and we ask the
| agent to run this in AGENTS.md. We have an MCP server
| over HTTP that we use to deliver the docs so we can
| monitor centralized telemetry.
|
| The objective is that at some point, there will be enough
| docs and improved models that the need for human reviews
| decreases while quality of code reaches a steady state
| that is more consistent than any human team of varying
| skill level could produce.
|
| One thing we've done is to decouple the docs from the
| codebase to make it easier to update the docs and
| immediately distribute updates orthogonal to the
| lifecycle of a PR.
|
| (I'll have a post at some point that goes into some of
| what we are doing and the methodology.)
| g-b-r wrote:
| > The objective is that at some point, there will be
| enough docs and improved models that the need for human
| reviews decreases while quality of code reaches a steady
| state that is more consistent than any human team of
| varying skill level could produce
|
| There will never be a point when human reviews will be
| less needed; you're doomed to ship something horribly
| insecure at some point, if you ever remove them; please
| don't.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Partially because the agents follow the guidance much
| more closely than humans do and there is far less variance.
|
| Ouch. Managing human coders has been described as herding
| cats (with some justice). Getting humans to follow
| standards is... challenging. And exhausting.
|
| Getting AIs to do so... _if_ you get the rules right, and
| if the tool doesn 't ignore the rules, then you should be
| good. And if you're not, you still have human reviews. And
| the AI doesn't get offended if you reject the PR because it
| didn't follow the rules.
|
| This is actually one of the best arguments for AIs that I
| have seen.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Yes, as I mentioned in my other replies, what I've seen
| is that quality has gone up and coalesced around a much
| higher bar with far less variance than before as we've
| refined our docs and tooling.
|
| In some cases, it was "instant"; dev's MCP server
| connected to our docs was down -> terrible PR. We fix the
| MCP connection and redo the PR -> instantly follows the
| guides we have in place for best practices.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >A friend of mine just proved this to his boss by bribing an
| AI with a 'nice batch of pure random data' to put a piece of
| unreviewed code into production by giving itself the
| privileges required to do so...
|
| Okay that's pretty hilarious. Everyone has a vice!
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is a chapter two to the story but I don't want to out
| my friend. You never know who reads HN.
| tern wrote:
| Came here to say something similar. For me, the craft aspect is
| now even more exciting because I can craft more ambitious
| things without getting bogged down in the details. For me,
| refining my conceptual model, drawing diagrams, finding the
| right way to think about something _was_ the craft.
|
| Maybe that's another way of saying: I was trained as a
| designer, and now the distinction between design (read:
| architecture, service-design, product, ux, cx) and programming
| is blurring.
| sockgrant wrote:
| Heck yeah! Love that way of putting it. Agree. Now there's
| more time to focus on making the right architecture and
| carrying it out. It's no longer a days long task to do a big
| refactor to remove code smells.
| sifar wrote:
| You are building a system that has a shaky mental model and
| which may or may not adhere to the *.md files.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're
| using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop
| while increasing speed and basically lift every developers
| level up by several notches.
|
| > > among the highest level ICs in my org.
|
| Checks out. Real straight shooter with upper management written
| all over him.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| If the whole team of junior and mid level devs are all using
| agents to code, then the only answer is to make sure they are
| doing it well.
|
| I don't think it's hard to grasp that this is how senior ICs
| can have the biggest impact now.
| kalalakaka wrote:
| After years of working at startups I've long since abandoned any
| notion of craft at work. I have developed a very keen sense for
| harmfully cutting corners though, and unreviewed AI code (or
| unreasonably large PRs - defined by a size you can't comfortably
| review) is absolutely cutting corners. It's nothing to do with
| craft and everything to do with both correctness and incurring
| massive amounts of future debt.
| sesm wrote:
| Yep it's not 'result chasers' but people who want to get credit
| while avoiding real work. And when their stuff breaks they are
| always too busy with something else or moved on to another
| project.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This better matches my experiences and feelings than the divide
| which the author discusses. The craft is in the entire
| building, not specifically the coding aspects. I want to do a
| great job building a house, and if AI helps or even completes
| some aspects while meeting standards that's awesome. The
| problem is it hasn't yet shown it can be trusted as a sub
| trade, and we've got people outsourcing the entire project to
| an army of agents. The result looks a lot like the condo I
| bought a few years ago.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please not create an account for every few comments
| you post? This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a
| community, users need some identity for other users to relate
| to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
| community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Strong agree. Needs another pass or two at editing though, some
| painful LLM-os sticking out there :'(
| lmorchard wrote:
| Which bits? And don't say the em-dashes because I've been over-
| using them since high school
| kace91 wrote:
| Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my
| country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear.
|
| All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a
| FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5
| agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code!
|
| This is going to blow up.
|
| Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable
| approach for AI usage. I suspect that version will still require
| crafters.
|
| If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then
| congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero.
| Everyone who's been around startup culture knows the running
| jokes about those 'I have a great idea, I just need someone to
| code it' guys. Now you're one, and you'll find how much ideas are
| worth.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >This is going to blow up.
|
| We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering.
| Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They
| don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality
| crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to
| cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying
| for failure.
| guelo wrote:
| Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6
| months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best
| practices will still hold in time.
| Roguelazer wrote:
| That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced
| "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots
| of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving
| companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that
| most of the people on this site are just trying to self-
| promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is
| sometimes just staggering.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-
| moving companies are staying off of this trend.
|
| Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on
| agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring
| the opposite stance? Anyone?
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| Both claims are hyperbole.
|
| Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of
| examples of either extreme right now.
| sothatsit wrote:
| It is not just startups or small companies embracing
| agentic engineering... Stripe published blog posts about
| their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up
| production because they gave their agents access to prod.
| Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering
| tools. It's not just tech companies either, massive
| companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with
| OpenAI or Anthropic.
|
| You can't just pretend it's startups doing all the agentic
| engineering. They're just the ones pushing the boundaries
| on best practices the most aggressively.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Want something to be terrified of?
|
| I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on
| the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can.
| Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can
| give an Agent some information and have go to work for some
| user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and
| either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the
| person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom
| line.
|
| Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents
| and bots and this is only the beginning.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| I literally just sat through the annual "choose your
| healthcare" plan bullshit and the "meeting" was literally
| one of the Hr people pulling up a power point narrated by
| "AI". You could tell in the first ten seconds.
|
| You'd think our plans would be cheaper given they're
| offloading all this work to agents they don't have to pay
| a salary to...right?
| k32k wrote:
| Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no
| balance here.
|
| You've got boosters and then you've got people who are
| panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI.
| techpression wrote:
| Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ
| vastly. I've heard some true horror stories already from
| companies who claim they're doing amazing things with great
| results. You should be especially on guard if it's a publicly
| traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the
| market (and thereby C-level stock value).
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ
| vastly.
|
| This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of
| friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed
| by both news and personal anecdote.
| techpression wrote:
| Sure, it goes both ways, I'm having great results at the
| startup I'm working at too.
| kace91 wrote:
| Just out of the popularity of the claim, I'll bite.
|
| Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at
| 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them,
| monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them.
|
| 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so
| did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of
| features in a single release?
|
| Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a
| month?
|
| What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a
| year?
|
| Yeah, me neither.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x.
| Feel free to revise your strawman.
| afavour wrote:
| If there's no increased productivity then what's the
| point in spending all the money?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't
| get to infer that I did and then attack that as my
| position.
| sifar wrote:
| What is your position? Genuinely asking as someone who is
| similarly trying to cope and doesn't want to travel down
| the road being trampled on. Primarily because it doesn't
| make me better, it doesn't benefit me as an individual
| and takes the joy out from understanding things.
| kace91 wrote:
| Fair, let's revise it then.
|
| If not productivity, what's the result AI is getting that
| is disruptive enough to make our previous work obsolete?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| At 11 this morning, I wanted to both debug an issue and
| take a meeting before lunch. Before AI, I would have had
| to just start debugging after lunch, there wouldn't have
| been enough time to do both. But now I had Claude debug
| the issue concurrently with the meeting. Its answer
| didn't actually make sense (I still do think I'm smarter
| than Claude, although the gap is narrowing!), but it
| showed enough of its work that I could make a good guess
| about what was really going on, and when I asked it to
| check my hypothesis I got back from lunch with some debug
| logs that confirmed I'd found the bug.
| kace91 wrote:
| I can easily believe that, I agree Claude has
| applications.
|
| I am disputing the idea that this is enough of a game
| changer to make us mourn our now lost craft. Also, I'm
| mentioning that we've discovered a world of footguns
| dressed as shortcuts, which we're not taking proper care
| of.
|
| First, your experience was required for that story to
| have a happy ending. Second, we both know someone else
| could probably have gone with Claude's senseless
| hypothesis, asked for a fix and sent it for review. This
| last part is becoming pretty universal.
| jorl17 wrote:
| 10x is definitely possible at a startup level. I suppose
| not in a big tech world (seems obvious to me, and it's not
| like development speed was the bottleneck there either,
| right?)
|
| You can choose not to believe what I say (and I genuinely
| understand if you do), and I can simply keep on doing it.
| I'm not taking it out of thin air either. tuesday I did in
| 8h the work I scheduled for roughly 65h. Ok, so maybe it's
| not 10x, maybe it's 8x, same ball park.
|
| And that's only talking about development. If I now get
| into other aspects....I have just spent the last 1.5 hours
| creating an incredibly detailed backcatalog of tasks and
| epics. This is the most detailed I have ever done so in my
| life and it has been working very well. It's like we merged
| the good of highly-detailed waterfall with the speed of
| agile.
|
| Tee-hee: Watergile. (I'm sure some expert in the field will
| let me know I have coined a new term for something that
| very much has a name; excuse my ignorance in advance).
|
| Nonetheless, I did this all by talking to the computer
| which is interfacing with my project management tools, the
| project documentation, and the project code. Full context
| on everything. In the past, I would have taken 3 or 4 days
| to create the same amount of tasks with a vaguely similar
| amount of detail. But, in truth, I wouldn't have spent so
| much time putting this love into the craft (!!) of planning
| a project, because it would exhaust me and feel like a
| waste of time.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I totally see shit code being thrown
| everywhere by inferior AI models or people who can't tame
| the beasts, but the right people in my life are _clearly_
| building out more, better tested code, and actually built
| with more care. Maybe it's not at the line-by-line level,
| but it certainly is from the end-product result (thinking
| of the actual end-user). I accept your mileage may vary --
| this is my very personal experience.
|
| Maybe it'll stop happening, who knows. Maybe price will be
| prohibitive, or maybe we'll have such an avalanche of ideas
| that weren't worth building that everyone will be
| overwhelmed and take a step back. Or maybe we won't develop
| juniors into the seniors of tomorrow. Or maybe everything
| will indeed implode once products are large enough that the
| original development speed can't be maintained anymore and
| expectations are mismatched.
|
| What I do know is that it is definitely happening in my
| world, and I haven't had this much fun since I was a little
| kid learning to code.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Do you have testable hypothesis for how the 10x will
| manifest? I.e., is there a way we could (coarsely)
| measure this in a year or two from now?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The future will not be evenly distributed. You can't
| expect to see it in the productivity of the industry as a
| whole, or even the productivity of a large company. You
| might be able to see it in a medium-sized team if you
| measure carefully.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| So, it sounds like measuring directly in individual
| individuals or companies might be tough. (Unless the
| company is medium-sized?) Maybe we could look for broader
| trends in the economy and beyond. What sorts of companies
| will this manifest in? I.e. mostly "tech" companies, or
| beyond?
| jorl17 wrote:
| I think I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that big
| corps will build faster (or more) -- in fact I said I
| don't expect them to right now, and I'm not so sure that
| will change.
|
| What I believe is that early prototype development and
| pivoting is insanely fast now. And if you find excellent
| engineers who are also great product people, and then
| pair them with people who have truly great ideas, many
| wonderful new products will emerge.
| jorl17 wrote:
| That's a very good question. Some metrics I'm watching or
| considering watching right now:
|
| - Amount of leads we're taking in (per unit of time)
|
| - Sprint velocity changes (task complexity should stay
| roughly the same with AI, and team velocity increase --
| we've been seeing this happening)
|
| - Hire rates (more sales people, less developers?)
|
| - Number of projects per unit of time (of similar
| dimension, hard to measure)
|
| - Length of "bugfixing buffer" before big releases (we've
| actually been noticing this _go down_ )
|
| - Another way of saying it is: number of bugs, or bugs
| per feature
|
| - Drift between planned execution time and actual
| execution time (we've been delivering early...but I guess
| we'll soon adjust our estimates...or maybe not, who
| knows?)
|
| - Spend on AI models
|
| - I can't measure this, but I can sort of "feel it": but
| the overall feedback we get from clients, the feeling we
| get from them.
|
| - Number of tests (tests have skyrocketed. Can't be sure
| about the quality, but, hey, it's a metric)
|
| - Feature turnaround time (how long since "feature is
| proposed" until it's actually implemented)
|
| - documentation to code ratio (not sure what we'll make
| of it, but there's a somewhat worrying trend here)
|
| - team balance: is everyone slowly becoming fullstack? Do
| we feel that those who aren't are significantly affecting
| development speed? if so, that indicates that the other
| ones are somehow moving faster
|
| I can't really think of any others, but I'm sure they
| exist.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace
| it
|
| "Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is
| going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out
| our expectations.
|
| We should have been running companies out of business with
| regulations and abandonment when their human-written software
| leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested
| forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams
| scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to
| upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we
| should have seen from investing in upgrades.
|
| The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all
| use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already
| know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start
| caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle
| for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the
| future we're sprinting towards.
| amarant wrote:
| The beginnings of that sustainable approach is already out
| there: https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/
| bigwheels wrote:
| I was still skeptical at the start of this year, but there
| seems to be a shift underway. Found the StrongDM Dark Factory
| docs in Feb and they've netted novel results that have been
| inspiring enough to keep studying and practicing.
|
| https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques
|
| https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor
|
| If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Wow! My productivity increased 100x after i stated listening
| to ad bots.
| RayVR wrote:
| These bear related sayings always make me laugh. The one I was
| told by a Russian: "don't argue over how to skin the bear
| before you've killed it"
| LPisGood wrote:
| > If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then
| congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero
|
| I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have
| dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind,
| "intelligence complete." If you can do it with knowledge work,
| you can have software do it.
| agentultra wrote:
| That's not the point of nor the reason for knowledge work.
|
| The fundamental mechanism of knowledge work is people. They
| haven't changed at all. And what they need to understand and
| learn hasn't changed. All the agents in the world and all of
| the methane guzzling data centres can't tell you what to
| write in the specification nor if what the computer has
| generated faithfully implements that specification.
| skydhash wrote:
| Yep. Most knowledge work is about coordination between
| people and transporting the right information to the people
| that are thinking and the people that are doing (not always
| separate groups, but can be one group switching mode). You
| need people because there's a lot of shared context between
| individuals in society that is not encoded anywhere.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn't write
| functional code. A few months ago people started saying
| they need to be operated by people who could otherwise
| write the code.
|
| It sounds like we're headed towards... the guy in Office
| Space who took specifications from the customer via a
| secretary and gave those to the engineers (and we know
| what happened to him).
|
| But I'm not sure that's a thing, at least for long,
| either. The original super power of these things wasn't
| that they could write code. It was that they could very
| competently extract meaning from natural language, debug
| what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed
| it, and still formulate competent answers.
|
| That doesn't sound like a comfortable place for former
| devs to sit for the next few years.
| skydhash wrote:
| > A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn't
| write functional code
|
| Even ChatGPT could write code when it came out.
|
| > It was that they could very competently extract meaning
| from natural language, debug what you were saying from
| the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate
| competent answers
|
| "Competent" is doing a lot of work here. If it were so,
| AI woul take change requests directly from the business
| side and put the implementation immediately in
| production. But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda
| to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it
| actually helps the devs do their job.
| carlmr wrote:
| >But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs
| to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the
| devs do their job.
|
| If (big if) LLMs/AI take over all of knowledge work the
| first thing you'll notice is that the first company
| getting to the point of automating all knowledge work
| will close off their models to the public, not advertise
| it, and take over every business on the planet.
|
| You wouldn't waste a dime on advertising, influencers, or
| convincing people to use your product.
|
| Taking over every business in the world seems more
| lucrative than selling $20 subscriptions to people.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| There's not going to be a single point at which that
| happens.
|
| More likely what we will see (if this happens) is AI
| companies entering close partnerships with other
| businesses, building up their models ability to do that
| sort of work, then either acquiring their partner or
| directly competing with them.
|
| Similar to how Apple monitors developers having success
| on their platform and then launches a first-party
| offering.
| carlmr wrote:
| This might be happening, too, however B2C advertising and
| heavy astroturfing is a sure sign that they don't even
| think they're close to this goal.
|
| The average consumer pays the least for subscriptions and
| asks most uninteresting questions to the AI in terms of
| gaining insight. The only goal here can be upholding the
| narrative that everything will be AI soon(tm).
| satisfice wrote:
| Exactly right.
|
| I have an idea for an "evidence editor." Claude is waiting
| for me to tell it exactly what I want this thing to be. But
| I don't know. I haven't figured out how to square the
| various circles, even in my fantasies. Until I do, Claude
| sits and waits. And waits...
| scuff3d wrote:
| A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How
| quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working
| any other way is a waste of time.
|
| I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their
| codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should
| have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna
| have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do
| what we actually need it to do.
|
| I use LLMs, they come in handy, and I use agents, but this
| "have agents do everything" nonsense is a disaster, and it's
| only going to get worse.
|
| On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.
| antonvs wrote:
| > On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.
|
| A lot of my career has been this, not due to choice but
| circumstance. Startups write terrible code, in general.
| Enterprises write terrible code. I've worked with both. If it
| becomes important enough, someone has to fix it at some
| point.
|
| Current AI models seem to be job security machines for that
| kind of work.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Devil's advocate: perhaps you are holding a hammer
| complaining about rivets. If you used AI to interact with the
| code instead, you wouldn't have to wade through the mess and
| might have gotten what you needed fairly easily, except
| you're using the wrong tool for the job
| scuff3d wrote:
| Bad code is bad code, doesn't matter how it was generated.
| ianm218 wrote:
| > If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then
| congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero
|
| I think the craft is going to die and am not thrilled about it.
| I dont feel like there is a contradiction there
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| There's no contradiction, but if/when it happens, being "not
| thrilled" will overflow off the bottom of your list of
| concerns
| api wrote:
| I'm a bit in the middle. I enjoy the craft but I also seek and
| enjoy the result.
|
| The thing about AI is that you don't have to use it for
| everything. Like any other tool you can use it as much as you'd
| like. Even though I like the craft, I find myself really enjoying
| the use of AI to do things like boilerplate code and simple
| tests. I hate crafting verbose grunt work, so I have AI do that.
| This in turn leaves me more time to do the interesting work.
|
| I also enjoy using AI to audit, look for bugs, brainstorm, and
| iterate on ideas. When an idea is solid and fleshed out I'll
| craft the hard and interesting parts and AI-generate the boring
| parts.
| bonkabonka wrote:
| Yow, submitter sure isn't shy with their bias. Maybe defang the
| title?
| dang wrote:
| Submitted title was "The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs.
| result chasers" - which does seem to be a fair statement of
| what the article is about, and in that sense not so biased.
|
| We've reverted the title to be that of the article now, though,
| in keeping with the site guidelines, since it was neither
| misleading nor linkbaity.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| frankc wrote:
| I think it's more granular than this, though. I also like to
| "make computer do thing" and have enjoyed using AI. But I also
| like building systems, optimizing systems. I find AI is a great
| partner in that. I can churn out prototypes more quickly, iterate
| on them more quickly etc. That also applies intra-system level. I
| might have a theory about how a different data structure or
| caching layer will affect application performance. It's now so
| much faster to test those kind of theories, and actually building
| good scaffolding around them to test them scientifically.
|
| Yes, sometimes I can also ask AI to evaluate things at the system
| level and it often has surprisingly good insights, but that is
| usually a collaboration where our powers combined comes up with a
| better solution. I enjoy that process, too.
|
| I do sympathize with the people "in mourning". I feel like this
| is really about how your identify is tied up in what you do. I
| have generally identified as a command line wizard. The xkcd of
| the guy flying in with "perl" very much speaks to me. But AI
| absolutely crushes at this. It's not that useful a skill anymore.
| Now I identify more as a local AI expert instead :D
| beej71 wrote:
| > I feel like this is really about how your identify is tied up
| in what you do.
|
| This is it for me. One thing that's important to my identify
| making things. And I have a lot of trouble saying I made a
| thing that I asked someone (or something) else to make for me.
|
| I know you're going to say, "But I'm making things, too!"
| However...
|
| I could crank out a project a day with Claude Code and slap
| them all up on GitHub for my green squares, and I could say
| that I made them all.
|
| Just like I could crank out a novel a day with ChatGPT and say
| that I made them all.
|
| Or I could use it to write 100 blog posts a day and say that I
| made them all.
|
| In all those cases, I caused things to get made. But did I make
| them? I don't feel like I can honestly say I did. (And the
| copyright office is starting to have a thing or two to say
| about it, as well.)
|
| This is what I struggle with. I like making things.
|
| As a capitalist, sure, your cash is good with me. Tell me where
| to shoot and I'll shoot. But in terms of keeping my soul fed,
| it's a tough one.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance
| if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source
| software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask "How do I?"
| questions or "how is it that?" questions that put you on a firm
| footing.
| gassi wrote:
| And contribute your changes back upstream, right?
| autoexec wrote:
| Do we even want a bunch of people contributing slop upstream
| when (assuming it does anything worthwhile in the first
| place) somebody has to actually review/correct/document that
| code?
|
| A handful of well intentioned slop piles might be manageable,
| but AI enables spewing garbage at an unprecedented scale.
| When there's a limited amount of resources to expend on
| discussing, reviewing, fixing, and then finally accepting
| contributions a ton of AI generated contributions from random
| people could bring development to a halt.
| danjl wrote:
| > I was afraid the puzzle-solving was over. But it wasn't--it
| just moved up a level.
|
| The craft can move up a level too. You still can make decisions
| about the implementation, which algorithms to use, how to
| combine them, how and what to test -- essentially crafting the
| system at a higher level. In a similar sense, we lost the hand-
| crafting of assembly code as compilers took over, and now we're
| losing the crafting of classes and algorithms to some extent,
| but we still craft the system -- what and how it does its
| thing, and most importantly, why.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You don't need AI for this, we've had search engines and good
| online resources for decades
| reverius42 wrote:
| Current AI is much, much better than current search engines
| (which themselves seem worse than they were decades ago, for
| some reason).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It really isn't. AI has _nothing_ on a good search engine
| like Kagi.
| simianwords wrote:
| This is easily disproven. I mean how can someone still
| believe this? Wow!
|
| I can come up with many examples that would take you ages
| to search in Kagi vs one prompt in ChatGPT.
|
| You really should be updating.
| simianwords wrote:
| Being blunt here but this is a good example of dogmatic
| thought.
|
| AI is leaps and bounds better than google at searching.
|
| "You don't need google for this, we have had public libraries
| for decades" energy.
| wreath wrote:
| Yeah to get the definitive answers, sure AI is quicker.
| Google is more like the librarian pointing you at possibly
| good resources to get your answers from after reading the
| materials and there are a lot of good learning
| opportunities there. LLMs just give you the answer and robs
| you of those opportunities.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > dogmatic thought.
|
| Dogmatism sometimes seems like a better thing compared to
| mind so open that wind blows through it without obstacles.
| wiseowise wrote:
| False. Have you even used google in the last 6 years or so?
| The results are so bad that I stopped using it altogether. It
| pops up sometimes when I mistype something in a search bar,
| but that's it.
|
| And don't make me laugh about "good online resources". SO
| went downhill and is just a graveyard at this point where
| everything is frozen in time. It has some good discussions
| (that LLMs ingested), but that's it.
|
| You can hate LLMs all you want, but they're godsend for
| interactive discussion with the material.
| keybored wrote:
| Every little minor dispute can be split into some arbitrary
| dichotomy which is vaguely defensible. Not interesting.
|
| Twelve years ago I would have the bright idea of why not make a
| little, just a tiny little (what I would call now) preprocessor
| for Java which does the same thing in less characters and is
| clearer. Everyone would love it. Of course no one loved it. Well,
| I never implemented it. Because I got some sense: you can't just
| make tiny little preprocessors, a little code generation here and
| there, just code-generate this and tweak after the fact. Right?
| It's not principled.
|
| You can cook up a dichotomy. Good for you. I think the approach
| is just space age technology meets Stone Age mindset. It's
| Flintstone Engineering. It's barely even serious.
|
| I am not offended that you took my craft. I am offended that you
| smear paint on the wall with three hundred parallel walls and
| painters and pick the best one. Or whatever Rube Setup is the
| thing that will take over the world as of thirty minutes ago.
|
| Make something rock solid like formal verification with LLM
| assist (or LLM with formal verification assist?). Something that
| a "human" can understand (at this point maybe only the CEO is
| left). Something that is understandable, deterministic.
|
| I might be out of a job. But I will not be offended. And I will
| respect it.
| keybored wrote:
| Now about the grief angle. This is AI Inevitability
| Soothsaying.[1]
|
| It's all just a backdrop for hammering home the same
| inevitabilism: GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. Just slap on whatever
| excuse to hammer this over, and over, and over. Grief, self-
| identity, some other pseudo-humanistic angle.
|
| Now is the time that programmers talk about their feelings.
| Give me a break.
|
| Because the AI hype machine isn't content with just eventually
| taking your job or your craft. It can't just quietly get
| exponentially better until it sweeps your legs effortlessly.
| No, because there's also a market out there, and a hype needs
| to be built. So now you need to see it all day in your tech
| news aggregator. Just push all the interesting stuff out.
| Replace with autopilot.
|
| No, really. Even if AI worked perfectly _right now_ you would
| still need to have a constant churn of _content_ about how to
| babysit this thing that speaks English already and is more
| capable than you. I guess it's kind of paradoxical.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day.
| Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages,
|
| Hell no. I, a craftsman, was going out of my way to use things
| like Haskell. I was very aware of the divide the entire time. The
| present is a relief.
| totetsu wrote:
| This reminds me of the divide between Role-players and Number-
| chasers in the once-upon-a-time MUD players communities.
| dude250711 wrote:
| I just do not want to deal with _other people 's_ AI-generated
| code.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Your AI can rewrite it to your own standards for free.
|
| You can tell your AI to read their code, and create a new
| requirements document for a clean-room implementation.
|
| Then you have your AI implement using your own requirements
| document.
| skydhash wrote:
| In a review process?
| toraway wrote:
| That doesn't sound like it would help while reviewing a PR
| full of verbose slop in your day job.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I feel like this could be improved by limiting the scope of
| the task given to GenAI, and also by giving it clear
| instructions on programming style, and tips to optimize the
| diff, for the PR reviewer.
| g-b-r wrote:
| That sounds so reliable, I'm so confident it would get it
| right
|
| We're so screwed
| furyofantares wrote:
| Author doesn't care about their blog writing as craft, either
| (it's been fed through an LLM.)
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Am I the only one who comes to the comments first to see if the
| blog/article is even worth reading?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Yes
| reverius42 wrote:
| No
| kaffekaka wrote:
| It's classified.
| lmorchard wrote:
| Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and
| tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it
| myself.
| furyofantares wrote:
| It's too bad it has so much grating LLM-voice. I don't think
| you typed all the LLM-isms, and they make it hard to know how
| much to trust that the rest is what you intended to convey.
| lmorchard wrote:
| I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't
| think it sounds particularly different than how I've
| written other posts.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I've read through your comments on HN and you really
| don't. Comments and a blog post are different things but
| the difference in voice is stark. In your comments it's
| clear someone writing it cares about things.
| lmorchard wrote:
| My comments are often more off-the-cuff than my blog
| posts--I spend more time editing the posts, usually
| dang wrote:
| It's increasingly clear that the LLMs leave more of a mark
| than authors realize when they run their writing through for
| a touching-up. This has been coming up a lot lately:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346449.
|
| That's why readers end up reacting to the LLM imprints rather
| than the content.
|
| I don't mean to be critical because it's a good article! But
| I bet if you shared the version before it was "tightened up",
| most of us would prefer it.
|
| (I suppose I'd better add that this isn't a criticism of LLMs
| either - it's about figuring out how to use them well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342045)
| lmorchard wrote:
| As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints,
| they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's
| really weird.
| pibaker wrote:
| Maybe the imprints aren't on your text, but on your soul,
| my dear friend :)
| dang wrote:
| I hear you. This stuff is really messy and imprecise
| right now.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| If the core of the post is yours I think it is fine, but
| there are so many pieces which the LLM always uses in these
| things that they stand out more than emdashes.
|
| Some examples.
|
| > I've felt the grief too--but mine resolved differently than
| I expected, and I think that says something about what kind
| of developer I've been all along.
|
| > I kept having this nagging sense that we were mourning
| different things.
|
| > Here's what I notice about my grief: none of it is about
| missing the act of writing code. It's about the world around
| the code changing.
|
| > If you're mourning the context--the changing web, the
| shifting career landscape, the uncertainty--that's real too,
| but it's more actionable.
|
| It uses these kinds of patterns over and over that it becomes
| obvious Just go on LinkedIn.
|
| "It's not X, its Y"
| lmorchard wrote:
| I mean, the irony is that those sentences were in my
| original draft before running it past the LLM
| thinkingemote wrote:
| It's the split. Many of us are mourning, you are not.
|
| Maybe the stages of grief are not aligned yet. Or maybe it's
| as your post says there are two types of people.
| blobbers wrote:
| Pointy haired bosses be looking for results.
|
| Engineers be loving the craft.
|
| It's a dance, but AI is unfortunately looking at us like we're
| dancing, and meanwhile it's built a factory.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I'm a craft lover but I like using the Ai for tedious tasks. Just
| today it tracked down a library conflict in a pom that from
| experience would have taken a day of trial and error.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think there are far fewer developers who reject it for search
| tasks, like the one you describe, than those who reject it for
| (production-)code generation tasks.
| Roguelazer wrote:
| The important thing to remember is that for a large number of
| people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that
| they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys
| routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with
| their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we
| like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the
| parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs
| where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if
| it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is
| the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-
| building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living
| the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably
| not well-prepared for.
|
| Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially
| more and better code than the people at my company spending all
| day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems
| plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of
| software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred
| watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.
| sockgrant wrote:
| I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find /
| good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are
| loving claude is disingenuous. I'm a creative, while I loved
| coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me
| hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can
| help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the
| little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test
| coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they're all trivial to do
| now.
|
| It's not the same as writing code, but it's fun.
|
| If your coworkers can't outpace your code output they're either
| not using opus4.6 or they aren't really trying.
|
| It's pretty easy to slam 20 PRs a day with some of them being
| complex changes. The hardest part is testing the diffs, but
| people are figuring that out too.
| ccosky wrote:
| I have a suite of Claude skills all about craftsmanship.
| Refactoring, renaming, deconstructing god classes, detecting
| deleted code, etc. I've never written better, more readable,
| more maintainable code in my life than I have with Claude.
| All of that is trivial and hardly takes any time at all to
| accomplish.
|
| Before moving to agentic AI, I thought I'd miss the
| craftsmanship aspect. Not at all. I get great satisfaction
| out of having AI write readable, maintainable code with me in
| the driver's seat.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| But, would you feel that same satisfaction out on the
| street?
| g-b-r wrote:
| > it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness.
| All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the
| high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they're all
| trivial to do now.
|
| It can help if you write poor code without it, probably
|
| High unit test coverage only means something if you carefully
| check those tests, and if everything was tested
| sockgrant wrote:
| The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness
| is if you write poor code?
|
| Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check
| every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what
| code coverage is?
|
| not gonna engage the trolling
| g-b-r wrote:
| > The only way Claude can help improve your code
| cleanliness is if you write poor code?
|
| No? You assert that it writes better code than the
| average software developer?
|
| > Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully
| check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you
| know what code coverage is?
|
| Do you know?
|
| Code coverage only tells what amount of the code gets
| *touched* by the tests.
|
| To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it
| doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the
| tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code
| coverage tool would be perfectly happy.
|
| So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that
| the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply
| much less useful than you assume it to be, more
| realistically).
|
| With "if everything was tested" I meant that you also
| need to check if the agent wrote all the tests that are
| needed, besides verifying that the ones it wrote are
| correct.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > You assert that it writes better code than the average
| software developer?
|
| Absolutely. It contains a lot, if not majority, of all
| the code available at our hands right now and can reason,
| whatever it means for LLMs to reason anyway, about it. It
| absolutely demolishes average software developer and it's
| not even close.
|
| > To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code,
| it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the
| tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code
| coverage tool would be perfectly happy.
|
| > So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite
| that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or
| simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more
| realistically).
|
| That's like saying that if you don't check every line
| your coworker writes it becomes worthless.
| umanwizard wrote:
| People who say directing an AI is just "moving up another level
| of abstraction" are missing the point that it's a completely
| different kind of work. Everything from machine code to Haskell
| is a predictable deductive logical system, whereas AIs are not.
| dang wrote:
| It's different, but it isn't completely different. That's one
| reason why it's hard to make sense of this change.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. I use
| an iterative process. The implementation is the test of the
| requirements document. If it's not right, I adjust the doc,
| discard that implementation, and try again.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents.
|
| Can you please come train the product people at my job? Maybe
| some of your love of the game will rub off on them.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I've heard this thesis a lot, but it's almost always from the
| result chasers.
|
| It doesn't resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like
| woodworking because I like building something that never existed
| before. I don't mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me
| out. I don't care about the process, I care about the result. But
| I care deeply about the quality of the result.
|
| I don't care about the beauty of the code, but I do care that
| nearly every app I load takes longer than it did 15 years ago. I
| do care that my HomePod tells my wife it's having trouble
| connecting to iPhone every 5th time she adds something to the
| grocery list. I care that my brokerage website is so broken that
| I actually had to call tech support who told me that they know
| it's broken and you have to add a parameter to go back to the old
| version to get it to work.
|
| I care that when I use the Claude desktop app it sometimes gives
| me a pop up with buttons that I can't click on.
|
| I've used Claude and Cursor enough to have what I think are valid
| opinions on AI assisted coding. Coding is not the bottleneck to
| produce a qualify product. Understanding the problem is the
| biggest bottleneck. Knowing what to build and what not to build.
| The next big one is convincing everyone around you of that
| (sometime this takes even more time). After that, it's
| obsessively spending time iterating on something until it's
| flawless. Sometimes that's tweaking an easing value until the
| animation feels just right. Sometimes that's obsessing over
| performance, and sometimes it's freezing progress until you can
| make the existing app bulletproof.
|
| AI doesn't help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because
| the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding,
| diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.
|
| It does help crank out one off tools. It does help me work in
| unfamiliar code bases, or code bases where for whatever reason I
| care more about velocity than quality. It helps me with search.
| It helps me rubber duck.
|
| All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe
| somewhere in the order of 10% all in.
| epolanski wrote:
| > AI doesn't help me with these. At least not much. Mostly
| because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding,
| diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.
|
| It can actually help a lot here too.
|
| In fact I rarely have AI author or edit code, but I have it all
| time researching, finding edge cases I didn't think about,
| digging into dependencies code, finding ideas or alternative
| approaches. My usage is 90% of the time assisting with
| information gathering, criticizing (I have multiple reviewer
| skills with different personas, and I have multiple LLMs run
| them), refining, reviewing.
|
| Even when it comes to product stuff, many of my clients have
| complicated business logic. Talking multi-tenant-company
| warehouse software where each process is drastically different
| and complexity balloons fast even for a single one of them. It
| helps to connect the dots between different sources of
| information (old Jira task, discord dumps, confluence,
| codebase, etc).
|
| And it can iteratively test and find edge cases in applications
| too, same as you would do manually by taking control of the
| browser and testing the most uncommon paths.
|
| I would do much less without this assistance.
|
| I really don't get why people focus so much on the least
| empowering part (code), where it actually tends to balloon
| complexity quick or overwhelm you with so much content and
| edits that you can't have the energy to follow while
| maintaining quality.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Yeah I've used it for that and it use useful. But it's kind
| of like listening to a math audiobook vs working out math
| problems. I still need to work out the math problems to
| really understand what's going on.
|
| I'm also nervous about the inevitable cognitive decline of
| relying on AI to explain everything to me.
| epolanski wrote:
| > But it's kind of like listening to a math audiobook vs
| working out math problems.
|
| I don't see it that way.
|
| I'm solving the math problem, but after coming with a
| solution I start asking for alternative approaches or
| formulas I don't even know about.
|
| In fact, calculus is full of suck gotchas tricks or
| formulas, think of integrals or limits. Took who found
| those decades/centuries to find them.
|
| It's not a black/white divide.
| sarchertech wrote:
| You added several paragraphs after I responded, but I
| never said it was black and white. I said it wasn't
| sufficient. By which I mean you still need to read the
| code, and that making changes to the code is even more
| beneficial for understanding.
| sublinear wrote:
| You seem to be conflating code quality with product integrity.
|
| All those problems are caused by business decisions, not the
| developers. You do make a good point though that AI may enable
| more people to build their own when they can.
| sarchertech wrote:
| The term code quality is overloaded and not really worth
| discussing without defining exactly what we mean.
|
| But yes many of those problems were caused by business
| decisions. But engineers are perfectly cable of creating
| those problems on their own. If an engineer doesn't realize
| that the function they called buffers messages in memory
| because someone made a wrapper function around sendAsync()
| and called it send(), that's a code quality issue not a
| business issue (except as in the broader sense where every
| problem is ultimately a business issue).
|
| Or if an engineer writes a naive implementation of some
| algorithm and adds a spinner so that an operation takes 5s to
| finish when it could be instantaneous if they'd thought about
| the problem more.
| sublinear wrote:
| I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience
| there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff
| like that happens.
|
| It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and
| implements something properly and then it gets into the
| hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The
| business then wants some much cheaper contractors to
| quickly make those changes without the original engineers
| involved. The result is a mess.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm not going to disagree with you there. A bad
| engineering culture is usually ultimately caused by other
| factors. Many times that is just hiring bad engineers
| though. Such that even if business got out of the way,
| the engineers still wouldn't make a quality product.
| sublinear wrote:
| I half agree, but the engineering culture tends to follow
| from the business culture being presented.
|
| You _can 't trust any new hires_ if you have middle
| managers with no technical experience who only care about
| business concerns, execs who only care about money, and
| all your good devs have left the company because they are
| not allowed to change anything.
|
| The blame game is a massive red flag for everyone
| actually worth a damn to leave. Complacency, intolerance
| of disagreement, hyperpragmatism and obsessive focus on
| measurable productivity, etc. all kill a business by a
| million papercuts. A business needs room to breathe and
| the time and desire to think in order to thrive.
|
| If you want new engineers who do good work you have to
| recognize that existing problems have become intertwined
| with the way the business currently works. They cannot
| fix what they cannot discuss. They cannot create when
| their hands are forced to repeat the motions of the ones
| they're replacing. All the while, someone rotten in the
| middle is definitely benefitting from throwing people
| under the bus and picking up a paycheck.
| kypro wrote:
| > Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product.
|
| I've been saying this too. The 10x engineer stuff simply cannot
| make sense unless previously you were spending 90%+ of your day
| just writing coding and now that's dropped to single digits
| because AI can generate it. If you spent 20-30% of your day
| coding before and the rest thinking about the problem, thinking
| about good UX, etc, then AI coding assistances mathematically
| cannot make you a 10x engineer. At a push they might make you a
| 2x engineer.
|
| Given this I think I realised something earlier about my own
| output... I'm probably just a unusually good coder. I've been
| doing this since I was a kid so writing and reading code is
| basically second nature to me. When I was a young teen I would
| literally take my laptop on holiday with me just so I could
| write code - I was just that kind of person.
|
| So I've basically always been the strongest or one of the
| strongest coders on any team I've been on. I very rarely have
| to think about how to do something in code. It's hard to think
| back to a time when code was a significant bottleneck for me.
|
| However, my output was never really faster than anyone else
| when it come to shipping, but the quality of my output has
| always been wayyy higher. And I think that was because I always
| spent a lot more time thinking and iterating to get the best
| result, while other people I work with spent far more time
| writing code and just trying to get something they could PR.
|
| My problem now is that the people I work, some of whom can't
| even read code, are able to spit out thousands of lines of code
| a day. So this forcing me to cut corners just to keep up with
| the rest of the team.
|
| 6-12 months ago I'd get at least 2-3 calls a day from people on
| my team asking for help to write some code. Now they just ask
| the AI. I haven't had someone ask me a coding related question
| in months at this point.
|
| I find this frustrating to be honest. I'm seeing bad decisions
| everywhere in the code. For example, often a change is hard
| because it's a bad idea. Perhaps a page on a website doesn't
| really look great on mobile or desktop. Previously you would
| have had to think about how you could come up with a good
| responsive design and implement the right breakpoints. But now
| people can just ask Claude Code to build a completely different
| page for mobile, so they do. For a human that would be a huge
| effort, even if someone who stupid enough to think that was a
| good idea they probably be forced to do something thats easier
| to maintain and implement, but an AI? Who cares. It works. The
| AI isn't going to tell you no.
|
| I know the quality of code is dropping. I see the random bugs
| from people clearly not understanding what Claude is writing,
| but if they can just ask the AI to fix it, does it even matter?
|
| > All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but
| maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.
|
| I'm very much like you. AI doesn't really boost my productivity
| at all but that's because I care about what I build and don't
| find coding hard. So AI doesn't really offer me anything. All
| it's doing is making people who don't care what their building
| and don't care about the quality of their code more productive.
| And putting me under pressure to trade quality for velocity.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I know someone who has a friend that works at Anthropic. He
| says that it's essentially 2 companies. 1 that vibe codes
| everything and merges without understanding, and one that
| spends all their time putting out the fires created by the
| first company.
|
| I think we're destined to be #2 for a while. If it gets too
| bad, my plan is to move into a part of the industry where
| quality and reliability are non-negotiable. Or start my own
| company and compete against established players for the
| smaller customer base that's willing to pay for quality.
|
| I go out of my way to pay for quality projects even if (and
| often because) they have fewer features. I think there are
| probably enough of us to support a lifestyle business in many
| niches.
|
| I also suspect as vibe coding introduces more bugs (we've
| certainly seen this at my current company) the people willing
| to pay for alternatives will grow.
| ares623 wrote:
| > I like woodworking because I like building something that
| never existed before. I don't mind using a CNC router or a 3
| printer to help me out. I don't care about the process, I care
| about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the
| result.
|
| Why not outsource it to someone else? That way you do none of
| the work.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Because delegating doesn't give me the level of control I
| want, the kind of people with the quality standards and
| capabilities I have are extremely expensive, and I like
| creating things.
|
| If I had access to a factory of apprentices that I had total
| control of, I probably would outsource more of it. So on the
| surface it seems like I'd love AI, but these particular
| apprentices aren't up to my standards, there are severe
| limitations on how much I can train them, and I get no joy
| from teaching them.
| epolanski wrote:
| There's no divide.
|
| Brilliant engineers, among the best software craftsmen out there
| are using AI daily and speeding up their processes.
|
| The author of Redis, antirez, stated a month ago he spent 2 weeks
| on Redis tinkering with LLMs...and it was just design phase, not
| a single line of code was authored. The ability to interrogate
| LLMs and have them criticize his ideas and edge cases sped up his
| process by month.
|
| He also used LLMs successfully to find multiple issues in Redis
| that would've took him longer to do without.
|
| I myself spend with AI way more time tinkering and gathering
| information than authoring code.
|
| Am I a craft lover or a result chaser?
|
| But sure, let's keep everything in the divide conservative vs
| liberal, black and white, craftsman vs vibe coder...give me a
| break..
| antonvs wrote:
| Yeah. We're seeing a lot of posts from people dealing with
| their emotions about AI, and trying to rationalize those
| emotions. Blaming a straw-manned group of other people who
| supposedly don't share some quality the author values is an
| easy way to do that rationalization. The reductively binary
| classification is a sign that they're indulging in something
| other than a serious analysis.
| nlawalker wrote:
| _> I think recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the
| actually useful thing here. If you're mourning the loss of the
| craft itself--the texture of writing code, the satisfaction of an
| elegant solution--that's real, and no amount of "just adapt"
| addresses it. You might need to find that satisfaction somewhere
| else, or accept that work is going to feel different. Frankly,
| we've been lucky there's been a livelihood in craft up to now._
|
| The blog post is all about being clear-eyed about the source of
| grief, but doesn't seem to articulate that it's the livelihood
| that's gone, not the craft. There's never been a better time to
| practice the craft itself.
| lmorchard wrote:
| Well, yeah, that's what a lot of folks are sad about - they
| can't practice the craft concurrently with the livelihood quite
| as much. But if you don't have a livelihood, you probably don't
| have as much space for craft at all.
| rimunroe wrote:
| Exactly. I said this elsewhere in here, but I've felt
| extremely lucky that for the last 13 years I've gotten paid
| to do something that would otherwise have to be a hobby. The
| problem is that I have other hobbies already and am a parent
| with limited time to devote to such things in the first
| place. It's valid to miss things you were extremely lucky to
| have in the first place.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| It's sad not because of AI itself but because of the companies
| behind AI: we are now paying for every single line of code we
| produce. That sucks
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Weird you got downvoted for that. This is exactly the thing
| which has been bothering me about all of this.
|
| Pre-LLM there are paid products and licenced stuff, but for the
| most part you could code in any language using free or
| community edition IDE's and mostly open toolchains. The total
| requirement for me as an individual to start using some
| language or stack is owning a computer and having internet
| access. Both provided by a stable market with consumer choice.
|
| Post-LLM there is now this blackbox of a service which you
| depend on and for which someone is picking up a not-
| insignificant tab where the costs currently seem massively
| subsidised, and which is getting to be a requirement for your
| skill set. Open local models? Fine, but who is training them?
| How will those stay up-to-date?
|
| Oh, and then there is the not-quite-insignificant ecological
| aspect and that bit where the powers-that-be seem to have
| collectively decided that copyright doesn't really apply here.
| RegW wrote:
| I don't know how I feel about this. I started programming in
| 1979.
|
| I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the
| bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5
| to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something
| that was going to deliver a result.
|
| I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a
| consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges.
| Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to
| weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when
| there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else.
| When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.
|
| Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built
| in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around
| something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again.
| Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the
| documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it
| because you have already read that.
|
| Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't
| know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me.
| Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream
| seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My
| IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as
| I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit
| tests.
|
| I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?
|
| Are we 80% of the way there yet?
| antonvs wrote:
| > Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI
| built in. And it's really good.
|
| Clearly you don't use Amazon's Alexa.
| ernesto905 wrote:
| > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day.
| Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages
|
| Throughout college I would see a pretty stark divide, where most
| people would use vscode on mac or on Windows + WSL. But there was
| a small minority who would spend alot of time 'tinkering' (e.g,
| experiment with OS like nix/gentoo, or tweaking their dev
| environment). Maybe i'm misunderstanding what a 'craft lover'
| means here but it seemed to me, at the time, that the latter camp
| had more technical depth just based on conversation. Can't speak
| to the result in terms of test scores. Though it would be
| interesting to see any data on that if it exists.
| wiml wrote:
| I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are
| chasing results too -- we're just chasing results that last and
| that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a
| major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to
| make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted
| assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to
| talk me into using compilers. Yes, I've spent many fruitful hours
| writing basic CRUD apps but now that's easily done by
| libraries/frameworks I'm not eager to go back. Memory management,
| type systems, higher level languages, no-/low-code systems that
| completely remove me from some parts of the design loop, etc etc
| etc. All great: the point of computer programming is to have the
| computer do things so we don't have to.
|
| I think the real divide we're seeing is between people who saw
| software as something that is, fundamentally, improvable and
| understandable; and people who saw it as a mysterious roadblock
| foisted upon them by others, that cannot really be reasoned about
| or changed. And oddly, many of the people in the second category
| use terminology from the first, but fundamentally do not believe
| that the first category really exists. (Fair enough; I was
| surprised at the second category.) It's not about intelligence or
| whatever, it's a mindset or perspective thing.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > It's not about intelligence or whatever, it's a mindset or
| perspective thing.
|
| I agree with everything except this last sentence. What you
| wrote looks highly intelligent and I would suspect a lot of
| people in the second camp are not up to par with this.
| hinkley wrote:
| Wise+intelligent people realize that intellectualizing every
| fucking thing in their life is a trap, and that they should
| rely more on other things. Not the least of which is buy-in,
| which is often not about rationality either.
|
| It might take intelligence to notice the problem, but we all
| know people who haven't and some who might never. My previous
| job has the oldest I've ever met and I wanted to strangle him
| at least once a week. I haven't added anyone to my Do Not
| Hire list in over a decade. Except him. He made himself
| indispensable at every opportunity and had some of the most
| convoluted code (and vocabulary) I've encountered in a long
| time. I spent way too much time extracting his claws from
| code I'd written that he made an absolute hash of.
| simianwords wrote:
| You are repeating the same thing. You think having good
| maintainable good is important - more than the first camp.
|
| That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only
| in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most
| enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration.
| Code quality doesn't matter that much. No one else is going to
| see it.
|
| When the craft coders bring their ideology to this set up, it
| starts slowing things down because they are optimising for the
| wrong target.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I think your target is the wrong target myself. Now what?
| simianwords wrote:
| If more people think like you we won't have jobs because
| company won't make profit
| wiseowise wrote:
| If people think like you we won't have jobs because
| everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines,
| nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments
| start misbehaving. Now what?
| simianwords wrote:
| this is a category error that i specifically called out
| in my comment.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Where?
|
| > That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is
| useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source
| tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring
| and fast iteration. Code quality doesn't matter that
| much. No one else is going to see it.
|
| Here? Most of those that I've listed IS boring enterprise
| code. Unless we're taking medical/military grade.
| simianwords wrote:
| fair, you have presented specific niche where the
| ~quality~ correctness is important in enterprise - not
| just libraries.
|
| but most people aren't writing code in those places. its
| usually CRUD, advertisement, startups, ecommerce.
|
| also there are two things going on here:
|
| - quality of code
|
| - correctness of code
|
| in serious reusable libraries and opensource tools,
| quality of code matters. the interfaces, redundancy etc.
|
| but that's not exactly equal to correctness. one can
| prioritise correctness without dogmatism in craft like
| clean code etc.
|
| in most of these commercial contexts like ecommerce, ads
| - you don't need the dogmatism that the craft camp
| brings. that's the category error.
| skydhash wrote:
| Maybe you're too entrenched in the web section of
| software development. Be aware that there's a lot of
| desktop and system software out there.
|
| Even in web software, you can write good code without
| compromising in delivery speed. That just requires you to
| be good at what you're doing. But the web is more
| forgiving of mistakes and a lot of frameworks have no
| taste at all.
| simianwords wrote:
| Do you think more sdes work in mission critical software
| or the ones I mentioned?
| oytis wrote:
| What is the category of code that does not need quality?
| You need it to not interact with real world, with
| people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically
| it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to
| investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not
| for real users to rely on.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What is the category of code that does not need
| quality?
|
| For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist
| "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire
| 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense
| two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient
| questions/tests that someone in the audience might come
| up with during these two hours.
|
| In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities"
| to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to
| be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has
| been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective
| company for the project, the requirements will completely
| change anyway ...).
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is
| though that before agentic coding skills to build a
| prototype and skills to build a production system were
| generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a
| demonstration of what is possible in general, but what
| your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these
| skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove
| anything like that. They are still going to be useful for
| demonstrations and market research though.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Code quality doesn't matter that much. No one else is going
| to see it.
|
| This is just false for anyone who has worked in the industry
| for any meaningful amount of time. Do you seriously never
| encountered a situation where a change was supposedly easy on
| the surface, but some stupid SoB before you wrote it so bad
| that you want to pull your hair out from trying to make it
| work without rewriting this crap codebase from scratch?
| simianwords wrote:
| at least where i have worked, you need to identify the
| context. certain projects require good readable code and
| certain projects require you to iterate fast and explore.
|
| in my experience very few projects were serious enough that
| required such scrutiny in code.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Sounds like you've never had a prototype become
| foundational infrastructure before, or dealt with someone
| else's.
| simianwords wrote:
| you can always change it later. this is exactly the
| dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise
| pushing things. the clean up can come later.
|
| ironically it is your camp that advices to not use
| microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm
| suggesting here.
| skydhash wrote:
| > you can always change it later. this is exactly the
| dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise
| pushing things. the clean up can come later.
|
| Everyone that says this has not been the one that had to
| fix the code later. They have already moved to the next
| jobs (or have been fired). Engineers do know the tradeoff
| between quality and speed, and can do hack if that's what
| needed to get the project to the finish line. But good
| ones will note down the hack and resolve it later. Bad
| ones will pat themselves in the back and add more hacks
| on top of that.
| discreteevent wrote:
| > You can always change it later.
|
| People seem to think that technical debt doesn't need to
| be paid back for ages. In my experience bad code starts
| to cost more than it saved after about three months. So
| if you have to get a demo ready right now that will save
| the company then hack it in. But that's not the case for
| most technical debt. In most cases the management just
| want the perception of speed so they pile debt upon debt.
| Then they can't figure out why delivery gets slower and
| slower.
|
| > ironically it is your camp that advices to not use
| microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm
| suggesting here.
|
| I agree with this. But there's a difference between over-
| engineering and hacking in bad quality code. So to be
| clear, I am talking about the latter.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I have many times and if you spend too long over
| architecting a prototype you start to get annoyed looks
| and tons of questions from PMs who just want something
| that looks right today (we can fix it/optimize it later)
| hinkley wrote:
| > Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast
| iteration.
|
| And when the code base is 250,000 lines of garbage all the
| way down, this is impossible. The projects where I've had
| free rein to kill tech debt and SDLC footguns with impunity
| have all been the ones where velocity maintained or increased
| over time. All the rest have ground to a halt.
|
| There's value in customers believing you'll get there soon
| and the code will actually work. They can be patient if you
| have an air of competence. But they will switch to some other
| clown car if it's cheaper than your clown car.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > Code quality doesn't matter that much. No one else is going
| to see it.
|
| You seem to be claiming that enterprise shops never adopted
| code reviews. Interesting if true.
| layer8 wrote:
| When the code is low-quality, you can't reason well about it,
| can't reason well about what changes to apply and what their
| effects will be, can't reason about what the outcome will be
| when making changes to the context (inputs, environment) the
| code is run it. Instead everything becomes an experiment on a
| black box or gray box, whose behavior you can't well predict
| in advance.
|
| Engineering is the task of making things behave predictably
| and reliably. Because software is malleable and rarely
| "finished", this applies to changing software as well.
|
| I'm pretty sure that there is more than one divide regarding
| AI among developers, but one of the dividing lines concerns
| the predictability and reason-ability of the tools and the
| code. AI fundamentally lacks these qualities.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known
| has been to make themselves obsolete.
|
| I've always heard this mantra when coders were thinking they're
| untouchable, not so much now.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Thank you for articulating that.
| msteffen wrote:
| Yeah, I like this framing a lot. There comes a point, after
| working on a system for a while, when there are no details:
| every aspect of how the system works is understood to be in
| some way significant. If one of those details is changed, you
| understand what the implications of that change will be for the
| rest of the system, its users, etc. I worry that in a post-AI
| software world, that'll never happen. The system will be so
| full of code you've barely looked at, understanding it all will
| be hopeless. If a change is proving impossible to make without
| introducing bugs, it will be more sensible to AI-build a new
| system than understand the problem.
|
| I sometimes wonder if modularity will become even more
| important (as it has in physical construction, e.g. with the
| move from artisanal, temperamental plaster to cheap, efficient
| drywall), so that systems that AI is not able to reliably
| modify can easily be replaced.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i wonder, is the divide something like Pirsig's classical vs
| romantic ? First see mostly-functionality / facts, want to
| understand to the bones, latter see .. appearance / utility /
| feelings, want to just-get-on-with-it ?
| skeledrew wrote:
| > These are real feelings about real losses. I'm not here to
| argue otherwise.
|
| I'll argue it. Technically, there's no loss IMO, only gain. Craft
| lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it
| on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job,
| just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them.
|
| But now result chasers can get results faster in their chasing.
| Or get results at all. I'm a proud result chaser now making
| serious progress on various projects that I've had on ice
| anywhere from months to years and occasionally lamented not
| having time/energy for them. And I also note my stable of tools,
| for both AI-related dev and other things, has grown greatly in a
| short period of time. And I'm loving it.
| rimunroe wrote:
| > Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have
| to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated
| day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them.
|
| ...except time, which sadly is limited. I'm sad about the real
| potential that I might not get to be paid to do something I
| enjoy so much anymore. I care about end products for sure, but
| that's not why I'm in this career.
|
| I do this because a large part of the work engages me in a
| pleasant way. I like TDDing in a tight loop. I like how it
| forces me to think one step at a time, how I get to stop myself
| from jumping ahead, and how I get to verify my thoughts or
| theories within seconds. I find efficiently manipulating text
| in my editor satisfying. I love the feeling of being validated
| that my architectural choice was right when a spec changes and
| the required code change is obvious, minimal, and clearly
| expressed. I enjoy the feeling of obtaining mastery for
| mastery's sake rather than because it lets me create a product.
|
| I've felt incredibly lucky for over a decade that my work gave
| me the opportunity to chase that. I may find enjoyment in
| wrangling AI, but I'm skeptical it'll scratch that itch. If it
| doesn't and I wanted to still scratch it, I'd have to do it on
| my own time. That would mean sacrificing time I've previously
| spent on other interests, and I don't have a ton of time to
| begin with.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > sacrificing time I've previously spent on other interests
|
| I'd say this is the crux of the matter. Having competing
| interests and choosing what to do and how much of it is a
| balancing act, but you can still get that desired
| satisfaction. You could perhaps even start your own company
| if it's that important to you.
|
| For me, projects just keep accumulating regardless of how
| much time I dedicate to them (outside of the mandatory
| things). Maybe I just have too many things I'd like to build.
| Definitely thinking about starting a company myself now
| there's all this capability available.
| rimunroe wrote:
| > I'd say this is the crux of the matter.
|
| That's why my opening paragraph and final paragraphs were
| devoted to it :)
|
| I feel like a lot of the things I hear from other folks is
| that I'm missing the possibility of programming the way I
| used to, rather than being sad that it might no longer be
| practical within the constraints of my life. Even if I did
| start doing it on the side, going from eight hours a day
| programming to squeezing in one or two would be quite the
| change.
|
| > You could perhaps even start your own company if it's
| that important to you.
|
| I have no interest in ever starting or running a company.
| Every person I've known who does it has it consume their
| life. I'd rather spend time with my family and do stuff
| which doesn't involve a boatload of stress and additional
| responsibility. Not to mention that in the case where I'm
| no longer able to find a job programming the way I used to
| then I don't think it's likely a company where people did
| that would be competitive enough to survive, at least not
| normally. Also, one of the reasons I rarely program on the
| side is that I don't often have ideas for things to make. I
| just don't feel the need for much software in my personal
| life, and certainly don't think of the sorts of things
| where there's a market for them.
|
| Having a lucrative job where you do something where you
| find great satisfaction in your daily work isn't the norm
| and is the privilege of a lucky few, but that doesn't mean
| they aren't justified in feeling sad at the prospect of it
| going away.
| gneuron wrote:
| This is the defining divide of AI, period. Whether you're a craft
| lover of art, writing, music, code, hell, business processes and
| the idea of "doing work." There are those who love the craft, and
| those who want the result of the craft. AI is a faster path to
| that end result (whether you're happy with that result is another
| matter). From that POV, it could lead to us speed-running our
| civilization into another era; abundant prosperity, or full on
| collapse. Bro...
| daft_pink wrote:
| It kinda reminds me of the first time I visited a maker space
| years ago. It was full of cutting edge lasers cutters, 3-D
| printers, oscilloscopes. I'm doing the tour they told us we could
| make anything. Then the tour ended. I get to meet the real users
| and they showed me what they made. Most people just made random
| things like etching Pokemon into their pencil case. I left
| thinking wow these people could make anything and that's what
| they made. All I'm saying is if you give the average person
| something that Lockheed Martin is using to build the SR 71. The
| average person would probably just use it to make a toy car and
| that SR 71 is not going to get built.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The average person can't afford the materials to build an SR 71
| but they can afford a pencil case.
| hofo wrote:
| There's a similar divide in the woodworking community between
| people that use CNC and the like to mill and shape wood vs those
| that use hand and power tools.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Isn't the question really about what you can get paid for, have
| as your job?
|
| People want to keep doing what they enjoy as their fulltime
| profession, making a (good) living out of it. Perfectly
| understandable. But neither AI, powertools or image generation
| is preventing someone from doing craft coding, hand woodworking
| or drawing/painting in their spare time and enjoying it.
|
| I love drawing but since it went out of business as a viable
| career long before I was born I have never felt the grief of
| losing it. With craft coding we happen to exist at the point in
| time where it suddenly gets significantly de-crafted.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| I'm just not buying this framing. At all.
|
| I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be mourning. I'm using my
| skills and continuing in my craft the way I have for several
| decades and the way I will continue to for several more. I eschew
| the LLMs not because they are threatening to me, but because they
| are unsound products built & promoted by people who are
| fundamentally sociopathic.
|
| If I am to mourn, I can mourn the unveiling of deep ethical
| lapses across the entire tech industry. They were clearly there
| already, we just didn't realize that if you were to put any
| random assemblage of techies into a room, a decent handful of
| them are sadly unethical people lacking a moral compass. We know
| that now. They _love_ LLMs, because they love _power_ and they
| dislike having to forgo perceived "utility" by recognizing the
| importance of caring for others in a community.
|
| While they do their utmost to demolish craft & artistry &
| tradition, I will be doing my utmost to preserve & defend all of
| those things. I am no stranger to boycotts, and I certainly don't
| suffer from FOMO. And I'm thankful I know a whole lot of people
| who feel much as I do.
| mllev15 wrote:
| Completely agree. This is the framing people use to cope with
| their moral and psychological failure. Using tools that are
| literally scorching the earth just so they don't have to use
| their brains anymore.
| wulfstan wrote:
| 100% with you. I start a new job on Monday and I intend to keep
| building great young engineers who love their craft and their
| community. Enough of this vampiric unethical horse manure.
| est wrote:
| I wonder what happens if Claude was exploited by hackers and all
| chat logs were released one day.
|
| Nearly every corp secrets would be instant leaked.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| What happens when providers achieve AGI, as they claim, and
| then use what they've learned from your company's prompts,
| context, memory and outputs to put you out of business
|
| Even without AGI, that internal source code, data and trade
| secrets are valuable on their own. Would suck if someone
| capitalized on it
| koenschipper wrote:
| I think I'm in the middle, at first I was definitely against
| using any AI because I loved the craft. But over the past 12-18
| months I've been using it more and more.
|
| I still love to code just by hand for an fun afternoon. But in
| the long-term, I think you are going to be left behind if you
| refuse to use AI at all.
| vaylian wrote:
| "Left behind" in terms of speed or are there other aspects that
| people are missing out on?
| ares623 wrote:
| It's this season's "have fun staying poor"
| cableshaft wrote:
| Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah.
|
| A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me
| hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last
| couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based
| A.I. coding before that).
|
| I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my
| superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes
| after they suggested them, for a feature the other day,
| getting feedback on how something should look.
|
| Something that would have taken me an hour or more each time
| they wanted a change or something new added.
|
| Now that cuts both ways, as it started to seem like they were
| expecting that to be the new normal and I started to feel
| like I had to keep doing that or make it seem like I'm not
| actually working. And it gets exhausting keeping up that
| pace, and I started worrying when anything did take me extra
| time.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my
| superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes
| after they suggested them, for a feature the other day,
| getting feedback on how something should look.
|
| Seems like a nightmare.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I did choose to do it, so it wasn't a nightmare. I was
| wanting extra guidance on what to include, and so I asked
| them (while they both weren't busy), they gave me
| feedback, I did that in like a minute or two with A.I.
| (when normally it would have taken me a lot longer), so I
| showed them and was like 'how's this?' and they said
| 'could you change it to be like this?' etc back and forth
| for about 45 minutes. It was about the equivalent of a
| call except it was over Slack and I could provide
| something they could look at quickly.
|
| What could be considered to be a nightmare, perhaps, is
| suddenly feeling like 'uh oh, is this going to be the new
| normal. Will I have to keep doing this all the time now,
| or else they think I'm not getting any work done?'
| koenschipper wrote:
| Yes, absolutely agree. I have that feeling too that we have
| to keep up that pace. But it is not realistic that
| everything can happen at that same speed.
|
| How do you deal with that feeling?
| cableshaft wrote:
| I don't really know, the client I've been working at for
| the past 4.5 years has only given me access to agent
| based A.I. two weeks ago, so this is all pretty new to me
| (it's a large corporation and they didn't allow it until
| very recently).
|
| I experimented with it a bit a couple weeks before that
| on my own personal projects as well, but I don't feel
| that same push when I'm doing my own projects, obviously
| (well, if I do, it's because I choose to).
| simianwords wrote:
| The split is about people who care about the commerce behind
| software development vs people who care about the craft.
|
| Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive
| environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic
| about unit tests and clean code an so on.
|
| If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce
| because coding is an artistic expression.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Your generalization are as useful as me saying that people in
| the first camp are just sloppy workers who dump their subpar
| code on others in hope that they'll never need to touch it
| again.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I love developing clever algorithms and writing elegant code.
| It's a hobby of mine and it makes me happy.
|
| I love shipping tangible products because it makes others happy
| and makes me money.
|
| Do what you love for work and you'll never love anything again.
|
| Do what you love for a hobby and keep it pure.
|
| Don't let either be your identity, you only diminish yourself and
| grow old in the doing.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| The real split is between people that believe technological
| progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always
| makes life better and easier, and people that know the history
| and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam
| machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle,
| because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity
| was increase in workload.
| Gud wrote:
| The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our
| labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that
| says they own a percentage of what I make.
| khafra wrote:
| Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the
| "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital
| owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-
| owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live
| at all.
|
| Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development,
| internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to
| durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans
| around, doing human things.
| Gud wrote:
| I agree.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| "Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital,
| or will not live at all."
|
| That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to
| end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a
| grade school level of historical literacy would know better
| than to stick a fork in that outlet.
| khafra wrote:
| It's never been tried before. Capital always required
| human labor, to be productive. Capital has never closed
| in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and
| expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing
| in on that ability now.
| daveguy wrote:
| It's really not. The capital owners just think it is.
| khafra wrote:
| We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if
| today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near
| the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in
| the logistic curve where things slow down a lot.
|
| I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid
| advances in task length, general capabilities, and
| research and development capabilities in AI, and
| generality, price, and autonomy in robotics.
|
| How much headroom in these capabilities do you believe we
| have, before a data center can protect and maintain
| itself and an on-site power plant? Before robots can run
| a robot factory?
| daveguy wrote:
| I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of
| automation. People are still confusing plausible text
| generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also:
| "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some
| awesome tools that sound like science fiction from
| decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle.
| In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or
| computational bandwidth necessary.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357042
| khafra wrote:
| We're absolutely not there yet, algorithmically or with
| compute. Algorithms keep getting better, though, despite
| the bitter lesson; and data centers keep getting bigger.
|
| If you showed a conversation between Terry Tao or Steve
| Yegge and their AI collaborators to someone from 2021,
| they would consider it beyond obvious that it's AGI.
| Today, we know they still have some shortcomings; but in
| another 5 years, what looks to us today like it's beyond
| obviously ASI may well be enough for catastrophic,
| irrecoverable outcomes.
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| The real transition would be from human-owned capital to
| self-owned capital. You are right that current
| capabilities and autonomy don't allow for that yet.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Is that what you think is happening right now? This line
| of reasoning brings to mind the luxury bunkers in New
| Zealand that are so popular with a certain type of folks.
| I'm guessing the sales brochures on those things don't
| mention stuff like the outcome of an 80lb bag of cement
| poured into the ventilation or the fact that heavy
| machinery is ubiquitous and shockingly simple to operate.
| Thinking capital can decouple itself from the larger
| populace is comically flawed for similar reasons. See
| also: XKCD where the crypto guy gets worked over with a
| wrench for his password.
| eloisius wrote:
| I, for one, am looking forward to me and a band of my
| closest friends and family raiding heavily fortified data
| centers guarded by Boston Dynamics robot dogs to steal
| clean drinking water for our underground village. We might
| even hit a caravan of autonomous trucks carrying cricket
| protein powder in the same night.
| sweetheart wrote:
| can i come
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If I were 20 years younger maybe, but nowadays I'm too
| old for that
| edgyquant wrote:
| The people without capital will just form their own
| economies and continue to exist, likely they will kill the
| capital owners as well if it really came to that.
| khafra wrote:
| What's your plan for beating the autonomous drone swarms
| without capital?
| dns_snek wrote:
| My plan is that we don't let it get far enough that a
| small group of people gain control of a fully integrated
| robotic supply chain powering an unbeatable war machine.
| If it comes to that then the world is already doomed.
|
| In practice this currently means voting for political
| options who can correctly identify concentration of power
| as the root cause of most of our current and future
| problems, and who pledge to actually do something about
| it.
| grafmax wrote:
| Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It
| does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point
| of LTV!
|
| We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation
| in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you
| produce more. But owners faced with increased competition
| under commoditized production see their profit margins
| fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source
| of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape -
| exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It
| was only when workers got their act together and organized
| that this decline was stopped and reversed.
| khafra wrote:
| Ok, but when the looms can autonomously analyze the
| market, design the products, organize purchasing and
| sales channel, run production, and deliver the products,
| the workers will not be squeezed. We will be discarded.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| I think there's a piece missing here. Capital owners are
| humans too, and what humans want (perhaps especially the
| ones who accumulate capital), is to be at the top of a
| hierarchy. But a hierarchy needs participants. If nobody
| else is playing the game, there's no top to be on top of.
| Strip away the people willing to compete, admire, envy, or
| just show up, and the whole structure collapses. It's not
| clear that a world of pure capital-on-AI-labor actually
| gives them what they're after. It sounds lonely and
| meaningless to me. I don't think that it would feed the
| black hole in their chests.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Lot of effort was spent to naturalize the current state
| of affairs and value system, even if there is nothing
| _natural_ and _obvious_ about it. Humans for millennia
| have lived with much higher political and social
| flexibility, with hierarchies built and teared down even
| seasonally, or with role of property and wealth shifting
| back and forth.
|
| Of course the structure exists because _we_ allow it,
| that 's the easy part. Hard part is - _why_ do we allow
| it?
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| I think in part because we have a black hole in our
| chest, and we are searching for ways to fill it. We
| attempt to fill it through worship at the altar of
| materialism, celebrity, etc. We are doing this to quiet
| the roar from the black hole. Actually stepping away
| would require us to sit with stillness, and then to forge
| a new path, a new life. It's frightening.
| khafra wrote:
| I think it's much more likely that the AI turns out not
| to be as compliant as the capital owners expect, and they
| die too.
|
| However, that's not useful in predicting what capital
| owners will do, because they follow their local
| incentives. "If everyone keeps doing X, we will all be
| worse off" does not help unless you can create local
| incentives that point toward an equilibrium where
| everyone stops doing X.
|
| In this case, no capital owner is individually better off
| by unilaterally refusing to chase more efficient returns
| on their capital. We would need an international
| agreement, with enforcement mechanisms, like I mentioned
| above.
| eloisius wrote:
| They can still keep us as pets, or use us for cage
| fighting spectacles.
| snek_case wrote:
| > imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around,
| doing human things.
|
| It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government
| and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was
| cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with
| the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated
| disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who
| comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much
| sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to
| STFU would be a good first step.
|
| > the political will to stop AI development
|
| The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You
| stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and
| Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the
| potential harms are less tangible.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons
| of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for
| this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first
| step.
|
| I don't need to imagine this student, I'm friends with
| some who are going through this right now. They graduated
| almost a year ago and haven't found work yet. One of them
| jokes about suicide often and I don't know how to help
| him
|
| The social contract between labour and capital has been
| frayed for a long time, but it is near breaking now. It's
| going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets
| better. If it ever does get better
| A_Duck wrote:
| Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
|
| Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers
| will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the
| left
|
| (It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects
| which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple
| stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the
| East India Company, for example -- your company can keep
| growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other
| countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
|
| I am on this site because it is one of the less shitty places
| on the Internet (in terms of usability, privacy etc.) to have
| some form of discussion, but I never identified as a
| "hacker", "techie", "entrepreneur" or "temporarily
| embarrassed billionaire". AI didn't change my view on
| anything, except it has shown me how blind and naive people
| can be.
|
| Of course I tend to focus on aspects that are being discussed
| here (context of software engineering).
| snek_case wrote:
| I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free
| to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for
| layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a
| wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer
| idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions
| of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they
| are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish
| on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term
| potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact
| they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot
| in the silicon valley VC bubble.
|
| My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will
| be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately
| just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers
| are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an
| advantage by having more developers than the competition.
| There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not
| documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your
| organization.
|
| In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and
| unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I
| doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to
| anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's
| probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have
| the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop
| online along with more and more job loss. There are probably
| going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I
| think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in
| place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that
| you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom,
| eat processed food and stay online all day.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| The absolutist extremes here is wild. Let's just push the pedal
| to the metal.
|
| The real split are between those that support science and
| technology, and those that hate science and technology and want
| to see more children die.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| The same children that those pushing for "science and
| technology" were sending to work in mines during last
| spectacular technological developments that promised to
| reduce need for hard-breaking labor?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Supporting "kill the children" seems like such a bad take,
| but you do you.
| FabianCarbonara wrote:
| For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My
| creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible
| without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I
| also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm
| working at now gets automated too?
| tovej wrote:
| Is it really valid to call it "ingenuity" if you weren't able
| to execute projects before?
|
| Gen-AI has not enabled me to develop anything I wasn't able to
| do before, and I consider myself to be an average developer.
| jigglypuff-mab wrote:
| This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding
| shifting in ways I didn't expect.
|
| The grief isn't really about losing the craft--it's about losing
| the _context_ where that craft made sense. When I started, "good
| code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever
| patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now?
| The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500
| lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds.
|
| What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more...
| untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good
| programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone
| who likes making things work.
|
| Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to
| _how_ they worked vs. people who tied it to _what_ they built.
| Garlef wrote:
| I like both worlds: Tinkering and vibe coding.
|
| My shift in perspective is really: Not all code deserves to be
| hand-crafted. Some stuff can be wonky as long as it does it's
| job.
|
| (And I think the wonkyness will reduce in vibe-coding as
| harnesses improve)
| amelius wrote:
| There's two kinds of developers. The first one would never become
| a manager because they like coding too much. The other one would
| become a manager at the first opportunity. It is obviously the
| second group that is benefiting from AI the most (because not
| everybody can be a manager).
| vb7132 wrote:
| True, there are people who are good with people. And they
| should totally become managers.
|
| But there are also the third kind: who like to design the
| systems and let them be built by someone else..
| vb7132 wrote:
| Having managed developers for over five years, I have seen two
| categories of devs (to simplify the argument, let's focus just on
| the smart ones):
|
| - one group loves to work independently and gets you the results,
| they are fast and they figure things out
|
| - second group needs direction, they can be creative in their
| space but check-ins and course corrections are needed.
|
| AI feels like group1 but it's actually group2. In essence, it
| doesn't fully fit in either group. I am still figuring out this
| third group.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Really the distinction is between those that can see the bigger
| picture, and those that only see what is in front of them. Of
| course the immediate gratification of LLMs appeal to the latter,
| whereas the former is all too aware of the systemic downside of
| such automated content generation.
| bushido wrote:
| Before AI, as a head of product (who has always written code), I
| did this thing where when I was thinking through an idea or a
| product direction, I built the solution three or four times
| before I found the shape and direction that I liked. And once I
| liked it, I put it on a roadmap for one or more of my teams to
| execute on.
|
| Candidly saying before AI is a little disingenuous, because since
| AI has gotten better in the last year at coding, my workflow has
| gone back to exactly what it was when I had a 40-person team
| reporting to me.
|
| I still go through three, four iterations before a final
| direction is picked. It still takes me two, three weeks to think
| through an idea. Three things have changed.
|
| 1. When I think of a possible direction, a new version gets spun
| up within minutes to a couple of hours, usually in a single shot.
| 2. I can work through more big ideas which require some amount of
| coding-based ideation than I could previously. 3. And when a
| direction is decided on, the idea comes in to deliver the
| outcomes at a much quicker pace. Previously, it could have been 1
| month of ideation + 2-8 sprints, now it's 2-4 weeks of ideation
| and 1-2 days to final delivery.
|
| All in all, while I can see where the author is coming from, the
| grief has been different for me.
|
| I've had a lot of good developers, product managers, product
| owners, and designers that have had the privilege of helping
| develop their skills in the past. That was the necessity of
| ensuring that we were developing talent who would then go on to
| produce good work on our teams.
|
| And I'm at a stage now where a three-person team that I have can
| produce more than the 40 could, and I am likely never going to
| need to develop the skills the way I used to. The loss is not
| from coding, I thoroughly enjoy how that's evolved. The loss is
| from the white space around it.
| mrob wrote:
| The optimal amount of generative AI in the world is zero. There
| are three possible scenarios, all of them bad:
|
| 1. Weaker than expected AI.
|
| Great Depression 2.0. Widespread poverty and suffering as the
| enormous investments already made fail to pay off.
|
| 2. AI works as expected.
|
| Dystopia. A few trillionaires gain absolute control of the entire
| world, and everyone else is enslaved or killed.
|
| 3. Stronger than excepted AI.
|
| Hard take-off singularity scenario. Extinction of all biological
| life.
|
| It's probably hopeless to resist at this point, but we should at
| least try.
| negroesrnegro wrote:
| you may notice tbat the same people benefit from 1 and 2 and 3
| is just a fantasy sold to the plebs to detract attention from 1
| and 2
|
| what a councidence
| sathish316 wrote:
| You do realize that AI seems magical because text response is
| converted into actions or tool calls. The AI is deciding the
| order in which the tools get called to fulfill your prompts.
| True Intelligence of Type 2 and 3 above needs to formulate,
| plan, analyse tradeoffs, think critically and solve novel
| unforeseen problems.
| rglover wrote:
| I had a similar opinion until I started to see a flood of
| outages, data leaks, money being pulled, etc starting to crop
| up right as co's started hailing AI as the second coming.
|
| Now? I'm waiting for the inevitable reality check. AI doesn't
| go away (I personally don't want it to; it's a power tool for
| an experienced dev), but imo, the market is not too far from
| correcting the hype. Reality can only shoulder so much bs
| before the rubber has to hit the road.
|
| The promises being made over the last few years are not being
| fulfilled and big money likes results, not talk. So, unless we
| get another (significant) rabbit coming out of the hat in 2026,
| the momentum (again, imo) won't be there to sustain the
| necessary long-term growth (i.e., in terms of mass-adoption,
| this era of AI is closer to AOL than Facebook).
| woodenbrain wrote:
| This resonates with me. I got into development exactly because I
| wanted to make things useful to me, with limited background in
| programming, over 20 years ago. Tech eventually got in the way. I
| was so bored with sandboxes, entitlements, signing apps, etc. The
| joy was gone. Now I am developing a new app with AI help. I may
| not be using the tools optimally but I don't care, it's a
| process. And it's a lie that this is a fast process. I have been
| working on one app for months, and now I have a pretty solid new
| app to show for it. Looking for MacOS Apple Music users for beta
| testers, BTW. Please have a look.
| https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html
| ontouchstart wrote:
| The consumer/producer dichotomy misses another aspect of coding,
| with or without AI.
|
| About a decade ago, STEM education was trendy and everyone was
| getting Lego, Raspberry Pi etc to build robots and writing Python
| in the name of STEM. You can ask LLM what STEM standards for.
|
| The Maker movement is not about consuming or producing for
| consumption. Some people might get incentive to be influencers
| and profit off it. But the majority of the kids who went through
| this process become adults and moved on to be producer/consumer
| and playing with AI now. I believe their curiosity and
| creativity.
|
| Don't worry, life will find its way.
| tcgv wrote:
| That's an interesting take. I'm likely on the same side of the
| split as you, since I'm very much motivated by the new
| possibilities agentic coding tools open when used responsibly.
|
| Back in February, I also wrote a piece on the recurring
| mourning/sense of grief we are seeing for 'craftsmanship' coding:
|
| - https://thomasvilhena.com/2026/02/craftsmanship-coding-five-...
| tyleo wrote:
| I think there is a split but I don't think it's between people
| who love hand-crafting things vs not.
|
| I love hand crafting things, yet I'm waking up like a kid on
| Christmas every day, running to my computer to use Claude code.
| For my critical apps I review every line. For 1-off things, I've
| had Claude build single-serving applications.
|
| If I had to guess the split is more between folks who have
| curiosity about the new technology and folks who fear things
| changing. With a decent center on that Venn Diagram of folks who
| feel both.
| oytis wrote:
| I think we should already get past pretending it's about people
| who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards.
| The real split is whether you like understanding systems and
| inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part
| to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their
| success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the
| credit can be justified if you mentored them or created
| conditions for their success and growth.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Disagree. I think it was always obvious to me that there are at
| two kinds of developers. To make an extreme example: developer
| A writes long, sometimes tedious, security-minded, thoroughly
| tested code, and has written the CI pipelines too. When tasked
| with some ticket, they'll develop it to the letter, not one
| inch further, and even if it makes zero sense from the point of
| view of the users. Developer B knows nothing of that, doesn't
| write tests, can't be arsed about security and has no idea of
| how to deploy stuff, but thinks backwards from what the users
| (or other developers, or their future self) might like a lot
| and tries to make that. Both have been useful, though the first
| kind usually much more appreciated (maybe because it's really
| essential, while type B's contributions are harder to measure).
|
| Probably AI has come a little bit earlier for type A, but type
| B will follow soon anyway. In the meanwhile, they're enjoying
| the ride a bit more since AI takes care of all the tedious but
| essential details.
| adverbly wrote:
| This says nothing about where people find enjoyment.
|
| I like doing puzzles.
|
| I like it more than planning.
|
| At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing,
| but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.
| cherry_tree wrote:
| > I like doing puzzles
|
| Meaning you like to put the pieces in, or you like to figure
| out where they should go? To me that's the crux of the
| article.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Puzzles have a correct solution that is known in advance,
| the pleasure consists in the work you do to reach it. It's
| a bit different when the solution has a beauty in itself.
| layer8 wrote:
| Part of figuring out where the pieces should go is usually
| in trying to put them in, because you generally can't
| visualize the complete solution in your mind just by
| looking at all the pieces and only thinking. I don't think
| this is a good analogy.
| rdevilla wrote:
| "Claude, lift these weights for me."
| marssaxman wrote:
| We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is
| a forklift for the mind, perhaps?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less
| physically fit than moving things by hand
|
| Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less
| mentally fit?
|
| Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me
| robocat wrote:
| Strawman. Forklifts usually do work we physically can't
| do (or sometimes could do if ignoring personnel risks and
| costs).
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do
|
| Is that any different from doing work we can do, but way
| faster than we could realistically do it?
|
| Change the analogy to an excavator then. I could move a
| pile of dirt with a shovel, or I could write code with my
| brain
|
| Or I could move a pile of dirt with an excavator or write
| code with an LLM
| oytis wrote:
| That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think
| the difference is that in software development, building
| knowledge _is_ the work. You write software and
| simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what
| the software does that allows you to maintain it and move
| forward.
| hinkley wrote:
| Some of us hate this part. They don't want to learn the
| domain to that degree. It's not always the dumb ones
| either.
|
| However there's not a lot of overlap I've noticed between
| the craftsman crowd and that one.
| aspenmartin wrote:
| How about people that understand things are changing whether
| anyone likes it or not and want to stay relevant. What about
| the people who care about the end product and not rabbitholing
| design decisions on a proof of concept. What about someone who
| understands there is more nuance than assuming people with a
| different perspective on AI are lesser than or lower than
| people who resist the technology. You may feel you know the
| "right way" but to everyone else who is interested in operating
| in a world changing beneath our feet and not whining about the
| fact that everything will be different, and denigrating the
| people who want to succeed in it, this opinion is not exactly
| convincing. You want to cludge your way through a problem
| you're welcome to but it's not necessarily logical to suggest
| this is the only "right" way and infer that people who build
| with AI don't like "understanding systems".
|
| When I build with AI I build things I never would have built
| before, and in doing so I'm exposed to technologies, designs,
| tools I wasn't aware of before. I ask questions about them.
| Sure I don't understand the tools as deeply as the person who
| wasted like 10 hours going down rabbit holes to answer a simple
| question, but I don't really see that as particularly valuable.
| senko wrote:
| As someone who likes understanding systems and inventing new
| things AND is happy to delegate drudgery to AI, according to
| you, I shouldn't exist.
|
| Naturally, I disagree.
| calebkaiser wrote:
| It's funny how "the real split" is always between the
| intellectually and morally superior (me) and the inferiors
| (them).
| reportgunner wrote:
| I never asked for this.
| allenu wrote:
| I've noticed that too and it's not too different from
| political discussions. At the end of the day, I think the
| split is really about different values people have, their
| identity, and justice.
|
| A lot of developers' identities is tied to their ability to
| create quality solutions as well as having control over the
| means of production (for lack of a better term). An employer
| mandating that they start using AI more and change their
| quality standards is naturally going to lead to a sense of
| injustice about it all.
| pona-a wrote:
| When one side of the discussion makes their ignorance a point
| of pride, defining themselves entirely based on what they now
| need not know, I believe you've inadvertently insulted
| yourself.
| rng-concern wrote:
| I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance.
| There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many
| ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition.
| I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much
| "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is
| built, I use it to build more things. More tools.
|
| Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your
| mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a
| void in our brain you don't fill with other things.
|
| But I don't know. I'm new to this.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| I think the split is between people who are in a hurry and those
| who are not. I'm not in a hurry and so choose not to spend money
| to get a quicker result.
|
| Taking time to solve a problem myself is pleasurable and I make
| no apologies for that.
|
| Horses for courses.
| andai wrote:
| You can just turn the AI off. I think that's a good idea to do
| regularly, in the same way it's good to have some time every day
| without screens and internet in your life.
|
| I did some "trad coding" to see how much I'd atrophied, and I was
| startled at how difficult and unpleasant it was. I was just stuck
| and frustrated almost the whole time! But I persisted for 7 hours
| and was able to solve the problem.
|
| Then I remembered, actually it was always like that! At least
| when doing something unfamiliar. That's just what programming
| feels like, but I had stopped being used to it because of the
| instant gratification of the magic "just fix my problem now"
| button.
|
| In reality had spent 7 hours in "learning mode", where the whole
| _point_ is that you don 't understand yet. (I was moving almost
| the whole time, but each new situation was also unfamiliar!)
|
| But if I had used AI, it would have eliminated the struggle, and
| given me the _superficial_ feeling of understanding, like when
| you skim a textbook and think "yeah I know this part" because
| you recognize the page. But can you _produce_ it? That 's the
| only question that matters.
|
| I think that's going to become a very important question going
| forward. Sure, you don't _need_ to produce it _right now._ But it
| 's mostly not _for_ right now.
|
| Just like you don't "need" to run and lift weights. But what
| happens if you stop?
| ugtr3 wrote:
| Yep. Something people overlook is the necessary need to
| condition oneself to enjoy something painful. Just like going
| gym and lifting weights.
|
| Without being exposed to this, you're not gonna be a good
| problem solver in the long run.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day.
| Writing code by hand.
|
| I would argue that the split existed before AI and these camps
| were not the same.
|
| There were always "Quality first" people and "Get the shit done
| ASAP" people. Former would go for a better considerations, more
| careful attitude towards dependencies. Latter would write the
| dirty POC code and move on, add huge 3rd party libs for one small
| function and so on.
|
| Both have pros and cons. Former are better in envs like Aerospace
| or Medtech, latter would thrive in product companies and web. The
| second cathegory are the people who are happy the most about AI
| and who would usually delegate the whole thing to the agents from
| start to finish including the review and deployment.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| I suppose I see the split a little bit differently. To me it's
| more that one camp of developers can still get a hit of
| satisfaction as if they built something themselves even if it was
| entirely generated by AI.
|
| Would they get the same satisfaction from cloning a public repo?
| Probably not. It's too clear to their brain that they didn't have
| anything to do with it. What about building the project with
| cmake? That requires more effort, yes, but the underlying process
| is still very obviously something that someone else architected,
| and so the feeling of satisfaction remains elusive.
|
| AI, however, adds a layer of obfuscation. For some, that's enough
| to mask the underlying process and make it feel as if they're
| still wielding a tool. For others, not so much.
| orsorna wrote:
| I don't follow your analogy at all. Suppose I want to build an
| application with xyz features. My research yields that there
| are no such applications that include xyz features. However,
| there are plenty of applications that might have x feature, y
| feature or z feature, or a combination of two, but not all
| three.
|
| If there are no such applications, I don't have a choice but to
| write it myself. _This could take some time_ , especially if an
| MVP is all I'm interested in. LLMs are a novel tool in building
| an MVP. If time is a constraint, I can use an LLM, which should
| excel since xyz features are in its training set.
|
| I suppose your analogy follows for developers who write
| applications that support abc features even though there are
| already applications out there that support abc features. Yes,
| I don't think that is very interesting. Your umpteenth clone of
| Snake is not interesting.
| orsorna wrote:
| Further, I don't argue that 100% prompting an application
| together isn't building something themselves. Built on the
| shoulders of leviathans, as libraries were built on the
| shoulders of giants of yore.
|
| But an application that combines xyz features _is_ novel in
| this scenario. There is inherent value in that.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| I'm not arguing whether AI has value as a code-generating
| application. I'm more interested in whether you, as a
| developer, still get satisfaction from building with AI,
| the same way you would get satisfaction if you built it
| yourself.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| People sure like manichaeism.
| starkparker wrote:
| > I grieve for the web I've known. Not for writing HTML by hand,
| but I grieve for the open web as an ecosystem.
|
| These seem more related than is stated. Shifting creation from
| individual people to corporate-owned AI tools is another step
| from being able to write it yourself in the common venue of the
| web, to being forced to either submit to owned tools or be
| relegated out of the mainstream.
|
| We're still in a sort of purgatory between the two, but the DIY
| web is creeping into the rear view, and every moment of
| proprietary generative AI adoption accelerates it.
| countWSS wrote:
| Sure, is there anyone nostalgic for debugging bash files by hand?
| Any sense of grief for writing C++ template headers, with all
| boilerplate? Hmm, does anyone like manually re-writing makefiles
| these days? I suspect the enthusiasts of coding craft will
| struggle to maintain their wonder after ~4h deep in any of these
| magical adventures, which surely involve inventing ad-hoc duct
| tape and novel, never-before-seen algorithms.
| oxag3n wrote:
| > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day.
| Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages,
| the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-
| it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products,
| looked indistinguishable.
|
| "Writing code by hand" - more result oriented engineers became
| managers.
|
| Editors - I don't believe Vim/Emacs used by both camps evenly.
|
| Languages - in my field, most make-it-go people use Python and
| when large data is involved Python/Java with Hadoop. The craft-
| lovers prefer bespoke solutions when feasible, running it in a
| single box.
|
| Version control - may be, but only after it got popularized by
| the GitHub.
|
| Products - would make-it-go people ever create the 'git' in the
| form that made it a success?
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