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Two years ago, I saw myself as a really good Python engineer. Now I'm building native mobile apps, desktop apps that talk to Slack, APIs in Go, and full web app

• mococa 1y ago
  I have the exact same feeling. 100x more engineering at cost of some questions.
• anon7000 1y ago
  I think it’s yet another layer of abstraction on top of complex ideas. There will always be room for people working on the infrastructure, tools, maintenance, and operations side of things. The biggest danger is if you stop learning because you trust AI to just do it. I’ve been (carefully) using AI on some AWS infrastructure stuff which I don’t know about. Whenever it proposes something, I research and learn what it’s actually trying to do. I’ve been learning quickly with this approach because it helps point me in the right direction, so I know what to search for. Of course, this includes reviews and discussions with my colleagues who know more, and I frequently completely rewrite what AI has done if it’s getting too complex and hard to understand. The important thing is not allowing AI to abstract away your thought process. It can help, but on my terms
• mettamage 1y ago
  Have you seen non-technical people use LLMs to build things? It's usually a lot slower or a disaster. You don't necessarily need to be technical perhaps in time, but you still need to be precise. Just knowing about HTML to the level we do allows us to embed text into it so the LLM can reason more sharply about it, etc. Being technical still is an advantage, in my opinion.
  • AnotherGoodName 1y ago
    Not really a criticism of llms though. Just a natural result of more accessibility to programming.
• simonw 1y ago
  The reason you can use these tools so effectively across native, mobile, Go, React etc is that you can apply most of what you learned about software development as a Python engineer in these new areas. The thing LLMs replace is the need for understanding all of the trivia required for each platform. I don't know how to write a for loop in Go (without looking it up), but I can write useful Go code now without spinning back up on Go first. I still need to conceptually understand for loops, and what Go is, and structured programming, and compilers, and build and test scripts, and all kinds of other base level skills that people without an existing background in programming are completely missing. I see LLMs as an amplifier and accelerant. I've accumulated a huge amount of fuzzy knowledge across my career - with an LLM I can now apply that fuzzy knowledge to concrete problems in a huge array of languages and platforms. Previously I would stay in my lane: I was fluent in Python, JavaScript and SQL so I used those to solve every problem because I didn't want to take the time to spin up on the trivia for a new language or platform. Now? I'll happily use things like Go and Bash and AppleScript and jq and ffmpeg and I'm considering picking up a Swift project.
  • anon7000 1y ago
    Completely agree. And along the way, my personal knowledge of bash has increased a lot, for example, just because I’m using it a lot more
    • giancarlostoro 1y ago
      LLMs are search engines not robots you can automate things with search engine results but you can also accidentally automate NSFW being delivered to customers. Use the right tools correctly.
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  • snoman 1y ago
    This is difficult to express because I too have enjoyed using an LLM lately and have felt a productivity increase, but I think there is a false sense of security being expressed in your writing and it underlies one of the primary risks I see with LLMs for programming. With minor exceptions, moving from one language to another isn’t a matter of simple syntax, trivia, or swapping standard libraries. Certainly, expert beginners do espouse that all the time, but languages often have fundamental concepts that they’re built that and need to be understood in order to be effective with them. For example: have you ever seen a team move from Java to Scala, js to Java, or C# to Python - all of which I’ve seen - where the developers didn’t try to understand language they were moving to? Non-fail, they tried to force the concepts that were important to their prior language, onto the new one, to abysmal results. If you’re writing trivial scripts, or one-off utils, it probably doesn’t build up enough to matter, and feels great, but you don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what to look for. Offloading the understanding of the concepts that are important for a language to an LLM is a recipe for a bad time.
• octopoc 1y ago
  Yeah there are a lot of things in programming that I don’t enjoy, that I can now avoid doing, like learning how to do the same technical thing in a different language/framework. But the stuff I enjoy doing is something I don’t delegate to the agent. I just wonder how long the stuff I enjoy can be delegated to an agent who will do it cheaper and faster.
  • giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Till theres an outage and the AI cannot help because they got rid of all the technical people or worse it generates sloppy underperforming code. You will continue to need devs for a good minute.
    • AnotherGoodName 1y ago
      For this you lose a day of llm usage? Big deal. Don’t mean to pick on you at all but I also saw you with a comment above along the lines of ‘but what if the llm includes nsfw stuff?’ which again seems to be clutching at straws since we all still at least review whats being added. I feel since the worst criticisms of llms in this thread boil down to down to ‘llm might be offline, might include nsfw stuff and might lead to non experts coding with poor results’ which are such weak criticisms that it’s is a damn good compliment to just how good they’ve gotten isn’t it?
      • rcruzeiro 1y ago
        I don’t think you understood his point?
• apwell23 1y ago
  yes remixing bunch of shit that already exists is good entertainment, i do it all the time. no need to be sad though as you can tell from your own creations you haven't really created anything of any value. its all AI slop.
• krzyk 1y ago
  It is similar to the days of first search engines - suddenly you didn't have to remember everything about your language/library or search multiple files. You lose some, you gain some. Although I'm not happy with code quality/style produced in most cases, or duplications, lack of refactorings to make the code look better/smaller.
• pembrook 1y ago
  I’m sure the handicrafts laborers prior to the industrial revolution felt the same way. However, they also likely had little education, 1-2 of their children probably died of trivial illnesses before the age of 10, and they lived without electricity, indoor plumbing, running water or refrigeration. Yes, blacksmithing your own tools is romantic (just as hand writing python code), but somehow I’m guessing our ancestors will be better off living at higher layers of abstraction. Nobody will stop them from writing python code themselves, and I’m sure they’ll do it as a fun hobby like blacksmithing is today.
  • prairieroadent 1y ago
    my brain read "before the age of 10" as "before the age of 100" haha and wondered if llms are leading us to the point where we look back and realize dying before 100 is truly young??
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• jtms 1y ago
  Absolutely feel the same way. I have been writing software professionally for over 20 years and truly love the craft. Now that I am using Claude Code basically 100% of the time my productivity has certainly increased, but I agree there is a hollowness to it - where before the process felt like art it now feels like industrialized mass manufacturing. I’m hoping that I can rediscover some of what has kept me so fascinated with software in this new reality, because quite a bit of the joy has indeed been stripped away for me.
• jasonmarks_ 1y ago
  Yes, software value appears to only exist for owners of products. You should pursue ownership of something. You can write anything, even a different type of Claude code!
• jostylr 1y ago
  Feeling the same, I just started a dialectic blog, with ChatGPT arguing with itself based on my prompt. It can have some biting words. I also have been using Suno AI to make a song with each post; while not perfect, it certainly allows for totally non-musical people like me to have something produced that can be listened to. One post that fits with this feeling is https://silicon-dialectic.jostylr.com/2025/07/02/impostor-syndrome.html https://silicon-dialectic.jostylr.com/2025/07/02/impostor-sy... The techno-apocalyptic lullaby at the end that the AIs came up with is kind of chilling.
• diggan 1y ago
  > My profession, my passion, all the things I worked so hard to learn, all the time and sacrifices, a machine can now do most of it Can it? It doesn't have experience, it doesn't have foresight nor hindsight, it cannot plan and it just follows the instructions, regardless if the instructions are good or bad. But you, as a human, have taste, ideas, creativity and a goal. You can convince others of your good idea, and can take things into account that an LLM can only think about if someone tells it to think about it. I'm not worried about programming as a profession disappearing, but it is changing, as we're moving up the ladder of abstractions. When I first got started professionally with development, you could get a career in it without knowing the difference between bits/bytes, and without writing a line of assembly, or any other low-level details. Decades before that, those were base-level requirements for being able to program things, but we've moved up the abstraction ladder. Now we're getting so far up this ladder, that you don't even need to know a programming language to make programs, if you're good enough at English and good enough at knowing what the program needs to do. Still, the people who understand memory layout, and assembly, and bits and bobs will always understand more of what's happening underneath than me, and probably be able to do a "better" job than me when that's needed. But it doesn't mean the rest of the layers above that are useless or will even go away.
• titanomachian 1y ago
  Hey, friend, let's see if my account helps ease your worries a little. Three years ago I decided to learn how to code, even though I was already 35 years old. My line of work is a bit far away from tech… I'm still trying to learn everyday, but going real slow because of work and some mental health stuff. Even though LLMs have been already a thing for a couple of years, I only managed to first try my hand at them a couple of months ago. Understand that I have very low self-esteem and that social anxiety prevents me from asking for help, even online — I think I might have done so less than 5 times my whole life, and I've been online since I was kid in 1996… Asking a complex text generator for help feels a lot more comfortable for me, even though there are ups and downs. I'm not sure if what I'm doing is the same as what everyone is calling "vibe coding", but it has been a real game changer in my self-study routine. I know LLMs sometimes (often?) write "unorthodox" code, but I like studying their output and comparing it to other stuff I find online. I'm sure there are better ways to learn, and I still wish to become like experienced programmers who learned their trade before these tools were around. Anyway, yeah, the machine helps. But I believe you're only feeling like the machine can make most of your work (or maybe replace you?) because your experience enables you to use the machine effectively. See it from my perspective as a baginner: I managed to do more than I could before, sure, but I quickly noticed I'll never get better at it if I don't learn how to "speak" it. At best, it would feel like knowing a foreign language "instrumentally", like enough to read a text if you have a dictionary beside you, but not near enough to strike a conversation with a native speaker of that language. If everything goes well, most beginners will soon realize that they need to know much more, even if just to write better prompts when asking for code. But, if all goes bad… I don't know yet… I worry about that too — like I worry about my young nephew and niece who barely touched a physical keyboard their entire lives and cannot touch-type to save their lives if they needed to. Whatever happens, we have to make the best of it. I would still be striving to be like more experienced engineers anyway, with or without LLMs around. But I can only speak for myself. I hope you feel at least a bit less sad by knowing there are still people out here who appreciate the effort people like you took.
• guluarte 1y ago
  It is because you already have the technical knowledge, and with LLMs, it is easier to apply it to other tech stacks because all are fundamentally the same. And the things you don't know (for e.g., Go coroutines), the LLMs can explain them to you based on what you know, so you can learn them faster and apply your Python knowledge in Go.