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The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The exci

• specproc 1y ago
  The most challenging thing I'm finding about working with LLM-based tools is the reduction in enjoyment. I'm in this business because I love it, and I'm worried about that going forward.
  • r_lee 1y ago
    Yup. not sure if it's just me but the trend seems to be just ship slop as fast as you can, nothing else matters, just ship ship ship
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    My daughter who switching from engineering to software because she enjoyed coding expressed that LLMs are taking away everything she found enjoyable about the job and reducing her to QA. She hates it and if the trend continues I won’t be surprised if she switches industries.
• a_bonobo 1y ago
  For the longest time, IT workers were 'protected' from Marx's alienation of labor by the rarity of your skill, but now it's coming for you/us, too. Claude Code is to programmers what textile machines were to textile workers. >In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labour power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and the wages paid to him for the labour. Less often discussed is Marx's view of social alienation in this context: i.e., workers used to take pride in who they are based on their occupation. 'I am the best blacksmith in town.' Automation destroyed that for workers, and it'll come for you/us, too.
  • codr7 1y ago
    Nope, not until AI is writing high quality, maintainable software; and no one knows if that's even possible yet.
    • hudon 1y ago
      What caused textile machines to replace the manual labor wasn’t the quality of their output, it was quantity. In fact, manually made clothing was of higher quality than what was machine-produced.
      • codr7 1y ago
        Yes, but they still filled their purpose. AI slop code doesn't even work beyond toy examples.
        • hudon 1y ago
          After the operating system and the spreadsheet, most software is toys.
          • skydhash 1y ago
            There are a lot of professional software out there. CAD, DAW, software that automated some services, and software to support all of those.
          • codr7 1y ago
            That isn't even close to true; we've based more or less our entire society on software, and it's getting worse every day.
      • gibagger 1y ago
        A low quality fabric makes the fashion police come and arrest you. Low quality software kills people.
        • 1y ago
• hnfsfdsd 1y ago
  Exactly, maybe "prompt engineering" is really a skill, but the reward for getting better at this is just pumping out more features at a low skill grade. What's excited about this ? Unless I want to spend all my time building minimum viable product.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Prompt engineering is just writing acceptance criteria; it's moving from someone who writes code to someone who writes higher level feature descriptions. Or user stories, if you will. Thing is though, many people don't know how to do that (user stories / acceptance criteria) properly, and it's been up to software developers to poke holes and fill in the blanks that the writer didn't think about.
• pdntspa 1y ago
  That is certainly how it played out for me. Give your employers an inch and they will take a mile.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  If there are 8 days per day worth of work to be done (which I doubt), why wouldn’t you want to have it done ASAP? You’re going to have to do it eventually, so why not just do it now? Doesn’t make sense. You act like they’re just making up new work for you to do when previously there wouldn’t have been any.
  • lvnfg 1y ago
    Yes, work will expand to fill all your available hours due to unaligned incentives between who does the work (the SWE in this example) and who decide the quantity, timeline, and cost of work. If the SWE can finish his work faster, 8x faster in this case, then backlogs will also be pushed to complete 8x faster by the project manager. If there are no backlogs, new features will be required at 8x faster / more by sales team / clients. If no new features are needed, pressures will be made until costs are 8x lower by finance. If there are no legal, moral, competitive, or physical constraints, the process should continue until either there’s only a single dev working on all his available time, or less time but for considerably less salary.
  • guappa 1y ago
    The reward for being faster is to do more work.
• ramesh31 1y ago
  >The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    What would this gain for labor even look like? Four hour workdays?
• never_inline 1y ago
  > The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. It's not really about excitement or enjoyment of work. It's the fear about the __8x output__ being considered as __8x productivity__. The increase in `output/productivity` factor has various negative implications. I would not say everything out loud. But the wise can read between the lines.
  • shiandow 1y ago
    I always feel most productive when I remove more code than I add.
    • utyop22 1y ago
      Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
• an0malous 1y ago
  You won’t enjoy any of the gains, the company will be worth 10x and you’ll get a 10% raise to match inflation
• cmiles74 1y ago
  Even if the developer is keeping the quality of the LLM generated code high (by constant close reading of the output, rejecting low quality work and steering with prompts) does this mean the project as a whole is improving? I have my doubts! I'm also skeptical that this developer has increased their velocity as much as they believe, IMHO this has long been a difficult thing to measure. Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.
• antonvs 1y ago
  > The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment I'm enjoying exactly what the author describes, so it's different strokes for different folks. I always found the "code monkey" aspect of software development utterly boring and tedious, and have spent a lot of my career automating that away with various kinds of code generators, DSLs, and so on. \ Using an LLM as a general-purpose automated code monkey is a near-ideal scenario for me, and I enjoy the work more. It's especially useful for languages like Go or Java where repetitive boilerplate is endemic. I also find it helps with procrastination, because I can just ask an LLM to start something for me and get over the initial hump. > whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise. This is completely up to the people using it.
• jodosha 1y ago
  > The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers This is what happens with big technological advancements. Technology that enables productivity won’t free people time, but only set higher expectations of getting more work done in a day.
• darkwater 1y ago
  > The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!
• latexr 1y ago
  > The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY > I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not. That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.
  • furyofantares 1y ago
    > That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along. The hypothetical that we're 8x as productive but the work isn't as fun isn't "society becoming shittier".
    • Steven420 1y ago
      How is everyone working shitty jobs not "society becoming shittier"? Seems pretty awful
      • furyofantares 1y ago
        "Society" is more than just software developers. We are very well paid for very cushy work. It's not good for anyone's work to get worse, but it's not a huge hit to society if a well-paid cushy job gets less cushy. And presumably people buy our work because it's valuable to them. Multiplying that by 8 would be a pretty big benefit to society. I don't want my job to get less fun, but I would press that button without hesitation. It would be an incredible trade for society at large.
        • codr7 1y ago
          If you think software development is cushy, I wonder what kind of software you're writing. Because there are different levels; getting something to work is not the same thing as writing maintainable, high quality software. I've seen plenty enough people try, really try, to get into software development; but they just can't do it.
• theshrike79 1y ago
  The trick is not telling anyone you spent an hour to do 7 hours of work. That's stupid and detrimental to your mental health. You do it in an hour, spend maybe 1-2 hours to make it even better and prettier and then relax. Do all that menial shit you've got lined up anyway.
  • creesch 1y ago
    > The trick is not telling anyone you spent an hour to do 7 hours of work. I wish that the hype crowd would do that. It would make a for a much more enjoyable and sane experience on platforms like this. It's extremely difficult to have actual conversations subjects when there are crowds of fans involved who don't want to hear anything negative. Yes, I also do realize there are people completely on the other side as well. But to honest, I can see why they are annoyed by the fan crowd.
    • carlmr 1y ago
      >I wish that the hype crowd would do that. Exactly, IME the hype crowd is really the worst at this. They will spend 8h doing 8 different 1h tries at getting the right context for the LLM and then claim they did it in 1h. They claim to be faster than they are. There's a lot of mechanical turking going about as soon as you ask a few probing questions.
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    Until your coworkers who've never heard of work-life balance start bragging about it, and volunteering to spend 8 hours to do 56 hours of work, or maybe spending 11 hours to impress the boss.
• willtemperley 1y ago
  Short-term, automated tech debt creation will yield gains. Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.
  • AstroBen 1y ago
    Can you give an example that's playing out today?
  • pureliquidhw 1y ago
    Given it's 2025 and companies saddled with tech debt continue to prioritize speed of delivery over quality, I doubt the craftperson will win. If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(s). After all, for business leader it's the output that matters, not the code. For 20+ years business leaders have been eager to shed the high overhead of developers via any means necessary while ignoring their most expensive employees' input. Anyone remember Dilbert? It was funny as a kid, and is now tragic in its timeless accuracy a generation later.
    • willtemperley 1y ago
      Yes there will be a class of developer like that, but it would only be considered winning if you're satisfied with climbing some artificial institutional hierarchy.
      • pureliquidhw 1y ago
        Indeed, the job of an SE is deviating further and further from code, much like how very few people write assembly anymore. An earlier iteration of your reply said "Is that really winning?" The answer is no. I don't think any class of SE end up a winner here.
      • yifanl 1y ago