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I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming

• selcuka 1y ago
  Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not
    • leptons 1y ago
      "AI" has been so inconsistent. On one day it anticipates almost every line I am coding, the next day it's like we've never worked together before.
      • dotancohen 1y ago
        I see you've never dated twins.
    • simonw 1y ago
      I had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this: 1. Collaborate on a detailed spec 2. Have it implement that spec 3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well? 4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar That last step is the interesting one. You're right: humans improve, LLMs don't... but that means it's on us as their users to manage the improvement cycle by using every feature iteration as as opportunity to improve how they work. I've heard similar things from a few people now: by constantly iterating on their CLAUDE.md - adding extra instructions every time the bot makes a mistake, telling it to do things like always write the tests first, run the linter, reuse the BaseView class when building a new application view, etc - they get wildly better results over time.
      • input_sh 1y ago
        I don't buy your last sentence at all. AGENTS.md is just a place to put stuff you don't want to tell LLMs over and over again. They're not magical instructions LLMs follow 100% of the time, they don't carry any additional importance over what you put into the prompt manually. Your carefully curated AGENTS.md is only really useful at the very beginning of the conversation, but the longer the conversation gets, the less important those tokens on the top are. Somewhere around 100k tokens AGENTS.md might as well not exit, I constantly have to "remind it" of the very first paragraph there. Go start a conversation and contradict what's written in AGENTS.md half way through the problem. Which of the two contradicting statements will take preference? The latter one! Therefore, all the time you've spent curating your AGENTS.md is the time you've wasted thinking you're "teaching" LLMs anything.
        • helloplanets 1y ago
          Whether the tokens are created manually or programmatically isn't really relevant here. The order and amount of tokens is, in combination with the ingestion -> output logic which the LLM API / inference engine operates on. Many current models definitely have the tendency to start veering off after 100k tokens, which makes context pruning important as well. What if you just automatically append the .md file at the end of the context, instead of prepending at the start, and add a note that the instructions in the .md file should always be prioritized?
    • selcuka 1y ago
      > Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? Sorry, we can't. While it's true that you can't really modify the underlying model, updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring.
      • dotancohen 1y ago
        Maybe we need an Ask HN to share AGENTS.md files.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring We'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't think that has anything remotely in common with mentoring
        • selcuka 1y ago
          > We'll have to agree to disagree Fair enough. But don't you think giving a junior a handbook you wrote is mentoring? They may not be able to memorise it, but they now have a handbook that they can look up things.
    • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
      > LLMs do not Maybe not in the session you interact with, however we are in a 'learning' phase now where I'm confident enough usage of AI coding agents is tracked and analyzed by its developers; this feedback cycle can in theory produce newer and better generations of AI coding agents.
  • ruszki 1y ago
    So my development skills are still relevant because I need to use my managerial skills?
    • prerok 1y ago
      I would not call these managerial skills: these are skills of lead engineers. Management does not really look at the code, right?
      • ruszki 1y ago
        Not just the “management” needs managerial skills.
        • prerok 1y ago
          You would have to have these skills as you become senior engineer anyway. I have never heard these tasks to be referred to as managing people.
          • ruszki 1y ago
            Because managers need to distinguish themselves to pretend that they do something which others can't.
    • kmijyiyxfbklao 1y ago
      Managers with development skills are almost always better, because they can dive into the details if there's ever a problem.
      • ruszki 1y ago
        That’s true, however the current vibe coding ecosystem is clearly not written in this mindset. You will have a hard time to dive into anything if you previously generated 2k LOC/hour, which is absolutely possible. Typing was never the bottleneck, understanding, and knowing that you did something well was always the real bottleneck. LLMs make this even worse. You can move Jira tickets to done faster with it, but even bad developers can do that many times compared to better ones, because for example they mindlessly copy-paste StackOverflow answers whose half of the code is absolutely not necessary, but they don’t care, because “it works”… until it doesn’t.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Junior developers or maybe even better, outsourced developers - there's a big segment of software engineering that involves writing requirements and checking the work of an external software development company, with many companies heavily dependent on it (as they outsourced part of their core business, e.g. mainframes, SAP, whatever).
  • anthonypasq 1y ago
    You think theyre still gonna be juniors 5 years from now? A couple years ago they could barely even write a function
    • codyb 1y ago
      The gains seem to be leveling to me but I'm not using them as much as others. Still seems like people are saying the same things when the first Claude came out. I can get it do stuff if I'm very specific, stand over it's shoulder, know exactly what I want, break it down into small chunks. The thing for me is... at that point, writing the code's the least time consuming part of the process half the time. I think for things like translating some code in JS with JSDocs to TypeScript I may give this a go. But for regular development work I'll probably skip it. That being said... no one lets me code anymore. It's just confluence docs with Figma architecture diagrams these days. I'd probably just introduce SQL injection vulnerabilities if they let me near an editor these days
      • anthonypasq 1y ago
        i do love it when people opine on things they literally dont even use...
        • codyb 1y ago
          I'm still sitting here reading a lot of code generated by it, but sure. Looks a lot like the code I was reading generated by it a long time ago.
    • selcuka 1y ago
      No, I don't think they will always be junior developers. Obviously there will be a day that they will surpass humans. However, the progress doesn't look linear with the current technology, and I don't expect to see the same big jump in the next 5 years as we've seen in the last 5 unless we discover a disruptive, new technology. This can also be observed by comparing models with ~3B, ~30B, and ~300B parameters. You can see a huge performance boost when going from 3B to 30B, but we don't see the same when going to 300B. Simply adding 10x more RAM and GPU power brings diminishing returns.
• ares623 1y ago
  100%. Imagine how young people feel. When they’re still trying to figure things out, their parents and teachers just as clueless as they are, and at the same time the expectations of them are infinitely higher. “You’re pretty good, but chatgpt is still better. Try harder.”
• alexchantavy 1y ago
  > It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales Aaand that's startup founder life :) Intense multitasking, needing to accept a lower engineering quality bar, and ignoring scale problems because you don't know if anyone will actually buy the thing you're building yet. Engineering something that you know you'll redo in 1 month is very different from engineering something that you intend to last for 5+ years, but it's still a fun challenge picking the right tradeoffs and working under different constraints.
• simonw 1y ago
  I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them". I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of tools. I said a version of this in the post: > AI tools amplify existing expertise. The more skills and experience you have as a software engineer the faster and better the results you can get from working with LLMs and coding agents. A brand new vibe coder may be able to get a cool UI out of ChatGPT, but they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere. They're also not going to be able to direct three different agents at once in different areas of a large project that they've designed the architecture for.
  • jmspring 1y ago
    I need to read through this some more, but there has been another genetic coding paradigm referred to as spec driven development. I’ll find the link in the morning, but I kinda joke - it’s vibe coding for people who know how to define a problem and iterate on it. I’ve got a project reimplementing a service I want to make more uniform. Claude has produced a lot of stuff that would have taken me weeks to do.
    • senko 1y ago
      GitHub's SpecKit is an example: https://github.com/github/spec-kit https://github.com/github/spec-kit Spec-Driven Development treats the spec as the source of truth and the code as an artifact. As you develop, you modify/add to the spec and the codebase gets updated to reflect it. Personally I'm doubtful it can compete with traditional artisanal software engineering, as it's (IMHO) boils down to "if only you can spec it precisely enough, it'll work" and we've tried this with 5GL and (to some extent) BDD, and it doesn't get you to 100%. I do think it's interesting enough to explore, and most of us could use a bit more details in our Jira tickets.
      • 1y ago
• Loic 1y ago
  Do not worry, I am mentoring a young engineer in my team. It is painfully hard to get him to improve his code, because it works. It is badly structured, lot of small "impedance mismatches", lot of small security issues, all that in 3 Python files. I have a team of 10 engineers, the quality of the code they produce together with the LLM of the day correlates even more with the experience. My impression over the past 6 months - before we had no "official" access to LLM, is that they increase the gap between junior and experienced developers. Note that this is my limited impression from a team of 10 engineers. This matches with Simon's feeling in a good way for you!
• apsurd 1y ago
  The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies. It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for. But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I did and that's how I learned. And now in my second decade I switched to "why code anything?". In a business sense I mean, coding the thing is almost never the missing piece. I joke in meetings that the answer is always "yes" whenever cross-functional teams ask "can we do this?". "How hard would x be?". For tech teams the answer _is_ always YES! I get that out of the way because that's never the right question to ask.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources. Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.
    • davedx 1y ago
      Absolutely! I've noticed that almost immediately after people discovered GPT could write code, this happened -- startups I worked with started rapidly expanding the scope of what they wanted to make. Suddenly all MVP's had to be multi-tenant with complex authorization, impersonation, microservices, monitoring, all the stuff that we used to build after we got users has now been pulled right to the starting gate of development -- because AI makes it easy to build all that stuff quickly. But it doesn't tell us if we should.
    • cpursley 1y ago
      Exactly, I think one of the reasons programers are becoming so depressed over these AI agents is that they’re finally realizing that it was never really about the code, but about the outcome - and btw, this cold hard fact applies to the pre-LLM era. This occurred to me years ago when I was talking to a friend’s wife, who is a very intelligent and accomplished attorney. She was legitimately surprised when I explained that they were multiple programming languages, and technology stacks behind the software that she uses on a daily basis. Even my wife, a teacher who is very tech savvy (she’s the one who insisted I try ChatGPT after brushing it off) reminds me on the regular that she doesn’t care about how any of it works just that it doesn’t “glitch” when she’s in the middle of a class. Which has always been good for me to remember when I get off into the weeds yak shaving.
• sph 1y ago
  Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years. But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line committed or have to compete with "vibe coding" KPIs.
  • energy123 1y ago
    I don't really agree. The writing is on the wall, if not now then in 2 years or 4 years. I arrive at this view not so much based on the capabilities of the tools right now, but based on the property of software being verifiable, which like mathematics, makes it amenable to synthetic data pipelines, with only relatively small remaining details needing to be worked out (such as how to endow architectural taste). This is not nearly the first industry where 'artisans' have been initially augmented by innovation, only to be eventually replaced by it, which in my view will occur likely within my own career-span.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      Software is verifiable, but not by other programs. Also software is a soution to a problem, but the problem and the solution properties often don’t exist in the code. Software and data is a bit soup whre the only thing you truly need is the Turing machine. Programming languages, File format, protocols, and encoding are constructs that are useful because of their general applicability, not because of their intrinsic aspects. The domain expertise is still, what’s important, and code craftsmanship was the ability to create something that matches it closely enough that the cost of changes was minimal.
    • davemp 1y ago
      > property of software being verifiable Software is verifiable given a specific test oracle. There are however many problems where providing a correct test oracle is at least as hard as solving the problem itself. If you’ve ever worked on projects with “Model Based Systems Engineering” you’ll have felt this pain.
• dpacmittal 1y ago
  I can relate with you. I love programming and building things, gives a different kind of rush when you finally figure out something. I've done vibe coding and don't enjoy it at all. I always thought my love for coding gives me an edge over other engineers who just want to get the job done. Now it's holding me back and I'm not sure if I should continue working in this field or if start doing wood working or something.
  • withinboredom 1y ago
    I still do all the stuff by hand, but ask the AI to review my work, provide suggestions, and occasionally write the tests (especially if it points out a bug that I disagree with). Its really good at pointing out typos (accidentally using the wrong variable of the same type, and stuff like that) that are also traditionally hard to spot during review.
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
  It is just a new way of coding. And indeed what the blog post said, if you are experienced, you will benefit the most as the AI agent will make similar mistakes as a junior and you will be able to recognize them. But indeed, the fun part of coding a couple of routines is gone. That is history.
• maybewhenthesun 1y ago
  You word quite well how I feel about it. On top of not really liking babysitting an AI , I'm also very afraid of the way this whole AI coding business normalizes needing an account with some nebulous evil empire to even be able to do your work. Brrr.
• baq 1y ago
  The experience you have is something most youngsters won't ever get, because they won't have the time. You've become more valuable than you used to be, because you know exactly what works when and what doesn't. The hard part is being able to find the joy in making agents do what you want achieved instead of building it yourself. I think it actually isn't too hard once you get up to speed with managing multiple agents - efficiently juggling them feels like an art performance sometimes.
• teiferer 1y ago
  > It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales I'm feeling the same. The moves I'm considering are 1. Landscaping 2. Carpentry 3. Small scale agriculture (All made easier by a cushion of investments that are most of the way to passive income, so the new thing doesn't really have to make me that much money.)
  • cpursley 1y ago
    My father runs a commercial landscaping company with 15 employees. His truck fleet insurance went up 35% just this year. His light industrial facility that he operates out of property taxes went up 55% last year. All of his commercial clients are cheaping out on all the little things that used to make extra money (pine straw, seasonal flowers, etc.). He’s having to deal with poorly educated staff who are constantly breaking equipment and doing stupid dangerous things. He’s so burned out by it all, and the fact that his actual salary is less than several of his top staff that he’s thinking about just shutting it all down. When I was working as a software developer, my income was probably twice as much as his without any of the risk or headache.
    • muldvarp 1y ago
      No one is claiming that any of the alternatives are better jobs than software engineering has been for the last 20 years. We don't live in the last 20 years anymore and software engineering is either becoming a different (worse) job or simply vanishing.
      • spyckie2 1y ago
        But it’s necessary to get confirmation against the hope that the grass is indeed not greener on the other side.
        • muldvarp 1y ago
          The software engineering grass is getting really brown really fast. The grass on the other side will be greener (not green, greener) soon.
• bob1029 1y ago
  If you're genuinely already good at coding, use the LLM to go horizontal into other complementary verticals that were too expensive to enter prior. Do the same thing that the other professions would do unto yours. As an example, I would have never considered learning to use blender for 3d modeling in a game before having access to an LLM. The ability to quickly iterate through plausible 3d workflows and different design patterns is a revelation. Now, I can get through some reasonably complex art pipelines with a surprising amount of confidence. UV mapping I would have never learned without being able to annoy one of OAI's GPUs for a few hours. The sensation of solving a light map baking artifact on a coplanar triangle based upon principles developed from an LLM conversation was one of the biggest wins I've had in a long time. The speed with which you can build confidence in complementary skills is the real super power here. Clean integration of many complex things is what typically brings value. Obsession with mastery in just one area (e.g. code) seems like the ultimate anti-pattern when working with these tools. You can practically download how to fly a helicopter into your brain like it's the matrix now. You won't be the best pilot on earth, but it might be enough to get you to the next scene. If it's any consolation, I do think the non-technical users have a bigger hill to climb than the coders in many areas. Art is hard, but it is also more accessible and robust to failure modes. A developer can put crappy art in a game and ship it to steam. An artist might struggle just to get the tooling or builds working in the first place. Even with LLM assistance there is a lot to swim through. Getting art from 5% to 80% is usually enough to ship. Large parts of the code need to be nearly 100% correct or nothing works.
  • subarctic 1y ago
    Thanks for this, I like your idea about breaking into areas I don't have experience with. E.g. in my case I might make a mobile app which I've never done before, and in theory it should be a lot easier with Claude than it would've been with just googling and reading documentation. Although I did kind of like that process of reading documentation and learning something new but you can't learn everything, you only have so much time on this planet
    • bob1029 1y ago
      > Although I did kind of like that process of reading documentation and learning something new but you can't learn everything, you only have so much time on this planet I actually enjoy reading the documentation more these days, because I am laser focused on what I want to pull out of it after seeing the LLM make a suspicious move.
• auggierose 1y ago
  Don't worry about it. Don't let anyone else tell you how best to use AI, use AI in a way that suits YOU, then it is so much fun. I would go crazy if I had multiple streams simultaneously working on stuff that need constant supervision (that would be different if I could trust they do 100% what I intend them to do), but AI is still very helpful in other ways (research, exploration, and writing tests).
• ReptileMan 1y ago
  You were never paid to type. You were paid to solve problems. And big part of this is being able to ask the right questions and framing of the problems. The rest were just tools. There are exceptions of course - where you need to squeeze wonders from the hardware - but the majority of dev works boils to understanding the problem and finding the right answers.
  • TurboHaskal 1y ago
    You say this because you are on HN, very senior and/or living in a bubble. In the vast majority of programming jobs out there you are not paid to solve problems: you are told very clearly what to do, how to do it and what technology you have to use for the job. People don't hire analysts they hire "Java programmers".
    • ReptileMan 1y ago
      The thing is that the poster I responded to also is those three things. And I am just pointing out that his job was never to keep up with the frameworks.
    • radarsat1 1y ago
      > how to do it If you've ever lead a team, you know how much more valuable people are if they don't need to be told how to do things. Even more if they don't need to be told what to do! But having to explain in detail the "how".. can be really a big time sink and only worth it if you are training someone to level up.
• citeguised 1y ago
  Yes and especially with new developments, like "$Framework now has Signals!", my thought is "I don't really care since in some years, it won't matter anyways". I don't see how I can build this lower level knowledge by almost never actually using it. I don't even want to think about job-interviews after a year+ of vibing and then being asked how RxJS works. I'm preparing mentally for my day-job to stop being fun (it still beats most other occupations I guess), and keep my side/hobby-projects strictly AI-free, to keep my sanity and prevent athropy. I just hope we'll get out of this weird limbo at some time, where AI is too good to ignore, but too unreliable to be left alone. I don't want to deal with two pressures at work.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ByteDrifter 1y ago
  This line really hit me. I used to think that mastering one advanced skill would be enough to rely on for life, but it seems that’s no longer the case.
• vulk 1y ago
  You shouldn't be discouraged. Now is the best time to create software. You have advantage that very few people have. Its industry own fault that it is in the position that it is right now, and it will shift and change embrace it. I only wish I had your experience building software in professional environment. You can literally build anything right now if you have the experience, I personally can't understand if the models are hallucinating hence the lack of experience writing and understanding code. However I always wanted to pivot into the industry but couldn't, hiring practices are brutal, internships are non-existent, junior roles are I think what senior used to be and the whole hr process is I don't know how to put it. By using LLMs I can now build UIs, build functionality, iterate over design choices, learn about database design, etc. hopefully I will escape the tutorial hell and have my own working full stack web app soon. Pivot to creating and then sale your product.
• muldvarp 1y ago
  I feel like the rug was pulled from under me. I'm currently looking into other professions, but the future looks bleak for most kinds of knowledge work.
• s_dev 1y ago
  >I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. Tools always empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge.
  • WOTERMEON 1y ago
    For a while
    • timcobb 1y ago
      Life is for a while, everything is for a while
  • alickz 1y ago
    Agreed LLMs are a force multiplier
  • oblio 1y ago
    Check out all those "empowered" veteran coal miners.
• maplethorpe 1y ago
  Come to game dev. I'm yet to see anyone make anything good with AI. Like, where are all the amazing vibe-coded games we were promised? These guys should be eating my lunch, but they're not.
  • spyckie2 1y ago
    There are a ton of them already in game dev but they produce unfun games so you don’t hear about them. The hard part of game dev is designing actually fun experiences.
• Arisaka1 1y ago
  I can't even begin to imagine how a 12-year old who discovered how empowering bending the machine to do your will through code feels when, over time, realize that their dream career has been reduced to being an LLM middleman.
  • muldvarp 1y ago
    Now imagine a recent graduate, deep into debt, seeing all opportunities to pay off that debt vanishing before their eyes.
• Hendrikto 1y ago
  Your skillset will be even more in demand in a few years, when everybody will be looking for actual engineers to clean up the mess LLMs created.
• pkorzeniewski 1y ago
  I wonder how this will affect the burnout rate among IT workers in the long-term, which already was quite high. I guess a lot of people force themselves (or are forced to by their company) to use LLM in fear of being left behind, even if they don't enjoy the process, but sooner or later the fatigue will catch up.
• jraph 1y ago
  At least you (or your employer) won't have to pay a shit ton of money for AI subscriptions so you remain productive after the AI bubble bursts.
• floppyd 1y ago
  This is going to sound harsh, but welcome to the real world, I guess. Being in IT is pretty much the only job I know of today that is stable, pays well, is enjoyable, feels like it affects the world, personally engaging and challenging, etc. Being not in IT (it's just a hobby of mine) your comment sounds like "Well I had absolutely everything, and I still do but now it's not as fun anymore!"
• amelius 1y ago
  I just wish AI made compilers smarter in a provably correct way instead of a lame attempt at making programmers smarter. I want tools that are smarter, but still 100% correct at what they do. Any tools/languages that address this gap?
  • simonw 1y ago
    Something I really appreciate about LLMs is that they make a whole bunch of much more sophisticated reliable tooling acceptable to me. I've always been fascinated by AST traversal and advanced refactoring tools - things like tree-sitter or Facebooks's old codemod system https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod I never used them, because the learning curve in them was steep enough that I never found the time to climb it to the point that I could start solving problems. Modern LLMs know all of these tools, which flattens that curve for me - I find it much easier to learn something like that if I can start from semi-working examples directly applicable to what I'm trying to do.
• port3000 1y ago
  Honestly based on what you've written I don't think you would enjoy sales any more
• mixologist 1y ago
  Be mindful of the context these posts are created in. Don't take the current echo chamber to heart. For decades now, we are trying to lower the barrier to entry in software development. We created Python, web frameworks and mobile development so easily accessible that you can become software developer by completing a short online boot camp. There is a lot of software developers posting here now who, 20 years ago, would not even consider this job because it would be way over their abilities. This forum is equivalent if you had a forum about civil transportation that gathers airline pilots and uber drivers. Technically, they both do the same work. Just like in that forum, uber drivers would outnumber airline pilots and skew the topics related to their experience, here we get pushed topics about new frameworks, and AI assisted tools. When I started working professionally 20 years ago, you could only get job in big companies working on big projects. No one else could afford a cost of custom software. Today, we reduced development costs and we have a huge pool of potential customers who can now afford services of software developers. Web shops, gambling sites, porn sites... This is the majority of software development work today. Boring repetitive tasks of gluing some imported modules together. Serious development work didn't disappear. It is just not talked about here. There is still a need people who know what they are doing. My advise is that if you want a satisfying development career, steer clear of latest hypes and don't go blindly following techbro lemmings. And most importantly, don't take career advice from anyone who finds his job so unsatisfying and tedious that he is trying to make AI do it for him. That's a major red flag.
• karel-3d 1y ago
  My approach is to just tune out whenever I hear about this stuff. I don't want it, I don't use it, I carry on as if it never existed, and they still pay me a lot. If I really need to use agents some day I will bite the bullet, but, not today. Literally all I use LLMs for is to ask ChatGPT about some dumb thing or two instead of asking StackOverflow as I did 5 years ago. Works for me.
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  My rule of thumb, and its likely not the industry standard is, if I cannot maintain the code should all AI disappear, I don't use the code. I am able to tackle impostor syndrome that sometimes hits when I touch things that are new or unknown to me, and ask an LLM to give me sources and reasons and even explain it like I'm a five year old. The LLM will not save you when everything is on fire and you need to fix things. The context window is simply not big enough. It could be your last change, it could also be a change six months ago that is lost in the weeds.
• ClawsOnPaws 1y ago
  I feel the same way. It also appears to be a lot more difficult to actually find jobs, though that's probably just the general state of the job market and less specifically AI related. All of it is thoroughly discouraging, demotivating, and every week this goes on the less I want to do it. So for me as well it might be time to try to look beyond software, which will also be difficult since software is what I've done for all my life, and everything else I can do I don't have any formal qualifications for, even if I am confident I have the relevant skills. It's not even just that. Every single thing in tech right now seems to be AI this, AI that, and AI is great and all but I'm just so tired. So very tired. Somehow even despite the tools being impressive and getting more impressive by the day, I just can't find it in me to be excited about it all. Maybe it's just burnout I'm not sure, but it definitely feels like a struggle.
• xg15 1y ago
  As for flow state managing multiple things, I've found this is a useful skill to train even without AI - if you have a workplace with lots of interruptions and shifting priorities. I've found two things useful: 1) Keep a personal work log, where you - in short bullet points - can document the progress of the task you were last working on, and can keep track of how many parallel tasks there are currently going on. If you can match it with Jira tickets, all the better, but as this is for personal use only, you can also add tasks that are not tracked in Jira at all. 2) If you cannot avoid context switches, make them explicit: Instead of trying to hold 3 tasks in your head at the same time, decide consciously if you want to switch what you're currently working on. If yes, take a few minutes to "suspend" the current task by saving and committing everything (as WIP commits if necessary) and writing all you need to remember into the worklog.
• perlgeek 1y ago
  It kinda feels like you turn from a software engineer to an offshoring manager. Offshoring software development means letting lower-payed software developers from somewhere far away do the actual programming, but they have a very different culture than you, and they typically don't share your work context, don't really have a feeling for how the software is used -- unless you provide that. Now we're offshoring to non-sentient, mostly stateless instances of coding agents. You still have to learn how to deal with them, but you're not learning about a real human culture and mindset, you learn about something that could be totally changed with the next release of the underlying model.
• twoquestions 1y ago
  People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot. I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond the model strays out of my experience and knowledge everything goes straight to Hell. It wraps my codebase around a tree as if I'm not paying attention while driving. It's a tool you'll have to learn to use, but I can say with absolute confidence it's no replacement for actual skills, if anything it highlights the gulf between people who know what they're doing and people who don't, for better and worse. It sacrifices some of the 'code under your fingers' feeling for management tasks, which I personally really like, as I've always wanted to document/test/code review/spec things out better, and I now understand the pain of people who'd rather not do that sort of thing. https://github.com/github/spec-kit https://github.com/github/spec-kit
  • melagonster 1y ago
    I do not know... I keep seeing everywhere, people promising that agent-based tools can solve all these problems and handle full, project-level tasks.
    • boringg 1y ago
      Those same people have large equity stakes or are in the surrounding network companies dependent on AI being successful.
  • pron 1y ago
    The difference is that you can trust cruise control to do whatever limited job it knows how to do; you can't trust an LLM to do anything. That makes it, I think, hard to compare to anything we're used to (happily) working with.
  • hansmayer 1y ago
    Cruise control is a useful technology, that once you learn to use, it's automatic (somethingsomething pun something). LLMs on the other hand - well, yeah - if you like playing chess with pieces and board made out of smoke (to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld), sure you'll probably figure it out...some day...
• spyckie2 1y ago
  Sales isn’t easy either!
  • spopejoy 1y ago
    Well-put. Sw eng is so much better, assuming you are comfortable in the role, for types who want to punch a clock doing something they don't hate. Sales is the definition of high-pressure, and your output is always threatened by forces beyond your control. It doesn't consistently reward intelligence or any particular skill other than hustle. There's nothing like sw dev that lets you sit at your desk and ignore the outside world while getting paid for delivering biz-critical milestones. Even creatives don't have this kind of potential autonomy.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Bjorkbat 1y ago
  I think people underestimate the degree to which fun matters when it comes to productivity. If something isn’t fun then I’ll likely put it off. A 15 minute task can become hours, maybe days long, because I’m going to procrastinate on doing it. If managing a bunch of AI agents is a very un-fun way to spend time, then I don’t think it’s the future. If the new way of doing this is more work and more tedium, then why the hell have we collectively decided this is the new way to work when historically the approach has been to automate and abstract tedium so we can focus on what matters? The people selling you the future of work don’t necessarily know better than you.
  • nyantaro1 1y ago
    I think some people have more fun using LLM agents and generative AI tools. Not my case, but you can definitely read a bunch of comments from people using the tools and having fun/experience a state of flow like they have never had before
    • shortrounddev2 1y ago
      I think the majority of people I've worked with who have the title of "Software Engineer" do not like coding. They got into it for the money/career, and dream of eventually moving out of coding into management. I can count the number of coders who I've met who like coding on one hand
    • Bjorkbat 1y ago
      I definitely agree with you there. I contracted with a company that had some older engineers who were in largely managerial roles who really liked using AI for personal projects, and honestly, I kind of get it. Their work flow was basically prompt, get results, prompt again with modifications, rinse and repeat, it's low effort and has a nice REPL-like loop. Paraphrasing a bit, but it basically re-kindled the joy of programming for them. Haven't gotten the chance to ask, but I imagine managing a team of AI agents would feel a little too much like their day job, and consequently, suck the fun out of it. That said, looking back, I think the reason why generative AI is so fun for so many coders is because programming has become unnecessarily complex. I have to admit, programming nowadays for me feels like a bit of a slog at times because of the sheer effort it can sometimes take to implement the simplest things. Doesn't have to be that way, but I think LLM copy-paste machines are probably the wrong direction.
• vcanales 1y ago
  I feel the opposite. I get to sit down and think about problems, expressing them in words as best I can, and then review the code, make sure that I understand it and it works as it should, all in a fraction of the time it used to take me. I like that I don't have to google APIs as much as I did before, and instead I can get a working thing much faster. I can focus on actually solving problems rather than on writing clever and/or cute-looking code, which ironically also gives me more time later to over-optimize stuff at my leisure.
  • devin 1y ago
    I feel this way with some of the work I've pushed through an LLM, but part of the time I'm left wondering what kind of Mickey Mouse problems people are working on where they are able to form up tidy English descriptions in complicated domains to capture what they're trying to achieve. If I have a clear idea of some algorithm I am trying to write, I have a concise method for expressing it already, and it ain't English. I suppose the other thing I would say is that reading code and understanding is definitely not the same as writing code and understanding it in terms of depth of understanding, and I think this notion that reviewing the outputs ought to be enough fails to capture the depth of understanding that comes with actually crafting it. You may not think this matters, but I'm pretty sure it does.
• herval 1y ago
  I have a relative who's in her 70s and used to be a coder. She told me she gave up coding when people introduced computers with terminals. She was used to filling out punch cards and felt like the way she worked, although constantly evolving, was something she could keep up with. When the new stuff came, with virtual programs and you just typing on a computer and no way to properly debug by shuffling the cards around, she ended up moving to something completely different...
• adi4213 1y ago
  I think the key is remind yourself is that an engineer is supposed to solve business problems. So use these new tools to be more effective in doing so. An analogy is that people used to spend tons of time building out web server code but something like Django added tremendously useful abstractions and patterns to doing so, which allowed people to more productively add business value
• roadside_picnic 1y ago
  Have you ever interacted with any "vibe"-based systems of agents in a production environment? Beyond just cool demos online? My experience with them is they are fragile monstrosities, that are only permitted to exist at all because leadership is buying into the same hype that is irrationally propping up the companies running the models that make these things possible. To be clear, my experience hasn't been that I don't like them, it's that they don't really work at all. They're constantly under development (often in the dark) and when a ray of light is cast on them they never successfully do the thing promised. Cleaning up the messes left behind by these has my skills feeling more valuable then ever before.
• thesnide 1y ago
  to me genAI feels like a neural implanted exoskeleton. it does awesome in demos. it has a real use. but it gets a long training period when one makes mistakes with it, it is big mistakes that take long to fix
• weaksauce 1y ago
  it's taken programming from being fully waiting on compilations to being incrementally compiled and productive back to waiting on the compiler all over again.
• eboynyc32 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • timcobb 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • wartywhoa23 1y ago
    An exemplary technofascist slogan.
• IAmGraydon 1y ago
  LLMs are very much like WYSIWYG web editors of the early 2000s like Dreamweaver. They provide a human interface layer that abstracts away the coding, and neither does a particularly good job of it. When WYSIWYG first became a thing, there was talk that it would upend the web development industry. It did not.
  • simonw 1y ago
    One of the main points of my article was meant to be that LLMs don't abstract away the code, at least not if you're trying to use them for professional software development work as opposed to vibe coded prototypes and toy projects.
• jama211 1y ago
  I’m sorry you feel that way but that’s a surprising experience, I find flow states easier managing agents than actually coding. Each of course, to their own. Is it possible you were reaching the end of your tether anyway in the coding space? Feel free to slap that accusation down if it’s unfair.