13 ms·

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management

by simonw 10mo ago

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things extremely effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents (communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context.)

elliotbnvl 10mo ago
Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades.
- beaker52 10mo ago
  Only it’s a bit like me getting back into cooking because I described the dish I want to a trainee cook.
  - CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    The head chefs at most restaurants delegate the majority of details of dishes to their kitchen staff, then critique and refine.
  - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
    As long as you get the dish you want when before you couldn’t have it — who cares?
    - beaker52 10mo ago
      Sure, as long as you don’t expect me to digest it, live with it, and crap it out for you, I see no problem with it.
      - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
        My expectations don’t change whether or not I’m using AI, and neither do my standards. Whether or not you use my software is up to you.
      - peteforde 10mo ago
        So you're saying that if you go to any famous restaurant and the famous face of the restaurant isn't personally preparing your dinner with their hands and singular attention, you are disappointed. Got it.
  - maplethorpe 10mo ago
    Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it.
    - krapp 10mo ago
      > If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did "cook" it. The person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the "catalyst" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work. Otherwise you could say you "cooked a meal" every time you went to MacDonald's.
      - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
        Why is the head chef called the head chef, then? He doesn’t “cook”.
        beaker52 10mo ago
        The difference is that the head chef can cook very well and could do a better job of the dish than the trainee.
        9rx 10mo ago
        To differentiate him from the "cook", which is what we call those who carry out the actual act of cooking.
        elliotbnvl 10mo ago
        Well, don’t go around calling me a compiler!
        9rx 10mo ago
        If that's what you do, then the name is perfectly apt. Why shy away from what you are?
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    Flipping toggle switches went out of fashion many, many, many years ago. We've been describing to trainees (compilers) the dish we want for longer than most on HN have been alive.
    - beaker52 10mo ago
      Actually, we’ve been formally declaring the logic of programs to compilers, which is something very different.
      - 9rx 10mo ago
        The only difference is that newer languages have figured out how to remove a lot of the boilerplate.
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - beaker52 10mo ago
        (Replying to myself because hn) That’s not the only difference at all. A good use of an LLM might be to ask it what the difference between using an LLM and writing code for a compiler is.
        9rx 10mo ago
        Equally a good use for a legacy compiler that compiles a legacy language. Granted, you are going to have to write a lot more boilerplate to see it function (that being the difference, after all), but the outcome will be the same either way. It's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day.
        beaker52 10mo ago
        Sorry friend, if you can’t identify the important differences between a compiler and an LLM, either intentionally or unintentionally (I can’t tell), then I must question the value of whatever you have to say on the topic.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    Depends on how you're using the LLMs. It can also be like having someone else around to chop the onions, wash the pans and find the ingredients when you need them.
  - peteforde 10mo ago
    This approach seems to have worked out for both Warhol and Chihuly.
  - esafak 10mo ago
    Are you even cooking if you did not collect your own ingredients and forge your own tools??
- imiric 10mo ago
  They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine. So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work". The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.
  - bitwize 10mo ago
    It's called being a systems analyst or product manager. Upskill into these roles (while still accepting individual contributor pay) or get left behind.
    - imiric 10mo ago
      I'm sorry, "upskill"? The roles you mentioned don't require any more advanced skills than those required for software development—just a different set of skills. And an IC is not "left behind" if those roles don't interest them. What a ridiculous thing to say. A systems analyst or product manager is not a natural progression for someone who enjoys software development.
    - pianopatrick 10mo ago
      Do you see any reason why AI and software will not soon take over system analyst or product manager roles? If we can go from natural language prompt to working code, it seems like not too big of a step to set up a system that goes straight from user feedback to code changes.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    That IKEA analogy is pretty good, because plenty of people use IKEA furniture to solve the "I need a bookshelf" problem - and often enjoy the process - without feeling like they should call themselves a carpenter. I bet there are professional carpenters out there who occasionally assemble an IKEA bookshelf because they need something quick and don't want to spend hours building one themselves from scratch.
timenotwasted 10mo ago
You just described my experience exactly. Especially the personal side project time as a parent. Now after bed I can tinker and have fun again because I can move so much more quickly and see real progress even with only an hour or two to spend every few days.
- elliotbnvl 10mo ago
  Yes! I feel like so many people really fail to appreciate this side of things. Heck, Suno has gotten me to the point where I play so much more piano (the recording -> polished track loop is very rewarding) that not only did I publish an album to Spotify in my favorite genre, of music that I’m really happy with, I’ve also started to produce some polished acoustic recordings with NO AI involvement. That’s just because I’ve been spending so much more time at the piano, because of that reward loop.
  - dharmatech 10mo ago
    What should we search for to hear your album?
    - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
      Thanks for your interest! My artist name is He & The Machines (yes, it’s a bit on the nose). It’s on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and anywhere else you look probably. The album name is “songs to play at the end of the world”.
      - dharmatech 10mo ago
        Here's the link for others: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n6B8QB_SzSfmODvPZWt1NIu9Swaemzz1c&si=R8Fd8k4WDfFFW2-Q https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n6B8QB_SzSfm...
  - freedomben 10mo ago
    As someone who is very much in this boat, though with guitar and bass rather than piano, I have really been wanting to get into this. I'm even willing to spend some money on tokens or subscription, but I have no idea how to really get started with it. Are you willing to go into some more detail about what you do with Suno and how you use it?
kachapopopow 10mo ago
I was just getting pretty sick and tired of programming, instead now AI can write the code down while I do the fun things of figuring out how shit works and general device hacking + home projects
po84 10mo ago
This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them. I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...
- simonw 10mo ago
  I'm finding that too. I have old stale projects that I'm hesitant to try and fix because I know it will involve hours of frustrating work figuring out how to upgrade core dependencies. Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me. I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time.
- codebolt 10mo ago
  Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months. As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.
yomismoaqui 10mo ago
It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.
- barrkel 10mo ago
  Try tailwind. Very amenable to LLM generation since it's effectively a micro language, and being colocated with the document elements, it doesn't need a big context to zip together.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Hah, centering divs with flexbox is one of my uses for this too! I can never remember the syntax off the top of my head, but if I say "center it with flexbox" it spits out exactly the right code every time. If I do this a few more times it might even stick in my head.
- jfengel 10mo ago
  No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. They don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated. If there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal was to confuse everyone, at which they succeeded magnificently.
  - alwillis 10mo ago
    > I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability. Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout. > They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. CSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1]. > It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. If you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2]. Any editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc. > It's not meant to be generated. Says who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS. Lots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5]. [1]: https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/ https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/ [2]: https://stylelint.io https://stylelint.io [3]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice [4]: https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables [5]: https://every-layout.dev https://every-layout.dev
bgwalter 10mo ago
[flagged]
- 8697656846548 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- dang 10mo ago
  Could you please stop posting cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and it destroys the intended spirit of this site. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
  - bgwalter 10mo ago
    How can I express in a non cynical way that I think LLMs are theft? Even if courts decide in the future that they think it is not, it is still a protected opinion in the same manner that some people do not recognize the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
    - simonw 10mo ago
      You could save those opinions for discussions about the legality and ethics of training LLMs on unlicensed data, which crop up here pretty often.
101008 10mo ago
I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.
- agumonkey 10mo ago
  Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion
  - solumunus 10mo ago
    Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with.
    - agumonkey 10mo ago
      I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become.
      - beginnings 10mo ago
        anything nontrivial is still long term, nothing has changed
      - baq 10mo ago
        ‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods.
wnevets 10mo ago
> AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. That fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour.
- wcarss 10mo ago
  I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour. It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise. A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it. It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".
yason 10mo ago
I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make yourself stop.)
- satvikpendem 10mo ago
  > There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself. Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917
- freedomben 10mo ago
  It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally. Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems. The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.
mands 10mo ago
Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family. I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week. There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition.
- MattSayar 10mo ago
  This is exactly the case. Businesses in the past wouldn't automate some process because they couldn't afford to develop it. Now they can! Which frees up resources to tackle something else on the backlog. It's pretty exciting.
hackable_sand 10mo ago
What do LLM's have to do returning to coding? Just... ...write the code. Stop being lazy.
coliveira 10mo ago
The good thing about AI is that it knows all the hundreds of little libraries that keep popping up every few days like a never-ending stream. No longer I need to worry about learning about this stuff, I can just ask the AI what libraries to use for something and it will bring up these dependencies and provide sample code to use them. I don't like AI for coding real algorithms, but I love the fact that I don't need to worry about the myriad of libraries that you had to keep up with until recently.
- fullstackchris 10mo ago
  what "AI" are you speaking of? all the current leading LLMs i know of will _not_ do this (i.e web search for latest libraries) unless you explicitely ask
  - pixelsort 10mo ago
    I'll sometimes ask Claude Sonnet 4.5 for JS and TS library recommendations. Not for "latest" or "most popular". For this case, it seems to love recommending promising-looking code from repos released two months ago with like 63 stars.
izacus 10mo ago
Yes, people who were at best average engineers and those that atrophied at their skill through lack of practice seem to be the biggest AI fanboys in my social media. It's telling, isn't it?
jimbokun 10mo ago
Now we ALL be project managers! Hooray!
- duskdozer 10mo ago
  I think this is probably the disconnect between me and heavy LLM-users. I find the process of asking them to generate code to be overall much more frustrating than just writing code myself.
atomicnumber3 10mo ago
I don't like it. It lets "management" ignore their actual jobs - the ones that are nominally so valuable that they get paid more than most engineers, remember - and instead either splash around in the kiddie pool, or go jump into the adult pool and then almost drown and need an actual engineer to bail them out. (The kiddie pool is useless side project, the adult pool is the prod codebase, and drowning is either getting lost in the weeds of "it compiles and I'm done! Now how do I merge and how do I know if I'm not going to break prod?" or just straight up causing an incident and they're apologizing profusely for ruining the oncall's evening except that both of them know they're gonna do it again in 2 weeks). I really don't know how often I have to tell people, especially former engineers who SHOULD KNOW THIS (unless they were the kind of fail-upwards pretenders): the code is not the slow part! (Sorry, I'm not yelling at you, reader. I'm yelling at my CEO.)
phamilton 10mo ago
It all comes back to "Do more because of AI" rather than "Do less because of AI". Getting back into coding is doing more. Updating an old project to the latest libraries is doing more. It often feels ambiguous. Shipping a buggy, vibe-coded MVP might be doing less. But getting customer feedback on day one from a real tangible product can allow you to build a richer and deeper experience through fast iteration. Just make sure we're doing more, not less, and AI is a wonderful step forward.
neuropacabra 10mo ago
Amen to that!
willtemperley 10mo ago
> You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. Yes. That used to require difficult decision making: “Can I do this and how long will it take?” was a significant cognitive load and source of stress. This was especially true when it became clear something was going to take days not hours, having expended a lot of effort already. Even more frustrating was having to implement hacks due to time constraints when I knew a couple more hours would obviate that need. Now I know within a couple of minutes if something is feasible or not and decision fatigue is much lower.
makeitdouble 10mo ago
> lost their personal side project time Yes ! > moved into management roles Please stop. Except if "coding" is making PoCs. If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management. PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic.
- simonw 10mo ago
  A common policy I've seen from engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping. That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them. This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding: - prototypes and proof of concepts - internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these) - helping debug issues
theshrike79 10mo ago
A friend of mine dabbled in programming when they were younger, but ended up as a writer. A few months ago they finally got annoyed enough about the janky manual way they need to get the dialog and scripts to a specific format and just went with the basic ChatGPT copy+paste route. Within a weekend they had a full web UI that automated a good 50% of the manual work. With a few nudges from yours truly they graduated into agentic coding and now we're at around 90-95% automation of the manual stuff + massive improvements in the actual writing process (proper previews, the system can "guess" what the layout is suposed to be), it can export to multiple formats required by different vendors etc. All done by a copywriter with a programmer's mindset (the need to automate) and an LLM.

by simonw 10mo ago

elliotbnvl 10mo ago

Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades.

beaker52 10mo ago
Only it’s a bit like me getting back into cooking because I described the dish I want to a trainee cook.
- CuriouslyC 10mo ago
  The head chefs at most restaurants delegate the majority of details of dishes to their kitchen staff, then critique and refine.
- elliotbnvl 10mo ago
  As long as you get the dish you want when before you couldn’t have it — who cares?
  - beaker52 10mo ago
    Sure, as long as you don’t expect me to digest it, live with it, and crap it out for you, I see no problem with it.
    - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
      My expectations don’t change whether or not I’m using AI, and neither do my standards. Whether or not you use my software is up to you.
    - peteforde 10mo ago
      So you're saying that if you go to any famous restaurant and the famous face of the restaurant isn't personally preparing your dinner with their hands and singular attention, you are disappointed. Got it.
- maplethorpe 10mo ago
  Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it.
  - krapp 10mo ago
    > If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did "cook" it. The person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the "catalyst" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work. Otherwise you could say you "cooked a meal" every time you went to MacDonald's.
    - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
      Why is the head chef called the head chef, then? He doesn’t “cook”.
      - beaker52 10mo ago
        The difference is that the head chef can cook very well and could do a better job of the dish than the trainee.
      - 9rx 10mo ago
        To differentiate him from the "cook", which is what we call those who carry out the actual act of cooking.
        elliotbnvl 10mo ago
        Well, don’t go around calling me a compiler!
        9rx 10mo ago
        If that's what you do, then the name is perfectly apt. Why shy away from what you are?
- 9rx 10mo ago
  Flipping toggle switches went out of fashion many, many, many years ago. We've been describing to trainees (compilers) the dish we want for longer than most on HN have been alive.
  - beaker52 10mo ago
    Actually, we’ve been formally declaring the logic of programs to compilers, which is something very different.
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      The only difference is that newer languages have figured out how to remove a lot of the boilerplate.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    - beaker52 10mo ago
      (Replying to myself because hn) That’s not the only difference at all. A good use of an LLM might be to ask it what the difference between using an LLM and writing code for a compiler is.
      - 9rx 10mo ago
        Equally a good use for a legacy compiler that compiles a legacy language. Granted, you are going to have to write a lot more boilerplate to see it function (that being the difference, after all), but the outcome will be the same either way. It's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day.
        beaker52 10mo ago
        Sorry friend, if you can’t identify the important differences between a compiler and an LLM, either intentionally or unintentionally (I can’t tell), then I must question the value of whatever you have to say on the topic.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Depends on how you're using the LLMs. It can also be like having someone else around to chop the onions, wash the pans and find the ingredients when you need them.
- peteforde 10mo ago
  This approach seems to have worked out for both Warhol and Chihuly.
- esafak 10mo ago
  Are you even cooking if you did not collect your own ingredients and forge your own tools??
imiric 10mo ago
They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine. So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work". The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.
- bitwize 10mo ago
  It's called being a systems analyst or product manager. Upskill into these roles (while still accepting individual contributor pay) or get left behind.
  - imiric 10mo ago
    I'm sorry, "upskill"? The roles you mentioned don't require any more advanced skills than those required for software development—just a different set of skills. And an IC is not "left behind" if those roles don't interest them. What a ridiculous thing to say. A systems analyst or product manager is not a natural progression for someone who enjoys software development.
  - pianopatrick 10mo ago
    Do you see any reason why AI and software will not soon take over system analyst or product manager roles? If we can go from natural language prompt to working code, it seems like not too big of a step to set up a system that goes straight from user feedback to code changes.
- simonw 10mo ago
  That IKEA analogy is pretty good, because plenty of people use IKEA furniture to solve the "I need a bookshelf" problem - and often enjoy the process - without feeling like they should call themselves a carpenter. I bet there are professional carpenters out there who occasionally assemble an IKEA bookshelf because they need something quick and don't want to spend hours building one themselves from scratch.

timenotwasted 10mo ago

You just described my experience exactly. Especially the personal side project time as a parent. Now after bed I can tinker and have fun again because I can move so much more quickly and see real progress even with only an hour or two to spend every few days.

elliotbnvl 10mo ago
Yes! I feel like so many people really fail to appreciate this side of things. Heck, Suno has gotten me to the point where I play so much more piano (the recording -> polished track loop is very rewarding) that not only did I publish an album to Spotify in my favorite genre, of music that I’m really happy with, I’ve also started to produce some polished acoustic recordings with NO AI involvement. That’s just because I’ve been spending so much more time at the piano, because of that reward loop.
- dharmatech 10mo ago
  What should we search for to hear your album?
  - elliotbnvl 10mo ago
    Thanks for your interest! My artist name is He & The Machines (yes, it’s a bit on the nose). It’s on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and anywhere else you look probably. The album name is “songs to play at the end of the world”.
    - dharmatech 10mo ago
      Here's the link for others: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n6B8QB_SzSfmODvPZWt1NIu9Swaemzz1c&si=R8Fd8k4WDfFFW2-Q https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n6B8QB_SzSfm...
- freedomben 10mo ago
  As someone who is very much in this boat, though with guitar and bass rather than piano, I have really been wanting to get into this. I'm even willing to spend some money on tokens or subscription, but I have no idea how to really get started with it. Are you willing to go into some more detail about what you do with Suno and how you use it?

kachapopopow 10mo ago

I was just getting pretty sick and tired of programming, instead now AI can write the code down while I do the fun things of figuring out how shit works and general device hacking + home projects

po84 10mo ago

This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them. I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...

simonw 10mo ago
I'm finding that too. I have old stale projects that I'm hesitant to try and fix because I know it will involve hours of frustrating work figuring out how to upgrade core dependencies. Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me. I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time.
codebolt 10mo ago
Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months. As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.

yomismoaqui 10mo ago

It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.

barrkel 10mo ago
Try tailwind. Very amenable to LLM generation since it's effectively a micro language, and being colocated with the document elements, it doesn't need a big context to zip together.
simonw 10mo ago
Hah, centering divs with flexbox is one of my uses for this too! I can never remember the syntax off the top of my head, but if I say "center it with flexbox" it spits out exactly the right code every time. If I do this a few more times it might even stick in my head.
jfengel 10mo ago
No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. They don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated. If there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal was to confuse everyone, at which they succeeded magnificently.
- alwillis 10mo ago
  > I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability. Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout. > They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. CSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1]. > It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. If you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2]. Any editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc. > It's not meant to be generated. Says who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS. Lots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5]. [1]: https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/ https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/ [2]: https://stylelint.io https://stylelint.io [3]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice [4]: https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables [5]: https://every-layout.dev https://every-layout.dev

bgwalter 10mo ago

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8697656846548 10mo ago
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dang 10mo ago
Could you please stop posting cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and it destroys the intended spirit of this site. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  How can I express in a non cynical way that I think LLMs are theft? Even if courts decide in the future that they think it is not, it is still a protected opinion in the same manner that some people do not recognize the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    You could save those opinions for discussions about the legality and ethics of training LLMs on unlicensed data, which crop up here pretty often.

101008 10mo ago

I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.

agumonkey 10mo ago
Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion
- solumunus 10mo ago
  Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with.
  - agumonkey 10mo ago
    I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become.
    - beginnings 10mo ago
      anything nontrivial is still long term, nothing has changed
    - baq 10mo ago
      ‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods.

wnevets 10mo ago

> AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. That fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour.

wcarss 10mo ago
I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour. It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise. A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it. It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".

yason 10mo ago

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make yourself stop.)

satvikpendem 10mo ago
> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself. Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917
freedomben 10mo ago
It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally. Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems. The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.

mands 10mo ago

Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family. I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week. There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition.

MattSayar 10mo ago
This is exactly the case. Businesses in the past wouldn't automate some process because they couldn't afford to develop it. Now they can! Which frees up resources to tackle something else on the backlog. It's pretty exciting.

hackable_sand 10mo ago

What do LLM's have to do returning to coding? Just... ...write the code. Stop being lazy.

coliveira 10mo ago

The good thing about AI is that it knows all the hundreds of little libraries that keep popping up every few days like a never-ending stream. No longer I need to worry about learning about this stuff, I can just ask the AI what libraries to use for something and it will bring up these dependencies and provide sample code to use them. I don't like AI for coding real algorithms, but I love the fact that I don't need to worry about the myriad of libraries that you had to keep up with until recently.

fullstackchris 10mo ago
what "AI" are you speaking of? all the current leading LLMs i know of will _not_ do this (i.e web search for latest libraries) unless you explicitely ask
- pixelsort 10mo ago
  I'll sometimes ask Claude Sonnet 4.5 for JS and TS library recommendations. Not for "latest" or "most popular". For this case, it seems to love recommending promising-looking code from repos released two months ago with like 63 stars.

izacus 10mo ago

Yes, people who were at best average engineers and those that atrophied at their skill through lack of practice seem to be the biggest AI fanboys in my social media. It's telling, isn't it?

jimbokun 10mo ago

Now we ALL be project managers! Hooray!

duskdozer 10mo ago
I think this is probably the disconnect between me and heavy LLM-users. I find the process of asking them to generate code to be overall much more frustrating than just writing code myself.

atomicnumber3 10mo ago

I don't like it. It lets "management" ignore their actual jobs - the ones that are nominally so valuable that they get paid more than most engineers, remember - and instead either splash around in the kiddie pool, or go jump into the adult pool and then almost drown and need an actual engineer to bail them out. (The kiddie pool is useless side project, the adult pool is the prod codebase, and drowning is either getting lost in the weeds of "it compiles and I'm done! Now how do I merge and how do I know if I'm not going to break prod?" or just straight up causing an incident and they're apologizing profusely for ruining the oncall's evening except that both of them know they're gonna do it again in 2 weeks). I really don't know how often I have to tell people, especially former engineers who SHOULD KNOW THIS (unless they were the kind of fail-upwards pretenders): the code is not the slow part! (Sorry, I'm not yelling at you, reader. I'm yelling at my CEO.)

phamilton 10mo ago

It all comes back to "Do more because of AI" rather than "Do less because of AI". Getting back into coding is doing more. Updating an old project to the latest libraries is doing more. It often feels ambiguous. Shipping a buggy, vibe-coded MVP might be doing less. But getting customer feedback on day one from a real tangible product can allow you to build a richer and deeper experience through fast iteration. Just make sure we're doing more, not less, and AI is a wonderful step forward.

neuropacabra 10mo ago

Amen to that!

willtemperley 10mo ago

> You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. Yes. That used to require difficult decision making: “Can I do this and how long will it take?” was a significant cognitive load and source of stress. This was especially true when it became clear something was going to take days not hours, having expended a lot of effort already. Even more frustrating was having to implement hacks due to time constraints when I knew a couple more hours would obviate that need. Now I know within a couple of minutes if something is feasible or not and decision fatigue is much lower.

makeitdouble 10mo ago

> lost their personal side project time Yes ! > moved into management roles Please stop. Except if "coding" is making PoCs. If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management. PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic.

simonw 10mo ago
A common policy I've seen from engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping. That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them. This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding: - prototypes and proof of concepts - internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these) - helping debug issues

theshrike79 10mo ago

A friend of mine dabbled in programming when they were younger, but ended up as a writer. A few months ago they finally got annoyed enough about the janky manual way they need to get the dialog and scripts to a specific format and just went with the basic ChatGPT copy+paste route. Within a weekend they had a full web UI that automated a good 50% of the manual work. With a few nudges from yours truly they graduated into agentic coding and now we're at around 90-95% automation of the manual stuff + massive improvements in the actual writing process (proper previews, the system can "guess" what the layout is suposed to be), it can export to multiple formats required by different vendors etc. All done by a copywriter with a programmer's mindset (the need to automate) and an LLM.