23 ms·

We mourn our craft

• BojanTomic 8mo ago
  The king is dead; long live the king.
• arrowsmith 8mo ago
  Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun. And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back. I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!
  • foobarian 8mo ago
    I had that same epiphany when I discovered AI is great at writing complicated shell command lines for me. I had a bit of an identity crisis right there because I thought I was an aspiring Unixhead neckbeard but in truth I hated the process. Especially the scavenger hunt of finding stuff in man pages.
  • wesammikhail 8mo ago
    Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you. I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
    • nojito 8mo ago
      >You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward. So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about. Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth time?
      • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
        (a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working on cars, Legos, and so on. (b) it allows you to have some time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the next "hard" section.
    • dragonelite 8mo ago
      Same here i'm a decade plus in this field, writing code was by far the number 1 and the discussion surrounding system design was a far second. Take away the coding i don't think i will make it to retirement being a code/llm PR auditor for work. So i'am already planning on exiting the field in the next decade.
    • arrowsmith 8mo ago
      I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever. To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been all-in on AI for close to a year now, and I have absolutely zero regrets. I can't believe I used to _type code out by hand_. What a primitive world I grew up in.
      • Anamon 8mo ago
        I went back to typing myself after a short time, even for the stuff I do rely on LLMs on. I noticed that crucial steps of thinking happen as I type out the code. Letting an agent code, or copying from a chat, versus typing it off manually makes a huge qualitative difference for me. Typing manually is an extreme time saver because of all the issue it lets me catch early on. At least for me and a lot of others, the mental process is very different between the two. I guess there's a similar dynamic with, e.g., writing a letter to someone vs. dictating it. You prepare differently, think differently. A different text comes out. Like the author (I forgot which one) who said they once copied an entire classic novel with their typewriter, in order to "see what it feels like to write a great novel." When I first heard it, I thought it was meant as a joke, but there's a lot more truth and sense in that than it might sound like at first.
  • popopopopoopop 8mo ago
    [dead]
• mlinhares 8mo ago
  1. it isn't that bad 2. the tools still need a lot of direction, i still fight claude with opus to do basic things and the best experiences are when i provide very specific prompts 3. being idealistic on a capitalist system where you have to pay your bills every month is something i could do when my parents paid my bills These apocalyptic posts about how everything is shit really don't match my reality at all. I use these tools every day to be more productive and improve my code but they are nowhere close to doing my actual job, that is figuring out WHAT to do. How to do it is mostly irrelevant, as once i get to that point i already know what needs to be done and it doesn't matter if it is me or Opus producing the code.
• AllegedAlec 8mo ago
  While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
  • zamalek 8mo ago
    This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
    • ALoverOfLats 8mo ago
      Huge tangent but curiosity is killing me: By any chance is your username based on the Egyptian football club Zamalek?
    • jhickok 8mo ago
      I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will probably always be a heavily diminished demand for handcrafted code.
    • andai 8mo ago
      I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable! Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.) https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output Then I turned them into weird proteins https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output (As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
• sprice 8mo ago
  > I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production. This may be the perspective of some programmers. It doesn't seem to be shared by the majority of software engineers I know and read and listen to.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Do you mean the perspective that he is a "glorified TSA agent" or that he doesn't like it? Because in this thread it seems that some people agree but they just like it :)
    • sprice 8mo ago
      I disagree the opportunities created for software engineers are reduced to those of a "glorified TSA agent". We now have more opportunity than ever to create more of the things we have wanted to. We are able to spend more time leaning into our abilities of judgement, creativity, specific knowledge, and taste. Countless programming frustrations are gone. I, and all those I talk to are having more fun than they have ever had. I'm still not sure what analogy fits for me. It's closer to product manager/maestro/artist/architect/designer that helps a number of amazing systems create great code.
• catlover76 8mo ago
  dude needs to chill also: > We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. no we won't lol wtf but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time
  • popopopopoopop 8mo ago
    [dead]
• grahar64 8mo ago
  "Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
  • bopbopbop7 8mo ago
    Just a couple more trillion dollars, we are so close!
  • Banditoz 8mo ago
    This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
    • wlindley 8mo ago
      "Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
      • XenophileJKO 8mo ago
        And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
        • SquibblesRedux 8mo ago
          Just like in "I, Robot?"
        • Teknoman117 8mo ago
          Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.
• iambateman 8mo ago
  I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software. Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful. It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.
  • bnchrch 8mo ago
    Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.
    • croes 8mo ago
      Wait 5 years and your skills are down
      • Ronsenshi 8mo ago
        I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
        • SoftTalker 8mo ago
          Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years. In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
• sosomoxie 8mo ago
  I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.
  • massysett 8mo ago
    We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
    • terminalbraid 8mo ago
      > Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
      • 0x696C6961 8mo ago
        Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.
        • terminalbraid 8mo ago
          Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
          • shepherdjerred 8mo ago
            Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
• lp4v4n 8mo ago
  People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming. If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language. But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all. So here we're seeing yet another text about how the world of software was solved by AI and being a developer is an artifact of the past.
  • 12_throw_away 8mo ago
    > we have formal languages for a reason Right? At least on HN, there's a critical mass of people loudly ignoring this these days, but no one has explained to me how replacing formal language with an english-language-specialized chatbot - or even multiple independent chatbots (aka "an agent") - is good tradeoff to make.
    • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
      It's "good" from the standpoint of business achieving their objectives more quickly. That may not be what we think of as objectively good in some higher sense, but it's what matters most in terms of what actually happens in the world.
      • stoneforger 8mo ago
        Should it be what matters most? Idiots leading idiots in a circle.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    You're right, of course, but you should consider that all formal language starts as an informal language idea in the mind of someone. Why shouldn't that "mind" be an LLM vs. a human?
    • flowerbreeze 8mo ago
      I think mostly because an LLM is not a "mind". I'm sure there'll be an algorithm that could be considered a "mind" in the future, but present day an LLM is not it. Not yet.
• oytis 8mo ago
  Write a blog post promoting inevitability of AI in software development while acknowledging feelings of experienced software engineers.
• slibhb 8mo ago
  I get where this is coming from. But at the same, AI/LLMs are such an exciting development. As in "maybe I was wrong and the singularity wasn't bullshit". If nothing else, it's an interesting transition to live through.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I agree, in the sense that any major change is "interesting". Doesn't mean they are all good though, many major changes have been bad historically. The overall net effect has been generally good, but you never know with any individual change.
• cfloyd 8mo ago
  I fall in the demographic discussed in the article but I’ve approached this with as much pragmatism as I can muster. I view this as a tool to help improve me as a developer. Sure there will be those of us who do not stay ahead (is that even possible?) of the curve and get swallowed up but technology has had this affect on many careers in the past. They just change into something different and sometimes better. It’s about being willing to change with it.
• zkmon 8mo ago
  This makes me think about the craftsmen whose careers vanished or transformed through the ages due to industries, machines etc. They did not have online voices to write 1000's of blogs everyday. Nor did they have people who can read their woes online.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Maybe not 1000s and not online, but we do have journals, articles, essays, and so on written by such people throughout history. And they had similar sentiments.
• ai_critic 8mo ago
  > We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. Oh come on. 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.
  • paulhebert 8mo ago
    For what it’s worth I’ve followed the author for a long time and that does not describe the type of work he has done
  • Applejinx 8mo ago
    This. People are way too easily impressed. I don't think this easily-impressedness will generalize to most people in the real world. If you really buy all that you'd be part of the investor class that crashed various video game companies upon seeing Google put together a rather lame visual stunt and have their AI say, and I quote because the above-the-fold AI response I never asked for has never been more appropriate to consult… "The landscape of AI video game generation is experiencing a rapid evolution in 2025-2026, shifting from AI-assisted asset creation to the generation of entire interactive, playable 3D environments from text or image prompts. Leading initiatives like Google DeepMind's Project Genie and Microsoft's Muse are pioneering "world models" that can create, simulate physics, and render games in real-time." And then you look at what it actually is. Suuuure you will, unwanted AI google search first response. Suuure you will.
• coolness 8mo ago
  Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.
  • terminalbraid 8mo ago
    > Programming was always a tool This is the narrow understanding of programming that is the whole point of contention.
• Krasnol 8mo ago
  I wonder whether, in the end, it was simply poor accessibility that made programmers special, and whether it is that what some of them are missing. Being special by "talking" a special language their customers can't comprehend. Sure, they are still needed for debugging and for sneering at all those juniors and non-programmers who will finally be able to materialise their fantasies, but there is no way back anymore, and like riding horses, you can still do it while owning a car.
• unholyguy001 8mo ago
  The thing he has spent his whole career doing unto others he finally did into himself
• aavci 8mo ago
  LLMs have made a lot of coding challenges less painful: Navigating terrible documentation, copilot detecting typos, setting up boilerplate frontend components, high effort but technically unchallenging code completions. Whenever I attempted LLMs for tools I’m not familiar with I found it to be useful with setting things up but felt like I had to do good old learning the tool and applying developer knowledge to it. I wonder if senior developers could use LLMs in ways that work with them and not against them. I.e create useful code that has guardrails to avoid slop
  • zzo38computer 8mo ago
    Even if it can sometimes help, I think it is not an excuse for writing bad documentation.
• thor-rodrigues 8mo ago
  I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing. Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it. What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-paid remuneration, to write software line-by-line. I’ll not pretend that I don’t get the point, but it feels like the lamentation of a baker, tailor, shoemaker, or smith, missing the days of old. And yet, most people prefer a world with affordable bread, clothes, footware, and consumer goods. Will the world benefit the most from “affordable” software? Maybe yes, maybe not, there are many arguments on both sides. I am more concerned the impact on the winners and losers, the rich will get more rich and powerful, while the losers will become even more destitute. Yet, my final point would be: it is better or worse to live in a world in which software is more affordable and accessible?
  • terminalbraid 8mo ago
    > All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing. Except the community of people who, for whatever reason, had to throw themselves into it and had critical mass to both distribute and benefit from the passion of it. This has already been eroded by the tech industry coopting programming in general and is only going to diminish. The people who discovered something because they were forced to do some hard work and then ran with it are going to be steered away from that direction by many.
  • paulhebert 8mo ago
    I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples: Food: A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities. Consumer goods: It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it would cost more to fix than to buy a new one. I asked him if there was a more reliable model and he said no: they all break quickly. Clothing: Fast fashion is terrible for the environment. Do we need as many clothes as we have? How quickly do they end up in landfills? Would we be better off as a society repairing shoes instead of buying new ones every year?
• CamperBob2 8mo ago
  This just in: people who expect things to stay the same should steer clear of careers in technology. Art, too, come to think of it.
  • popopopopoopop 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • throwaway0123_5 8mo ago
    LLMs and AI more broadly certainly seem to have upended (or have the potential to upend) a lot of white-collar work outside of technology and art. Translators are one obvious example. Lawyers might be on the chopping block if they don't ban the use of AI for practicing law. Both seem about as far as you can get from "careers in technology," and in fact writing has pretty much always been framed as being on the opposite end of the spectrum from tech jobs, but is clearly vulnerable to technological progress. Right now I can think of very few white-collar jobs that I would feel comfortable training 4+ years for (let alone spending money or taking on debt to do so). It is far from a guarantee that almost any 4-year degree you enroll in today will have any value in four years. That has basically never before been true, even in tech. Blue collar jobs are clearly safer, but I wouldn't say safe. Robotics is moving fast too. I really can't imagine the social effects of this reality being positive, absent massive and unprecedented redistribution of the wealth that the productivity of AI enables.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    C came out in ~1972. Some people have been coding in C the entire time since then. There's no inherent reason that software hasn't stayed the same for a long time :).
• faccacta 8mo ago
  I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.
  • _zagj 8mo ago
    At least with physical works (for now, anyway), the methods the artisans employ leave tell-tale signs attesting to the manner of construction, so that someone at least has the choice of going the "hand made" route, and others, even lay people without special tooling, can tell that it indeed was hand made.
    • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
      Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. Of course it doesn't really matter for the business goals, as long as it works correctly. Just like 99% of people don't care if their clothing was machine made vs. handmade. It's going to be a tiny minority that care about handmade software.
      • _zagj 8mo ago
        > Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. For now. Though I suspect the commit history would probably still be pretty telling.
        • XenophileJKO 8mo ago
          lol.. the AI actually writes detailed commit message. Unlike me... "Fixed issue with timeout"
  • ok123456 8mo ago
    This is romanticising the past. The modal person just trying to get their job done wasn't a software artisan; they were cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, using textbook code verbatim, and using free and open-source code in ways that would likely violate the letter and spirit of the license. If you were using technology or concepts that weren't either foundational or ossified, you found yourself doing development through blog posts. Now, you can at least have a stochastic parrot that has read the entire code and documentation and can talk to it.
• tigerlily 8mo ago
  There's a commercial building under construction next to my office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping young men are digging with their big excavators they've been using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer. Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.
  • danny_codes 8mo ago
    I think OP is coming at this more from an artisan angle. Perhaps there were shoveler artisans who took pride in the angle of their dirt-shoveling. Those people perhaps do lament the advent of excavators. But presumably the population who find code beautiful vs the art of shoveling are of different sizes
  • dragonelite 8mo ago
    Them using excavator and trucks etc to move dirt. Is the same as us using a compiler to compile code into an executable. LLM would be if the digging and hauling of the dirt happened without any people involved except the planning of logistics.
    • koiueo 8mo ago
      > LLM would be if you'd sometimes discover a city communication line destroyed in the process; or the dirt hauled on top of a hospitals, killing hundreds of orphaned kids with cancer; or kittens mixed into concrete instead of cement. And since you clicked "agree" on that Anthropic EULA, you can't sue then for it, so you now hire 5 construction workers to constantly overlook the work. It's still net positive... for now at least... But far from being "without any people". And it'll likely remain this way for a long time.
    • Shock9889 8mo ago
      LLM would be equal to a monstrous moving castle with million robotic hands that can somehow collaterally extract piles of dirt from earth, doing a lot of damage to our planet
  • keynesyoudigit 8mo ago
• bopbopbop7 8mo ago
  I'll believe it when I start seeing examples of good and useful software being created with LLMs or some increase in software quality. So far it's just AI doom posting, hype bloggers that haven't shipped anything, anecdotes without evidence, increase in CVEs, increase in outages, and degraded software quality.
  • bgar 8mo ago
    Well, on the surface it may seem like there’s nothing being created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software. At this point, most software you touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.
    • bopbopbop7 8mo ago
      > every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software > The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering. Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts are telling you.
      • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
        It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.
        • bopbopbop7 8mo ago
          > Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity from them?
• light_hue_1 8mo ago
  I'm that 40 year old now. Been writing code since grade 5. Loved it so much I got a PhD, was an academic, then moved into industry. I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages. The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done. Seeing my ideas have impact. What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type the code in anymore. Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now. I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think. Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm already delivering things that were on the roadmap for engineering months worth of effort. I can think about abstractions, architecture, math, organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame compiler thinks about my code. And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are astronomically more productive than juniors.
• localghost3000 8mo ago
  This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things: Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone. Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve. Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.
  • codazoda 8mo ago
    “Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and it’s gone.” I’m putting that on my wall.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Interesting, I still have code I wrote 20 years ago being used in production.
    • localghost3000 8mo ago
      Theres always exceptions. Congrats!
    • Anamon 8mo ago
      Same here. With a little bit of smug satisfaction about the fact that my 20-year-old mission-critical code is running flawlessly, noticed by people only when it needs to be rebooted to update some connectivity configuration, while the 11 teams of some overpriced consultancy that was supposed to replace it have been struggling for five years now, having swallowed ten times the budget and not even being close to matching the functionality of my own code. This gap will only widen with the generation of LLM coders.
• Applejinx 8mo ago
  I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would teach people something, but apparently not. Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money. I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do? One less adversary. I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating together… but he's acting against those interests and he's doomering and I have no more time for that.
  • popopopopoopop 8mo ago
    [dead]
• andai 8mo ago
  Ephemeralization: the ability thanks to technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." —Buckminster Fuller
• rtkakh 8mo ago
  > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. No they cannot, And an AI bro squeezing every talking point into a think piece while pretending to have empathy doesn't change that. You just want an exit, and you want it fast.
  • marcosdumay 8mo ago
    Also: > and if you don’t believe me, wait six months This reads as a joke nowadays.
• codazoda 8mo ago
  “We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of” I still feel proud when skillfully guiding a set of AI agents to build from my imagination. Especially when it was out of my reach just 6-months ago. I’m a 49 year old veteran who started at just 10 years old and have continued to find pure passion in it.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I wonder if this is just a matter of degree. In a few years (or less) you may not have to "skillfully guide" anything. The agents will just coordinate themselves and accomplish your goals after you give some vague instruction. Will you still feel proud? Or maybe a bit later then agents will come up with their own improvements and just ship them without any input at all. How about then?
    • stoneforger 8mo ago
      That requires thinking. Let's just ship now, think later. Does it matter? Show me the money and all that. We will all just ride in the sunset with Butch Cassidy and the Sunset Kid I'm sure.
    • infp_arborist 8mo ago
      Then we can finally turn off the computers and go outside to play with friends.
      • shinryuu 8mo ago
        How do you pay your bills? That's the dark question that's looming in the background.
• reactordev 8mo ago
  I’m in my 40 something and it’s game over for my career. The grey in my hair makes it so that I never get past the first round. The history on my resume makes it so I’m lucky to get a round. The GPT’s and Claude have fundamentally changed how I view work and frankly, I’m over it. I’m in consulting now and it’s all the same crap. Enterprises want to “unleash AI” so they can fire people. Maximize profits. My nephews who are just starting their careers are blindly using these tools and accepting the PR if it builds. Not if it’s correct. I’m in awe of what it can do but I also am not impressed with the quality of how it does it. I’m fortunate to not have any debt so I can float until the world either wises up or the winds of change push me in a new direction. I liked the satisfaction of building something “right” that was also “useful”. The current state of Opus and Codex can only pretend to do the latter.
• _zagj 8mo ago
  I'm surprised so many people are only waking up to this now. It should have been obvious as soon as ChatGPT came out that even with only incremental improvements, LLMs would kill programming as we knew it. And the fact that these utterances, however performative, from developers expressing grief or existential despair have become commonplace tells me as much about the power of these systems than whatever demo Anthropic or OpenAI has cooked up. I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts, still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of software development becomes something akin to googling--just typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at least, we don't pay them very much.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• dismalaf 8mo ago
  Dunno, LLMs writing code still feels like they memorized a bunch of open source code and vomited them out in worse condition. It's not that impressive that Claude wrote a C compiler when GitHub has the code to a bunch of C compilers (some SOTA) just sitting there. I'm using an LLM to write a compiler in my spare time (for fun) for a "new" language. It feels more like a magical search engine than coding assistant. It's great for bouncing ideas from, for searching the internet without the clutter of SEO optimized sites and ads, it's definitely been useful, just not that useful for code. Like, I have used some generated code in a very low stakes project (my own Quickshell components) and while it kind of worked, eventually I refactored it myself into 1/3 of the lines it produced and had to squash some bugs. It's probably good enough for the people who were gluing React components together but it still isn't on the level where I'd put any code it produces into production anywhere I care about.
  • codazoda 8mo ago
    That is my experience from a year ago but I no longer feel that way. I write a few instructions, guide an agent to create a plan, and rarely touch the code myself. If I don’t like something, I ask the agent to fix it.
    • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
      Agree, there was a huge step change with Claude Code + Opus 4.5 (maybe 4.6 is even better?). Anyone dealing with earlier models as their basis should probably try the newest stuff and see if it changes their minds.
  • falloutx 8mo ago
    C compiler it wrote doesnt even compile. Waste of $20k
• andai 8mo ago
  Some code is worth transcribing by hand — an ancient practice in writing, art and music.[0] Some isn't even worth looking at. I find myself, ironically, spending more time typing out great code by hand now. Maybe some energy previously consumed by tedium has been freed up, or maybe the wacky machines brought a bit of the whimsy back into the process for me. [0] And in programming, for the readers of Zed Shaw's books :)
• webdevver 8mo ago
  it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out there. fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility. a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a digital archive-brain.
  • throwaway0123_5 8mo ago
    Yeah, I notice a lot of the optimism is from people who have been in the field for decades. I'm newish to the field, half a decade out of undergrad. It definitely feels like almost all of what I learned has been (or will soon be) completely devalued. I'm sure this stuff feels a lot less threatening if you've had decades to earn a great salary and save a bunch of money. If money wasn't a concern I'd be thrilled about it too.
    • falloutx 8mo ago
      No, dont trust the supposed "staff engineer" types, Many had forgotten how to write code and now they can finally live the fantasy of being architects. So for them its like winning a jackpot. For people who could always write good code, the basics are still same, a good dev is still a good dev, and its even more important to be able to read & critique code.
• Ronsenshi 8mo ago
  Agree with the author. I like the process of writing code, typing method names and class definitions while at the same time thinking ahead about overall architecture, structure, how much time given function would run for, what kind of tests are necessary. I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into this field for seemingly very different reasons. I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I usually have when working on codebase myself.
  • dham 8mo ago
    It's not so much the writing of the code (which I did like), it's the aesthetic of the code. It's solving a problem with the right code and the right amount of code (for now). That's still the case, even with AI writing most of the code. You have to steer it constantly because it has very bad instincts, because most people in the profession aren't good at it, so it has bad training data. Mainly because the "learn to code" movement and people getting into this profession just for the money and not the love. Those people are probably screwed.
  • another_twist 8mo ago
    For me its the money. Software paid and does pay well when I got in. I have actually been trying to get the eff out as fast as I can and move to management/research (I work in ML). I have avoided web dev shit like the plague since it is indeed very low value added work. The fact that LLMs can finish all this crappy work for 20bucks a month where I dont have to do it by hand is a welcome step. Otoh, I dont think point and trust is the way to do AI assisted coding. You get better output when you know the business logic and can make sense of the code. In fact, I prompt many many times until the AI spits out something I understand. Honestly all the complaining about dying of a craft is just pathetic. In one of the jobs I worked, there were specific performance rubrics under "Craft" and those really annoyed me. Software / Code is just a tool to solve a problem.
• lukekim 8mo ago
  Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully automated production. The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job. This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (overseeing farm automation, high end handmade furniture, small organic farms), and the factory worker masses (ZIRP enabled tech workers) will move on to more fulfulling work.
  • sidibe 8mo ago
    Where do people find this optimism? I reckon when the software jobs fall everything else will follow shortly too. That's just the first target because it's what we know and the manual stuff is a little harder for now. The "good news" is everyone might be in the same boat so the system will have to adapt,
    • throw1235435 8mo ago
      Software, and most STEM based jobs, have a lot of determinism and verifiability + some way to reduce the cost of failure so brute force iteration can cover up the remaining. There is often "a correct answer". They've also yet to be truly disrupted until now which makes them particularly vulnerable than any other job. Most jobs don't have the same level of verification and/or repeatability. Some factors include: * Physical constraints: Even the jobs that have productive output if they are physical it will take a long time for AI and more importantly energy density to catch up. Robots have a while to go as well - in the end human hands and your metabolism/energy density will be worth more than your brain/intelligence. * Cost of failure/can't repeat: For things like building the cost of failure is high (e.g. disposal, cleanup, more resources, etc) -> even 70% of a "building bench" benchmark would be completely inadequate without low cost to repeat. Many jobs are also already largely automated but scaled (e.g. mining, manufacturing, etc) - they've already gone through the wave. * Human need for its own sake: Other jobs cater not just for productive output, but for some human need where it hasn't been made more efficient ever (e.g. care jobs). There are jobs that a human is more effective in the medium term because the receiver needs it from a human. No -> this just affects white collar STEM based roles. Thinking we are in it together is just another form of "cope" sadly. There's a rational reason why others have optimism while we SWE's are now full of anxiety and dread. For the people who it doesn't affect given their current place in many societies (nurses, builders, etc etc) there will be little sympathy.
• karmasimida 8mo ago
  > If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.
  • notnullorvoid 8mo ago
    By that logic prompting an AI is also labour. It's not even always a more efficient form of labour. I've experienced many scenarios with AI where prompting it to do the right thing takes longer and requires writing/reading more text compared to writing the code myself.
• killerstorm 8mo ago
  I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies. Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching
  • bopbopbop7 8mo ago
    Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.
    • themacguffinman 8mo ago
      Humans are also non-deterministic code generators though. It can be possible that an LLM is more deterministic or consistent at building reliable code than a human.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    • killerstorm 8mo ago
      You're missing the point. Consider this: Mathematicians use LLMs. Obviously, they don't trust LLM to do math. But LLM can help with formalizing a theorem, then finding a formal proof. It's usually a very tedious thing - but LLMs are _already_ quite good at that. In the end you get a proof which gets checked by normal proof-checking software (not LLM!), you can also inspect, break into parts, etc. You really need to look into detail rather than dismiss wholesale ("It made a math error so it's bad at math" is wrong.)
  • account42 8mo ago
    Just wait out until you find out how vulnerable the average house is to robbers. The only difference with software is that we have somehow discarded deterrence and law enforcement as reasonable parts of a security strategy and keep insisting that technological defenses need to be 100% tight no matter the cost.
• Eridrus 8mo ago
  I do not mourn typing in code. But I am still quite annoyed at the slopful nature of the code that is produced when you're not constantly nagging it to do better We've RLed it to produce code that works by hook or by crook, putting infinity fallback paths and type casts everywhere rather than checking what the semantics should be. Sadly I don't know how we RL taste.
• d357r0y3r 8mo ago
  I thought I'd miss all the typing and syntax, but I really don't. Everyone has their own relationship with coding, but for me, I get satisfaction out of the end product and putting it in front of someone. To the extend that I cared about the code, it mainly had to do with how much it allowed the end product to shine.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Yes, there's clearly a big split in the community where perhaps ~50% are like OP and the other ~50% are like you. But I think we should still respect the views of the other side and try to empathize.
• henning 8mo ago
  > They can write code better than you or I can Speak for yourself. They produce shit code and have terrible judgment. Otherwise we wouldn't need to babysit them so much.
• iafan 8mo ago
  It makes me sad to read posts like this. If it is a necessary step for you on the journey from denial to acceptance to embracing the new state of the world, then sure, take your time. But software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction so that we don't repeat ourselves and make each next step even more powerful. Just yesterday we were pair programming with a talented junior AI developer. Today we are treating them as senior ones and can work with several in parallel. Very soon your job will not be pair programming and peer reviewing at all, but teaching a team of specialized coworkers to work on your project. In a year or two we will be assembling factories of such agents that will handle the process from taking your requirements to delivering and maintaining complex software. Our jobs are going to change many more times and much more often than ever. And yet there will still be people finding solace in hand-crafting their tools, or finding novel algorithms, or adding the creativity aspect into the work of their digital development teams. Like people lovingly restoring their old cars in their garage just for the sake of the process itself. And everything will be just fine.
  • apitman 8mo ago
    > software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction Not sure I agree. I think most programming today looks almost exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. You could even have gotten away with never learning a new language. AI feels like the first time a large percentage of us may be forced to fundamentally change the way we work or change careers.
    • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
      It's true, unless you have always been working on FOTM frontend frameworks, you could easily be doing the same thing as 20/30/40 years ago. I'm still using vim and coding in C++ like someone could have 30+ years ago (I was too young then). Or at least, I was until Claude code got good enough to replace 90% of my code output :)
    • iafan 8mo ago
• oooyay 8mo ago
  You know who else mourned the loss of craft? People that don't like PHP and Wordpress because they lower the barrier to entry to creating useful stuff while also leaving around a fair amount of cruft and problems that the people that use them don't understand how to manage. Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases, ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the age of AI. All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is changing as it always has. The only constant I've ever experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for me.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I think it's a bit different when you can opt out. If you didn't want to use PHP you didn't have to. But it's getting increasingly hard to opt out of AI.
• bloppe 8mo ago
  The acceleration of AI has thrown into sharp relief that we have long lumped all sorts of highly distinct practices under this giant umbrella called "coding". I use CC extensively, and yet I still find myself constantly editing by hand. Turns out CC is really bad at writing kubernetes operators. I'd bet it's equally bad at things like database engines or most cutting edge systems design problems. Maybe it will get better at these specific things with time, but it seems like there will always be a cutting edge that requires plenty of human thought to get right. But if you're doing something that's basically already been done thousands of times in slightly different ways, CC will totally do it with 95% reliability. I'm ok with that. It's also important to step back and realize that it goes way beyond coding. Coding is just the deepest tooth of the jagged frontier. In 3 years there will be blog posts lamenting the "death of law firms" and the "death of telemedicine". Maybe in 10 years it will be the death of everything. We're all in the same boat, and this boat is taking us to a world where everyone is more empowered, not less. But still, there will be that cutting edge in any field that will require real ingenuity to push forward.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I think there's clearly a difference in opinion based on what you work on. Some people were working on things that pre-CC models also couldn't handle and then CC could, and it changed their opinions quickly. I expect (but cannot prove of course) that the same will happen with the area you are describing. And then your opinion may change.
    • bloppe 8mo ago
      I expect it to, eventually. But then the cutting edge will have simply moved to something else. I agree that it's very destabilizing. It's sort of like inflation for expertise. You spend all this time and effort saving up expertise, and then those savings rapidly lose value. At the same time, your ability to acquire new expertise has accelerated (because LLMs are often excellent private tutors), which is analogous to an inflation-adjusted wage increase. There are a ton of variables. Will hallucinations ever become negligible? My money is on "no" as long as the architecture is basically just transformers. How will compiling training data evolve with time? My money is on "it will get more expensive". How will legislators react? I sure hope not by suppressing competition. As long as markets and VC are functioning properly, it should only become easier to become a founder, so outsized corporate profits will be harder to lock down.
• skybrian 8mo ago
  "Glorified TSA agent" is a rather gloomy, low-agency take on it. You both ask for what you want and verify the results.
• tintor 8mo ago
  You can still do your craft as you did it before, but you can't expect to be paid for it as much as before.
• zer00eyz 8mo ago
  If you want to build a house you still need plans. Would you rather cut boards by hand or have a power saw. Would you rather pound nails, pilot hole with a bit and brace and put in flat head screws... or would you want a nail gun and an impact driver. And you still need plans. Can you write a plan for a sturdy house, verify that it meets the plan that your nails went all the way in and in the right places? You sure can. Your product person, your directors, your clients might be able to do the same thing, it might look like a house but its a fire hazard, or in the case of most LLM generated code a security one. The problem is that we moved to scrum and agile, where your requirements are pantomime and postit notes if your lucky, interpretive dance if you arent. Your job is figuring out how to turn that into something... and a big part of what YOU as an engineer do is tell other people "no thats dumb" without hurting their feelings. IF AI coding is going to be successful then some things need to change: Requirements need to make a come back. GOOD UI needs to make a comeback (your dark pattern around cancelation, is now going to be at odds with an agent). Your hide the content behind a login or a pay wall wont work any more because again, end users have access too... the open web is back and by force. If a person can get in, we have code that can get in now. There is a LOT of work that needs to get done, more than ever, stop looking back and start looking forward, because once you get past the hate and the hype there is a ton of potential to right some of the ill's of the last 20 years of tech.
• Nextgrid 8mo ago
  LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore. It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.
    • Nextgrid 8mo ago
      You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.
      • archagon 8mo ago
        If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com https://thethreevirtues.com) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.
• FergusArgyll 8mo ago
  If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera
  • apitman 8mo ago
    But you have to admit it loses a certain shine in the cases where you know that what you're doing is no longer solving a problem that could be solved simpler and cheaper another way.
    • kaffekaka 8mo ago
      But understanding _how_ it solves the problem, and knowing you found the solution yourself might/will be something to strive for.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    As you probably know, painting changed quite a bit after cameras became common. I wonder if handcrafted code will have a similar shift, becoming more "artistic" :)
    • kaffekaka 8mo ago
      It surely will.
  • coolThingsFirst 8mo ago
    yup, you can do whatever you want if you don't need the $$$
• pron 8mo ago
  Some people say that working with an agent or an agents orchestrator is like being a technical lead. But I've been a technical lead for quite a while, and the experience of working with an agent doesn't even come close. I think that when people talk about the agents' coding abilities they're talking about the average ability. But as a team lead, I don't care about average ability. I care only about the worst case. If I have any doubt that someone might not complete a task, or at least accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with at least 95% certainty, I won't assign them the task. If I have any doubt that the code they produce might not be up to snuff, I don't assign them the task. I don't need to review their code; they review each others'. When I have to review code I'm no longer a team lead but a programmer. I often have one programming project I do myself, on the side, and recently I've been using coding agents. Their average ability is no doubt impressive for what they are. But they also make mistakes that not even a recent CS graduate with no experience would ever make (e.g. I asked the agent for it's guess as to why a test is failing; it suggested it might be due to a race condition with an operation that is started after the failing assertion). As a lead, if someone on the team is capable of making such a mistake even once, then that person can't really code, regardless of their average performance (just as someone who sometimes lands a plane in the wrong airport or even crashes without their being a catastrophich condition outside their control can't really fly regardless of their average performance). "This is more complicated than we though and would take longer than we expected" is something you hear a lot, but "sorry, I got confused" is something you never hear. A report by Anthropic last week said, "Claude will work autonomously to solve whatever problem I give it. So it’s important that the task verifier is nearly perfect, otherwise Claude will solve the wrong problem." Yeah, that's not something a team lead faces. I wish the agent could work like a team of programmers and I would be doing my familiar role of a project lead, but it doesn't. The models do some things well. I believe that programming is an interesting mix of inductive and deductive thinking (https://pron.github.io/posts/people-dont-write-programs https://pron.github.io/posts/people-dont-write-programs), and the models have the inductive part down. They can certainly understand what a codebase does faster than I can. But their deductive reasoning, especially when it comes to the details, is severely lacking (e.g. I asked the agent to document my code. It very quickly grasped the design and even inferred some important invariants, but when it saw an `assert` in one subroutine it documented it as guarding a certain invariant. The intended invariant was correct, it just wasn't the one the assertion was guarding). So I still (have to) work as a programmer when working with coding assistants, even if in a different way. I've read about great successes at using coding agents in "serious" software, but what's common to those cases is that the people using the agents (Mitchell Hashimoto, antirez) are experts in the respective codebase. At the other end of the spectrum, people who aren't programmers can get some cool programs done, but I've yet to see anything produced in this way (by a non programmer) that I would call serious software. I don't know what the future will bring, but at the moment, the craft isn't dead. When AI can really program, i.e. the experience is really like that of a team lead, I don't think that the death of programming would concern us, because once they get to that point, the agents will also likely be able to replace the team lead. And middle management. And the CTO, the CFO, and the CEO, and most of the users.
• nubg 8mo ago
  To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
  • crazygringo 8mo ago
    I'm all for AI programming. But I've seen this conversation on HN already 100 times. The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not. I personally don't agree at all, in the sense I don't think that matters. I've run into compiler bugs, and more library bugs than I can count. The real world is just as messy as LLMs are, and you still need the same testing strategies to guard against errors. Development is always a slightly stochastic process of writing stuff that you eventually get to work on your machine, and then fixing all the bugs that get revealed once it starts running on other people's machines in the wild. LLMs don't write perfect code, and neither do you. Both require iteration and testing.
    • haolez 8mo ago
      I just answered exactly that. I think that AI agents code better than humans and are the future. But the parent argument is pretty bad, in my opinion.
      • Ronsenshi 8mo ago
        Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.
        • 8mo ago
• leecommamichael 8mo ago
  > Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft. Your craft is not my craft. It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general... If you are making something that exists, or something that is very similar to something that exists, odds are that an LLM can be made to generate code which approximates that thing. The LLM encoding is lossy. How will you adjust the output to recover the loss? What process will you go through mentally to bridge the gap? When does the gap appear? How do you recognize it? In the absolute best case you are given a highly visible error. Perhaps you've even shipped it, and need to provide context about the platform and circumstances to further elucidate. Better hope that platform and circumstance is old-hat.
  • remify 8mo ago
    It's funnily enough quite the opposite front ends that have a focus on UX are pretty well protected from generative AI
    • nullbio 8mo ago
      Strangly, yeah. LLMs are absolute trash at generating good UX and UI.
      • pellenys 8mo ago
        Agreed. That’s the one area where I think my experience will still have value (for a while anyway): translating customer requests into workable UI/UX, before handing off to the LLM.
    • leecommamichael 8mo ago
      I haven't heard this perspective. I'm kind of surprised the LLMs can't generate coherent frontend framework-ized code, if that's the implication.
      • 8mo ago
• alex_young 8mo ago
  Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety, bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse. Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Your entire brain's model of the world is an abstraction over its sensory inputs. By this logic we might as well say you shouldn't mourn anything since all it means is a minor difference in the sensory inputs your brain receives.
• knuckleheads 8mo ago
  December a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT I did Advent of Code in Rust. It was very difficult, had never done the full month before, barely knew Rust and kept getting my ass kicked by it. I spent a full Saturday afternoon solving one of the last problems of the month, and it was wonderful. My head hurt and I was reading weird Wikipedia articles and it was a blast. Nothing is stopping me from doing that sort of thing again, and I feel like I might need to, to counteract the stagnation I feel at times mentally when it comes to coding. That spark is still in there I feel, buried under all the slop, and it would reappear if I gave it the chance, I hope. I have been grieving for the last years I think and only recently have I come to terms with the changes to my identity that llm's have wrought.
• koiueo 8mo ago
  > We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me. We'll still be sitting till 2am. > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. I've been hearing this for the last two years. And yet, LLMs, given abstract description of the problem, still write worse code than I do. Or did you mean type code? Because in that case, yes, I'd agree. They type better.
  • cmiles74 8mo ago
    I am not confident that AI tooling can diagnose or fix this kind of bug. I’ve pointed Claude Opus at bugs that puzzle me (with only one code base involved) and, so far, it has only introduced more bugs in other places.
    • koiueo 8mo ago
      I'm not saying it can btw. I'm arguing for the opposite. And for the record, I'm impressed at issues it can diagnose. Being able to query multiple data sources in parallel and detect anomalies, it sometimes can find the root cause for an incident in a distributed system in a matter of minutes. I have many examples when LLMs found bugs in existing code when tasked to write unit tests (usually around edge cases). But complex issues that stem from ambiguous domain are often out of reach. By the time I'm able to convey to an LLM all the intricacies of the domain using plain English, I'm usually able to find the issue myself. And that's my point: I'd be more eager to run the code under debugger till 2am, than to push an LLM to debug for me (can easily take till 2am, but I'd be less confident I can succeed at all)
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 8mo ago
  I don't mourn coding for itself, since I've always kinda disliked that side of my work (numerical software, largely). What I do mourn is the reliability. We're in this weird limbo where it's like rolling a die for every piece of work. If it comes up 1-5, I would have been better off implementing it myself. If it comes up 6, it'll get it done orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Since the overall speedup is worthwhile, I have to try it every time, even if most of the time it fails. And of course it's a moving target, so I have to keep trying the things that failed yesterday because today's models are more capable.
• GeorgeTirebiter 8mo ago
  And all that time spent doing leetcode? Yeah, THAT was time Well Spent.... ;-)
• daedrdev 8mo ago
  I feel like we are long into the twilight of mini blogs and personal sites. Its like people trying to protect automotive jobs, the vas majority were already lost Perhaps Im a cynic but I don't know
• namuol 8mo ago
  The death of a means to an end is the birth of an end itself. When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of programming/computing is going to be interesting.
• internetguy 8mo ago
  how elitist
• GeorgeTirebiter 8mo ago
  One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and LISP) instead of using assembly language. We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!
  • bopbopbop7 8mo ago
    A non-deterministic, slow, pay to use, compiler for a language that is not precise enough for software. What an amazing abstraction!
    • stoneforger 8mo ago
      You are just salty and old. If you're young and hip you don't need to know what you're doing just do the thing.
• jryio 8mo ago
  These comments are comical. How hard is it to understand that human beings are experiential creatures. Our experiences matter, to survival, to culture, and identity. I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience. Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any form of human creation? Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes. Should he mourn the loss of our craft. Also yes.
  • another_twist 8mo ago
    A much more measued and pragmatic take.
  • kaffekaka 8mo ago
    Very well put. Two things are true at the same time, this makes people uneasy.
    • jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
      In fact, contrary things are so very often both true at the same time, in different ways. Figuring out how to live in the uncomfortableness of non-absolutes, how to live in a world filled with dualisms, is IMO one of the primary and necessary maturities for surviving and thriving in this reality.
      • kaffekaka 8mo ago
        Yes. Unwillingness to accept contradicting data points is holding many people back. They have an unconscious need to always pick one or the other, and that puts them at a disadvantage. "I know what I think." But no, you do not.
  • coolThingsFirst 8mo ago
    This is so naive, you watch chess masters not because of the quality of the end result of the chess game but because it illustrates human ability, it's entertainment. SWE the quality is measured in the end result, there's no beauty in handcrafted barely working code. So if machines come to the stage where they program better than 90% of human developers then yes the craft is done for. The profession is dead. You can talk to LLM to give it specs for what you want built but that's basically a totally different profession that a high-schooler would do and salaries will soon follow suit.
• ertucetin 8mo ago
  That's why I'll only read source code written until 2024.
• codeduck 8mo ago
  I on the other hand await the coming of the Butlerian Jihad.
• stack_framer 8mo ago
  > wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games, chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I could see and experience the value of the internet immediately. It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible. LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved." It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs—and there are always bugs. Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.
  • levzettelin 8mo ago
    Well said!
  • Alex-Programs 8mo ago
    The state of the art is moving so rapidly that, yeah, Copilot by Microsoft using gpt-5-mini:low is not going to be very good. And there are many places where AI has been implemented poorly, generally by people who have the distribution to force it upon many people. There are also plenty of people who use vibe coding tools and produce utterly atrocious codebases. That doesn't preclude the existence of effective AI tools, and people who are good at using them.
  • cheema33 8mo ago
    > an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition... Nobody credible is promising you a perfect future. But, a better future, yes! If you do not see it, then know this. You have your head firmly planted in the sand and are intentionally refusing to see what is coming. You may not like it. You may not want it. But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or become irrelevant. Does Copilot spit out useless PR comments. 100% yes! Are there tools that are better than Copilot? 100% yes! These tools are not perfect. But even with their imperfections, they are very useful. You have to learn to harness them for their strengths and build processes to address their weaknesses. And yes, all of this requires learning and experimentation. Without that, you will not get good results and you will complain about these tools not being good.
• dlvhdr 8mo ago
  Another post saying 6 more months.. i’m so tired of these
• tormeh 8mo ago
  Quick questionnaire. Please reply with how much you like/use AI and what kind of programming you do. I wonder if there are some interesting groupings.
• Folcon 8mo ago
  I suspect my comment will not be well received, however I notice in myself that I've passed the event horizon of being a believer and am past the honeymoon period and I'm beginning to think about engineering My headspace is now firmly in "great, I'm beginning to understand the properties and affordances of this new medium, how do I maximise my value from it", hopefully there's more than a few people who share this perspective, I'd love to talk with you about the challenges you experience, I know I have mine, maybe we have answers to each others problems :) I assume that the current set of properties can change, however it seems like some things are going to be easier than others, for example multi modal reasoning still seems to be a challenge and I'm trying to work out if that's just hard to solve and will take a while or if we're not far from a good solution
• willguest 8mo ago
  We have CNC machines, and we still have sculptors. Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries. I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.
• linguae 8mo ago
  Two years ago I decided to give up my career as an industry researcher to pursue a tenure-track professor position at a community college. One of the reasons I changed careers is because I felt frustrated with how research at my company changed from being more self-directed and driven by longer-term goals to being directed by upper management with demands for more immediate productization. I feel generative AI is being imposed onto society. While it is a time-saving tool for many applications, I also think there are many domains where generative AI needs to be evaluated much more cautiously. However, there seems to be relentless pressure to “move fast and break things,” to adopt technology due to its initial labor-saving benefits without fully evaluating its drawbacks. That’s why I feel generative AI is an imposition. I also resent the power and control that Big Tech has over society and politics, especially in America where I live. I remember when Google was about indexing the Web, and I first used Facebook when it was a social networking site for college students. These companies became successful because they provided useful services to people. Unfortunately, once these companies gained our trust and became immensely wealthy, they started exploiting their wealth and power. I will never forget how so many Big Tech leaders sat at Trump’s second inauguration, some of whom got better seats than Trump’s own wife and children. I highly resent OpenAI’s cornering of the raw wafer market and the subsequent exorbitant hikes in RAM and SSD prices. Honestly, I have less of an issue with large language models themselves and more of an issue with how a tiny handful of powerful people get to dictate the terms and conditions of computing for society. I’m a kid who grew up during the personal computing revolution, when computation became available to the general public. I fell for the “computers for the rest of us,” “information at your fingertips” lines. I wanted to make a difference in the world through computing, which is why I pursued a research career and why I teach computer science. I’ve also sat and watched research industry-wide becoming increasingly driven by short-term business goals rather than by long-term visions driven by the researchers themselves. I’ve seen how “publish-and-perish” became the norm in academia, and I also saw DOGE’s ruthless cuts in research funding. I’ve seen how Big Tech won the hearts and minds of people, only for it to leverage its newfound power and wealth to exploit the very people who made Big Tech powerful and wealthy. The tech industry has changed, and not for the better. This is what I mourn.
  • stoneforger 8mo ago
• bytefish 8mo ago
  To me, it’s super exciting to play ping pong with ideas up until I arrive at an architecture and interfaces, that I am fine with. My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code. And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it. That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about. Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job. I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.
• hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago
  I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago. As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it. If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.
• Animats 8mo ago
  Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone. That's the future for maybe half of programmers. Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
  • jsrcout 8mo ago
    From valued professional to surplus inventory just like that. Where does this process end? Because right now it's only accelerating.
• levzettelin 8mo ago
  I don't mourn our craft.
• peheje 8mo ago
  I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it. After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted. My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my confusion. Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation is free, judgment becomes priceless. We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now, which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design, tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach. This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder, rather than just for coordinates.
  • kakaghrjfk 8mo ago
    > I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. I don't understand this comment. Is this your personal experience in the industry? The only reason 99.99% of people needed to do this was for technical interviews. The world hasn't moved on until technical interviews have moved on, and they haven't.
• guygurari 8mo ago
  Programming brings me joy in two different ways. 1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art. 2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering. These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things. AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year. I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.
• IhateAI 8mo ago
  I love paying some billionaire $0.0001 to use his thinking machine / Think for me SaaS. I love my competency and speed being rented from a billionaire, removing all value of my labor and agency. I really feel sorry for all of you LLM pilled people. You need to be shamed. This is going to be used as a weapon to devalue every working persons agency in this world and remove all of the working class's bargaining chips. You think its just SWE? It will be accountants, customer service, factory workers, medical assistance basically anyone who doesn't work with their hands directly, and they'll try to solve that here soon too and alienate them too. Look at who's in charge, do you think they're going to give us UBI? No, they're going to sign us up to go fight wars to help them accumulate resources. Stop supporting this, they're going to make us so poor young men will beg to fight in a war. Its the same playbook from the first half of the 20th Century. You think I'm paranoid, give it 5 years. We are at all time high's in the stock market/equities and they've laid off 400k SWE's in the last 16 months. While going on podcasts to tell us we are going to have more time to create and do what we love. We have to work to pay our bills. We don't want whats coming, but they're selling us some lie that this will solve all our problems, it will solve the ruling classes problems that will be it. You will have no bargaining chips and you will be forced to take whatever morsels given to you. Your competency will be directly correlated 1:1 to the quantity and quality of tokens that you can afford, given access too (or loaned??) We're literally at the beginning of a black mirror episode before it gets dark. People that grew up in the Capitalist West have been brainwashed since they were 10 years old they they can be a billionaire too, no you can't there's 2k-3k of them and 8 billion of us. These automation tools are the ultimate weapon for the ruling class to strip all value of you from your labor, and you're embracing that as a miracle. Its not, your life is in the process of being torn of all meaning. Good luck to everyone who agrees, we're going to need it.. Anyone supporting these companies or helping enhance these model's capabilities, you're a class traitor and soon to be slave. Required reading: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
  • shinryuu 8mo ago
    I'm with you. Though what good choices do I have as an individual? It seems like all the choices are crap.
• k33n 8mo ago
  This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working at the moment. The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate. The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses. I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.
• frays 8mo ago
  The majority of the code currently running in production for my company was written 5+ years ago. This was all "hand-written" and much lower quality than the AI generated code that I am generating and deploying these days. Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best. If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to rewrite this code myself all over again.
• whyenot 8mo ago
  For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money. That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open source projects that would love to have your help, but the days of making big money may be drawing to a close. Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.
• kruipen 8mo ago
  This discussion is like the discourse about work from home/return to office.
• libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  From a blog post last month by the same author: > Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming. > I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it. https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/ https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/ If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI hype), might want to go read that post.
• sbuttgereit 8mo ago
  > "I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it." I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow. If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine. But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose. It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has. Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous. If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.
• jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
  My ability to ask questions & hone in on good answers is far better than it ever was. My ability to change course & iterate is far faster than it ever has been. I'm making far more informed decisions, far more able to make forays and see how things turn out, with low cost. I could not be having a better time. I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow, and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a weekend. But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I wanted to be doing. I feel incredibly relieved, feel such enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it's way to the rest of the world, possibly. Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that. But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with incredible raw excitement and possibility before me. That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people working really hard together to build amazing systems.
• teeray 8mo ago
  > because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds of toxic gas along the way.
  • naragon 8mo ago
    Like the cab drivers in London who have to know the city inside and out? https://wheelchairtravel.org/london-black-cab-driver-knowledge-test/ https://wheelchairtravel.org/london-black-cab-driver-knowled...
• pzo 8mo ago
  I didn't come in IT for money - back in the days it wasn't as well paid as today - nevertheless if this craft was very poorly paid I probably wouldn't choose this profession either. And I assume many people here wouldn't as well unless you are already semi-retired or debt free. I mourn a little bit that in 20 years possibly 50% of software jobs will get axed or unless you are elite/celebrity dev salary will stagnate. I mourn that in the future upward mobility and moving up into upper middle class will be harder without trying to be entrepreneur.
• notnullorvoid 8mo ago
  > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills. People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing. It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.
• bunderbunder 8mo ago
  I am feeling this loss. I spent most of mu career scrupulously avoiding leadership positions because what I really like is the simple joy of making things with my own two hands. Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most people are nowadays. And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are - like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least, soon enough it won’t be. I can fret about deskilling all I like, but it seems that soon enough these skills won’t be particularly valuable except as a form of entertainment. Perhaps the coding agents won’t be able to make certain things or use certain techniques. That was the case for textile manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we see it in each others’ work. It’s not a terrible future, I suppose, in à long enough view. The world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and other similar points in history, not until after we get through another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won’t start quite so many wars while they enjoy their power trips.
• brandensilva 8mo ago
  I'm probably a minority, but I've never loved dealing with syntax. The code itself always felt like a hindrance to me that reminded me that my brain was slowed down by my fingers. I get it though, it was tactical and it completed the loop. It was essential for learning I felt like despite eventually getting to a point where it slows you down the more senior you get. AI has a ways to go before it's senior level if it ever reaches that level, but I do feel bad for juniors that survive this who never will have the opportunity to sculpt code by hand.
• clarity_hacker 8mo ago
  [dead]
• cheevly 8mo ago
  Oh no, my engineering profession requires me to use new engineering techniques due to advancements produced by engineering. Quality cringe.
  • shinryuu 8mo ago
    It's not only that. If 1 person is able to d the job of 10 people. What do you think will happen to the other 9 people.
• padjo 8mo ago
  Thanks to the person who wrote this. It resonates very strongly with me.
• clutter55561 8mo ago
  Many have mentioned woodworking as an analogy from a personal perspective, but for me the important perspective is that of consumers. Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress. A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value. How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck. But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die. The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels. As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.
• twelve40 8mo ago
  I found my love for programming in high school, dreaming of helping the world with my beautiful craftsmanship, but now i really really need the fokken money. Both are true! So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well, then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess
• mirawelner 8mo ago
  These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence. I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using? The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself. I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!
  • themacguffinman 8mo ago
    A lot of people are using Claude Code which many consider to be a noticeably better for coding than the other models. I think also they tend to be generating non-C++ code where there are more guardrails and less footguns for LLMs to run into. Eg they're generating Javascript or Python or Rust where type systems and garbage collection eliminates entire classes of mistakes that LLMs can run into. I know you said you don't use it for Python because you know the language but even experienced Python devs still see value in LLM-generating Python code.
    • mirawelner 8mo ago
      That’s funny bc I linked my post to a server I’m on and I also was told to use an agent. My worry about an agent is I’m trying to translate the math with full fidelity and an agent might take liberties with the math rather than full accuracy. I’m already having issues with 0 to 1 indexing screwing up some of the algorithm. But I will try an agent - can’t hurt to try
  • 8mo ago
• bytearray 8mo ago
  I understand the sentiment and I've been involved in software engineering in various roles for the last 25+ years. The thing that gives me hope is that never once in that time has the problem ever been that we didn't have more work to do. It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm just getting a lot more done.
• gob_blob 8mo ago
  "They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months." They've been saying that for years. Stop believing it.
  • fiala__ 8mo ago
    Also, it’s always six months from now, because otherwise you could just point at the hundred ways they’re wrong right now. It’s nothing but the ol’ dotcom “trust me, bro” kind of marketing.
  • stealthyllama 8mo ago
    I tried out Claude code for the first time today, and I was a little bit disappointed after all the comments I’ve been reading about it. I didn’t so much notice a speed difference as I did just not having to think very hard while I was working compared to writing everything myself. Perhaps I’m too opinionated / a micromanager.
• IhateAI_2 8mo ago
  If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option, please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up when the response is bad. Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.
  • ossa-ma 8mo ago
    Why don't you take a more proactive role in AI safety and alignment? I think that community would suit you better than some of the AI-maximalists/accelerationists here. I do agree with some of your points, AI may result in a techno-feudalist world and yes as a direct result of "taking humans out of the equation." The solution isn't to be a luddite as you may suggest, it's to take a more proactive role in steering these models.
  • falloutx 8mo ago
    Or dont pay them out of your own pocket. Use employer paid but dont let these shit companies in your personal space.
• mrandish 8mo ago
  As a very old school programmer who taught myself assembler in 1982 on an 8-bit 4K micro, I don't see much to mourn here. * People still craft wood furniture from felled trees entirely with hand tools. Some even make money doing it by calling it 'artisanal'. Nothing is stopping anyone from coding in any historical mode they like. Toggle switches, punch cards, paper tape, burning EPROMs, VT100, whatever. * OP seems to be lamenting he may not be paid as much to expend hours doing "sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM." I've been there. Sometimes I'd feel mild satisfaction on solving a rat-hole problem but more often, it was significant relief. I never much liked that part of coding and began to see it as a failure mode. I found I got bigger bucks - and had more fun - the better I got at avoiding rat-hole problems in the first place. * My entire journey creating software from ~1983 to ~2020 was about making a thing that solved someone's problem better, cheaper or faster - and, on a good day, we managed all three at once. At various times I ended up doing just about every aspect of it from low-level coding to CEO and back again, sometimes in the same day. Every role in the journey had major challenges. Some were interesting, a few were enjoyable, but most were just "what had to get done" to drag the product I'd dreamt up kicking and screaming into existence. * From my first teenage hobby project to my first cassette-tape in-a-baggie game to a $200M revenue SaaS for F100, every improvement in coding from getting a floppy disk drive to an assembler with macros to an 80 column display to version control, new languages, libraries, IDEs and LLMs just helped "making the thing exist" be easier, faster and less painful. * Eventually, to create even harder, bigger and better things I had to add others coding alongside me. Stepping into the player-coach role amplified my ability to bring new things into existence. It wasn't much at first because I had no idea how to manage programmers or projects but I started figuring it out and slowly got better. On a good day, using an LLM to help me "make the thing exist" feels a lot like when I first started being a player-coach. The frustration when it's 'two steps forward, one back' feels like deja vu. Much like current LLMs, my first part-time coding helpers weren't as good as I was and I didn't yet know how to help them do their best work. But it was still a net gain because there were more of them than me. * The benefits of having more coders helping me really started paying off once I started recruiting coders who were much better programmers than I ever was. Getting there took a little ego adjustment on my part but what a difference! They had more experience, applied different patterns, knew to avoid problems I'd never seen and started coming up with some really good ideas. As LLMs get better and I get better at helping them help me - I hope that's were we're headed. It doesn't feel directionally different than the turbo-boost from my first floppy drive, macro-assembler, IDE or profiler but the impact is already greater with upside potential that's much higher still - and that's exciting.
• dazhbog 8mo ago
  I dont get the hype.. And I dont think we will reach peak AI coding performance any time soon. Yes, watching an LLM spit out lots of code is for sure mesmerizing. Small tasks usually work ok, code kinda compiles, so for some scenarios it can work out.. BUT anyone serious about software development can see how piece of CRAP the code is. LLMs are great tools overall, great to bounce ideas, great to get shit done. If you have a side project and no time, awesome.. If your boss/company has a shitty culture and you just want to get the task done, great. Got a mundane coding task, hate coding, or your code wont run in a critical environment? please, LLM that shit over 9000.. Remember though, an LLM is just a predictor, a noisy, glorified text predictor. Only when AI reaches a point of not optimizing for short term gains and has built-in long term memory architecture (similar to humans) AND can produce some linux kernel level code and size, then we can talk..
  • cmiles74 8mo ago
    I have junior people on my team using Cursor and Claude, it’s not all great. Several times they’ve checked in code that also makes small yet breaking changes to queries. I have to watch out for random (unused) annotations in Java projects and then explain why the tools are wrong. The Copilot bot we use on GitHub slows down PR reviews by recommending changes that look reasonable yet either don’t really work or negatively impact performance. Overall, I’d say AI tooling has maybe close to doubled the time I spend on PR reviews. More knowledgeable developers do better with these tools but they also fall for the toolings false confidence from time to time. I worry people are spending less time reading documentation or stepping through code to see how it works out of fear that “other people” are more productive.
  • ricardobayes 8mo ago
    Super weird comments on this thread, to the point I would think it's brigaded or some (most) comments are straight up AI generated. Hackernews definitely changed. The tone on AI changed since a few months ago, I guess also because many people here are working on AI. Almost any new startup is AI-adjacent now. It's no surprise, cca. 120 out of 150 YC startups are AI. So there is a big push on this forum to keep the hype and sentiment going. The hard part is always the last 20%.
• orange-tourist 8mo ago
  > will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig guy who doesn't realize we still use hammers. This article was embarrassing to read.
• etamponi 8mo ago
  > So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike. Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code. I might be mistaken, but I bet they said the same when Visual Basic came out.
• apublicfrog 8mo ago
  I cannot empathise. If you love writing code, there is nothing stopping you writing code. I write code for fun with no commercial intent all the time, and have for decades. Very few oil painters had a salary. This is a complaint someone is making about their job propspects thinly wrapped in floral language. I know for some people (it seems especially prominent in Americans I've found) their identity is linked to their job. This is a chance to work on this. You can decouple yourself and redefine yourself as a person. Who knows? Once you're done you may go write some code for fun again.
• oxag3n 8mo ago
  > wait six months from other sources: 6-12 months, by end of 2025, ChatGPT 7. It's a concern trolling and astroturfing at it best. One camp of fellow coders who are saying how their productivity grew 100x but we are all doomed, another camp of AI enthusiasts who got ability to deliver products and truly believe in their newly acquired superiority. It's all either true or false, but if in six months it becomes true, we'll know it, each one of us. However, if it's all BS and in six months there will be Windows 95 written by LLM but real code still requires organic intelligence, there won't be any accountability, and that's sad.
• bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  I've been hearing "the LLM can write better code than a human, and if you don't believe me, wait six months" for years now. Such predictions haven't been true before and I don't believe they are true now.
• ozozozd 8mo ago
  I can relate coz once upon a time I enjoyed reading poetic code - which I later found to be impossible to modify or extend. > Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code. And then I couldn’t relate because no one ever paid me for lines of code. And the hardest programming I ever did was when it took me 2 days to write 2 lines of C code, which did solve a big problem. I abhorred the LOC success metric because we had to clean up after those who dumped their code diarrhea to fool those who thought every line of code is added value. Not to mention valuing LOC strictly makes you a junior programmer. E.g. you have to know more to do the following in 2 lines (yes, you can): ‘’’ t = a; a = b; b = a; ‘’’ According to LOC missionaries these 3 lines are more expensive to write and shows that you’re a better programmer than the XOR swap. But it’s actually more expensive to run it than the XOR swap, and it’s more expensive to hire the person who can write the XOR swap. (Not endorsing clever/cryptic code, just making a point about LOC) So, if the LOC missionaries are out of a job because of LLMs, I will probably celebrate.
  • oxag3n 8mo ago
    It's the end goal that matters in this context. Boss that counts LOC will be fired or will bankrupt the company/team. One of my friend who never lost a touch with coding in hist 30+ years career recently left FAANG and told me it's the best time to realize his dream of building a start up. And it's not because AI can write code for him - it would take him about 12 month to build the system from the ground up manually, but it's the best time because nobody can replicate what he's doing by using AI only. His analogy was "it's like everyone is becoming really good cyclist with electric bikes, even enthusiast cyclists, but you secretly train for Tour de France".
• chetanahuja 8mo ago
  Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?
  • arrowsmith 8mo ago
    > Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced? Yes, at least according to ChatGPT: "Compilers didn’t arrive to universal applause; they arrived into a world where a chunk of programmers absolutely believed the machine could not be trusted to write “real” code—until the productivity wins (and eventually the performance) became undeniable." Damn that sounds familiar.
    • falloutx 8mo ago
      compiler is deterministic, coding models are not. compilers have been unit tested and will generate same output for a given input. They are not the same things.
      • arrowsmith 8mo ago
        So?
        • Anamon 8mo ago
          So, there's a big qualitative difference in whether you can trust the output. You can either "just believe", and prepare for inevitable, nasty surprises down the line. Or you can verify in ways you don't have to with stable compilers, eating up most of, if not more than all the efficiency gains you felt you had by using the LLM. The two aren't comparable even remotely. One is a tool, the other is a slot machine. One allows for a new layer of abstraction, the other allows for a new layer of imprecision and hoping for the best.
• dogcomplex 8mo ago
  lmao nope burn in hell old programming. What is emerging is a thousand times better than that dumpster fire
  • Anamon 8mo ago
    Who cares if the resulting software is also a thousand times worse and a thousand times more insecure?
• KevinMS 8mo ago
  The more popular it becomes for coding, the more likely a model collapse will occur.
• techbrovanguard 8mo ago
  "ai is inevitable, stop resisting" — claude marketing department. if it was so invertible, why are you funding these psyops?
  • falloutx 8mo ago
    Astroturfing on the internet is Anthropic's main business now.
• tsoukase 8mo ago
  About 20 years ago I realised the extreme immaturity of IT field. The market was fragmented and you could literally become billionaire from your basement (80's), from an office (90's) etc. It was at the stage of car industry of the beginning of the past century. Since then the IT market has matured a lot so that a handful of companies formed an oligopoly and are thriving with no possibility of threat from isolated developers. In the following years the startup landscape will be dead, everyone will be bought up and even the computer devices will become sealed boxes with controlled buttons. Having a browser open might be a hack.
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  It isn't about the tools or using them, it's about the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it in a mutitude of areas because of all the areas technology touches. Millions of jobs erased with no clear replacement? Value of creative work diminshed leading to more opportunities erased? Scale of 'bad' actors abusing the tools and impacting a whole bunch of spheres from information dispersal to creative industries etc. Not even getting into environmental and land-use impacts to spaces with data centers and towns etc (again, it's the scale that gets ya). And for what? Removing a huge chunk of human activity & expression, for what?
• Kye 8mo ago
  This is probably a good representative take for the view of people who assigned value to the coding part of building software. It's worth reading and saving, if only as an artifact to study.
• falloutx 8mo ago
  Stop acting like software engineering is dead or something. Even if it its, we will still code by hand when we are poor later in this bubble. Only thing I would refuse is to pay any money to Anthropic & openAI. Literally would invest in Chinese labs at this point
• tangotaylor 8mo ago
  I feel like most of the anxiety around LLMs is because (in the USA at least) our social safety net sucks. I'd probably have way more fun debating LLMs if it wasn't tied to my ability to pay rent, have healthcare, or feel like a valued person contributing something to society. If we had universal healthcare and a federal job guarantee it would probably calm things down.
  • an0malous 8mo ago
    Yes that's why most of the excited folks are VCs and software engineers who made their wealth already
    • throw1235435 8mo ago
      What's more interesting is how the big names in our industry, the ones who already made their money as you say, have turned quickly since the end of 2025. I think even the most old school names can see that the writing is on the wall now.
      • shinryuu 8mo ago
        What do you mean turned quickly?
        • throw1235435 8mo ago
          Changed their opinion/public stance completely sometimes only months apart. For example "I love programming" to "if you aren't with AI you are behind" within maybe only 6 months time. Its almost like anyone with any public opinion in software is being paid to say it now and boost the AI hype.
          • shinryuu 8mo ago
            Yeah, I'm surprised by this. The pragmatic engineer publication is full of them. It may be that most of these people only see the benefits, or don't think they'll be adversely affected by this.
• dangoodmanUT 8mo ago
  > We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM No the fuck we wont
• iepathos 8mo ago
  If AI is good enough that juniors wielding it outproduce seniors, then the juniors are just... overhead. The company would cut them out and let AI report to a handful of senior architects who actually understand what's being built. You don't pay humans to be a slow proxy for a better tool. If the tools get good enough to not need senior oversight, they're good enough to not need junior intermediaries either. The "juniors with jetpacks outpacing seniors" future is unrealistic and unstable—it either collapses into "AI + a few senior architects" or "AI isn't actually that reliable yet."
  • shash 8mo ago
    Or it collapses when the seniors have to retire anyway. Who instructs the LLM when there’s nobody who understands the business? I’m sure the plan is to create a paperclip maximizing company which is fully AI. And the sea turned salty because nobody remembered how to turn it off.
• noisy_boy 8mo ago
  > Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it. Why will I miss it? I will be coding my small scripts and tools and hobby projects by hand because there is no deadline attached to them. Hell, I will also tag them as "bespoke hand-crafted free range artisanal" code. There will be a whole hipster category of code that is written as such. And people will enjoy it as they enjoy vinyl records now. Many things would have changed by then but my heart will still be a programmer's heart.
  • shash 8mo ago
    Either that or the “bespoke hand-crafted artisanal free-range code” will be the only thing still maintainable because vibe coders made such a mess
• red75prime 8mo ago
  At the end I felt more like a plumber, connecting pipes and building adapters where pipes didn't match.
• nullbio 8mo ago
  Repost this in a couple of years and it'll be relevant. Too soon though, as it stands.
• utopiah 8mo ago
  So funny because "you’re still riding around on a fixie bike." that's literally what I do. I also take a plane to fly. In that analogy that would be picking the right library/framework/service vs. vibe coding it. I do NOT need to write all the code to provide value. Knowing which tool to use for the task is precisely what requires honing a skill and requires judgement. It's not about how many kilometers you manage to cover.
• jordanscales 8mo ago
  The inspired me to write down some scattered thoughts I have on this [0]. tl;dr I firmly believe we kicked the can down the road and now it's too late. Things programmers forgot to do before AI started writing a bunch of software: 1. Learn how to review code Some tools exist, some of them are even quite good! Large organizations have tried to build best practices to balance urgency with correctness, but programmers are still quite bad at this. 2. Compare program A vs program B In a similar vein, we simply do not know how to measure one program vs another. Or a function against another. Or even one variableName vs another_variable_name. "It depends" Depends on what? We never sorted this out. 3. Talk to other professions We are not the first profession forced to coordinate with Automation as a coworker, and we certainly won't be the last. We're not even the first knowledge workers to do so. How did other laborers deal with this? We don't know because we were busy making websites. [0]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wh7bie3ld7bmg3cz76sbjkwj/post/3meec47ym6s2p https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wh7bie3ld7bmg3cz76sbjkwj/po...
  • rawgabbit 8mo ago
    Software was never governed by a single standard. It has always been closer to architecture or design, with competing schools judging quality differently. AI tools do not remove judgment; they make it unavoidable. I sit in a minimalist, almost brutalist school: fewer layers, obvious structure, and software that delivers results even if it is not fashionable.
• jsontsx 8mo ago
  im happy about this new era to weed out the gatekeepers of programming. its been insufferable for about a decade and a half. leetcode, TC farming, praising anti social behavior, ego of devs at companies... the archetype had to change
• ratrace 8mo ago
  > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. How many 6-month periods do we have to go through before we can all admit that this isn't actually the case?
  • nine_k 8mo ago
    Not that many, as the new crop of junior devs grows up not writing and barely reading code.
    • dude250711 8mo ago
      My fear is management saying: "here are two juniors and a Claud, now produce output of 10 seniors". It is not working out? You must be using it wrong. You don't want the juniors? Too bad.
• richard_todd 8mo ago
  The craft is still there just like painting is still an alternative to a photograph. It's just not going to be valued by society anymore, and far fewer will learn how to do it. Natural language is the new programming language. For now, understanding the craft is still an edge in making better prompts, but already I can see that telling Antigravity "now look for ways to make this more efficient" works almost as well as guiding it specifically on how it had duplicated some code flows. I do feel a kind of personal loss in the sense that society is in the process of stopping to value or admire the design and coding skill I've cultivated since I was 6yo. At the same time, I'm kind of thrilled that I can write a detailed readme.md and tell an agent to "make it so" and I can iterate to a utility program in 20 minutes instead of an hour. When I feel a pit in my stomach is when that utility program uses some framework that I haven't learned, and don't need to because their code worked perfectly the first time. Surely that means I'm going to basically stop learning the details, as the details I've accumulated over my life quickly begin to not matter anymore. Honestly I'm planning to use AI to make a kick-ass retro development environment a la "Sending Modern Languages Back to 1980s Game Programmers" (https://prog21.dadgum.com/6.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/6.html) and spend my retirement having fun in it.
  • adamredwoods 8mo ago
    Natural language is not a programming language. Programming is precision. Natural language is fuzzy. >> spend my retirement having fun in it. People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.
    • joe_mamba 8mo ago
      >People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy. Not everyone has to become a programmer, people at the start of their careers can chooses paths other than programming if they're afraid of the (lack of) future prospects from AI. Where did people work before the ZIRP boom? Those industries are still around. Plenty of STEM related jobs besides programing.
    • richard_todd 8mo ago
• adamredwoods 8mo ago
  I agree with the nolanlawson's sentiment. What's interesting is many of the opposing statements here seem to be less interested in the actual code, and more interested in the final state. Both are valid, but one is going away due to technological advancements. That is the mourning. There are some of us who enjoyed the code as a thing to explore. Others here don't seem to like that as much.
  • hnthrow0287345 8mo ago
    I've never bought into it because like 80% of the work the world does is CRUD-level stuff which should be boring and simple so it can be readable and maintainable. The craftspeople doing the other 20% of the code are at the top end of the skill spectrum, but AI is starting from the bottom and working its way up. They should be the least worried about AI taking over their output. This is like throwing together dozens of stick frame homes that look alike vs. building custom log, brick, or stone houses. No one is going to be tearing down my drywall and marveling at how well the studs are spaced.
• docmars 8mo ago
  Dang right we do. And the problem isn't even the Junior Zoomer devs running circles around seniors. It's the CTO or Engineering VP himself disappearing for a few months and single-handedly consolidating a handful of products into a full rewrite for the company, excluding most of their engineering team from the process, and then laying them off after. The problem is the CEO pretending to be an engineer and thinking they know better because they can write English prompts and spit out a hideous prototype. The problem is Product Owners using LLMs to "write code" while their engineering team does zero human review before merging it, because their AI tooling was made solely responsible for code quality. If something's broken, just prompt a sloppy fix full of hidden performance and security bugs that the automated code review step missed. If you think this is hyperbole, I was recently laid off from a company that did exactly the above. Then in 2027, it will be product owners replacing the entire engineering team, including the CTO, because they made their system too reliable to justify their employment, while the "thinkers" get to build the product, engineers be damned. People with real skills they acquired over a lifetime are no longer shaping business. Reckless efficiency towards being average will rule the day.
• ath3nd 8mo ago
  [dead]
• EliRivers 8mo ago
  "They can write code better than you or I can" They can not. They can make some average code. On Friday one suggested an NSI installer script that would never bundle some needed files in the actual installer. I can only imagine that a lot of people have made the same mistake (used CopyFiles instead of File) and posted that mistake on the internet. The true disaster of that being that then testing out that installer on the developer's PC, where that CopyFiles may well work fine since the needed files happen to be sitting on that PC, would then lead on to think it was some weird bug that only failed on the end user's PC. I bet a lot of people posted it with comments like "this worked fine when I tried it," and here we are a decade later feeding that to an LLM. These tools can write average code. That's what they've mostly been fed; that's what they're aiming for when they do their number crunching. The more specifically one prompts, I expect, then the more acceptable that average code will be. In some cases, average appears to be shockingly bad (actually, based on a couple of decades' experience in the game, average is generally pretty bad - I surely must have been churning out some average, bad code twenty years ago). If I want better than average, I'm going to have to do it myself.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pojzon 8mo ago
    So it can write better code than your below average software engineer. It still cuts out 40-50% of workforce out. For above average engineers its very good. For bottom half not so much. Translate for Mgrs - it replaces offshore completely.
    • EliRivers 8mo ago
      And it will run rings around me in all the languages I don't know; every case in which my standard would be shockingly bad (I speak no APL whatsoever, for example) it would do better (in some cases, though, it would confidently produce an outcome that was actually worse than my null outcome).
    • geon 8mo ago
      The "below average" engineers are largely the juniors and the programming non-programmers. The juniors can't be replaced because all senior engineer were once junior. The non-programmers won't be replaced because they are not really programmers to begin with, so there is nothing to replace.
• kjgkjhfkjf 8mo ago
  I was very impressed by AI-generated CSS when I didn't know CSS. Then I learned CSS. Now I am not as impressed by AI-generated CSS.
  • nicoburns 8mo ago
    This seems to be a general rule for AI-generated anything. It's impressive in domains you're not an expert in. Much less so on domains you are an expert in.
  • bigyabai 8mo ago
    That's how I felt about human-generated CSS 10 years ago.
• darepublic 8mo ago
  This post is rather like a recent similar post "I miss thinking hard about things". Top comment quoted a metaphor relating to clay. No offense this blog article feels as if an LLM ingested that post and thread and produced a gestalt of it
• eliasdejong 8mo ago
  To me this sentiment is silly. Programming was never about the act of writing, but about making the computer do something. Now we can ask computers to helps us write instructions for them. Great if you ask me. And no, your job is not going away because human maintainers will always be required to review changes, communicate with stakeholders and provide a vision for the projects. I have yet to see a chatbot that can REDUCE entropy inside a codebases rather than continuously increase it with more and more slop.
• wasmainiac 8mo ago
  > If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. I’m not against AI in itself, but the current implementation (read market) can eat my shiny metal … I got kids to feed and bills to pay. Yes AI was all about post scarcity. Hiring in our industry is already feeling the brunt of AI, where is the UBI? Where is our soft landing? I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off, it will be life changing, and for what? For some rich person to be richer while simultaneously destroying the climate and my energy bill? I would push back, but I do not know how. Hope for the market to pop I guess.
  • tejohnso 8mo ago
    > I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off, it will be life changing, and for what? If you're not already retirement aged, how is age stopping you from learning a new skill? This sounds like learned ageism.
    • win311fwg 8mo ago
      It was said in the context of having bills to pay. Meaning that he is in deep and needs a high-priced developer salary to make ends meet. Virtually all other careers that offer similar compensation have an old boys club gatekeeping the profession, requiring you submit many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars before they will consider letting you in. That might pencil out as a reasonable investment when you are 14, but once you are mid-career you'll never get back what you put into it. Learning XYZ skill is something you can do at any age, and doing so will even get you an average paying job with ease. Learning the XYZ skill in the way that keeps the old boys happy is not a realistic option for someone who considers themselves old.
    • throw1235435 8mo ago
      Generally from a financial planning standpoint 35-50 is typically the "grinding years" where mortgage, family, and other life commitments means that typically your career investment needs to pay off to make it through. In some ways it is the "danger zone" financially. Hard to change careers (not young enough), but not yet worked enough to retire with large expenses coming in. This isn't unique to software engineers either -> this is most people in most jobs. There are also mixed people on these forums in different regions, countries, work experiences, etc. For example software in most places in the world had an above average salary but not extremely high (i.e. many other white collar professions would pay similar/more). For those people where it is a standard skilled role it probably hits even harder now than say the ones with lots of stock who can retire early and enjoy the new toy that is AI.
• arendtio 8mo ago
  > and parrot it back I don't like this particular phrase, as it suggests that LLMs are just replicating code. As far as I understand, LLMs can also create new code and algorithms (some better than others). When we think of them as copy-paste-maschines, we judge their capabilities unfairly and also underestimate their capabilities.
• cat-whisperer 8mo ago
  > We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands I agree, I started feeling this a few months ago, where I was only writing the architecture and abstractions and letting AI fill in the gaps. It seems in the next few months it could probably do more than that. But is it so bad, I agree that I can't really mold an entire pot by my hand any more. But, if you ask AI to do it, it will create a pot with cracks in it and it would be your job to either plaster it of fill gold in those cracks. I feel coding is going to be similar to kintsugi after this is all over
  • Dumblydorr 8mo ago
    Sort of ironic. My dad coded on hole punch cards and hated it, hated th physicality of that. Now he super loves AI, having left the field 20 years ago due to language fatigue.
• dave_sid 8mo ago
  I think you need to lighten up and adapt the way programmers have adapted since the 50s. There’s been a lot of pomposity over the past ten years around “craft”, you’d think we’re all precious Renaissance artists pining for recognition over our heavenly crafted code rather than engineers. I’m in my late forties also I’m case that matters at all, I don’t think it does. If anything that gives me an advantage to spot and quickly filter out the 1/10 insanely bad suggestions that AI pukes out and know when it’s giving me decent code. Who knows where it will lead but stubbornly refusing to move won’t help. Please take this in a positive way also, rather than a dig. Be positive. Also think of all the job opportunities you will have rewriting all the crap code that gets punted out over the next 10 years. You’re going to be rich. Seriously tho, if you are in your forties you have the advantage of leveraging AI yourself but also knowing when it is bull shitting you.
• yunnpp 8mo ago
  That Michael A Breeden in the comments section has some good insight going on. Make that post twice as valuable.
• kfn 8mo ago
  Something I've been unable to get any AI agent to do: add HDR support to Xorg. Certain things like this will be out of the realm of AI, because it doesn't understand the requirements.
• squirrellous 8mo ago
  It was pretty clear to me after interacting with the first popular ChatGPT version around end of 2022 that all knowledge jobs will be replaced sooner or later. I don’t think coding is somehow special. What we have right now is an intermediate stage where “taste” still matters, but this won’t last forever. I also believe that when all knowledge jobs are replaced, something fundamental needs to change in society. Trying to anticipate and prepare for that right now is premature.
• arathis 8mo ago
  The hypocrisy is outstanding. For years developers have worshipped at the alter of innovation, citing their role in decimating many old industries and crafts as just what we do. Now it’s come for you. Reap what we sow, people.
  • totallykvothe 8mo ago
    I highly doubt this specific person has looked down on others for also mourning the death of their craft. You can't rightly call someone a hypocrite and cite "developers" as your source.
• the_real_cher 8mo ago
  I for one am not going to miss wrangling over a bug at 1 in the morning.
• waterTanuki 8mo ago
  I've noticed a steep decline in software quality as a consumer since Covid, but especially since ChatGPT came out. That hasn't changed. Whether it's apps that hog too much memory, games that use too much storage, unresponsiveness, or just plain cryptic error messages, everything feels more fraile than it used to be. Perhaps its the growing pains of LLMs, a horde of junior programmers pushing stuff to production that the seniors were too "old fashioned" to notice. Only time will tell.
• thegrim000 8mo ago
  " They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months." It's ALWAYS wait 6 months, or wait for the next generation. Or "oh that model that we told you to use is old now, use this new one instead. Oh that doesn't work? Well that's old now, use this one". Always. 6 months ago it was wait 6 months. 12 months ago it was wait 6 months. 18 months ago it was wait 6 months. Now it's wait 6 months. 6 months from now it'll be wait 6 months.
• juliangmp 8mo ago
  > They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. I feel like I've been hearing this exact sentence for 2 years now...
• Havoc 8mo ago
  Think there is some reversion to wider mean at play here too. The majority of jobs out there are not about whether the employee feels fulfilled. And commoditisations of code is likely to trigger same here.
• tipsytoad 8mo ago
  Made it to the 5th stage of grief
• spicyusername 8mo ago
  We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.” I definitely feel this some days. It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, clever. Just the right abstractions. Complicated problems reduced to perfectly legible structures, easy to read for newcomers, easy to extend when new problems arise. Extracting that from an LLM just doesn't produce the same feeling, even when it produces the same results. And they don't reliably produce the same results yet even, just poor imitations, however functional. On the other hand, when they work, I am empowered to produce code I would have never thought of. I'm empowered to bounce an idea off an oracle that knows all the answers, and can tailor its responses to my exact use case. I'm coming around to finding the joy in that. I have to.
  • elzbardico 8mo ago
    I still nitpick it to death. If anything, I have more opportunities to nitpick code. LLM code is usually filthy: terrible abstractions, no care for complexity, cohesion, and coupling metrics. Debugging with LLMs is also a mixed experience; they can identify plenty of hypotheses very well, thanks to millions of dollars spent in RL, but they lack a more profound understanding of causal chains. They will try to change more than one thing at a time, even when doing so will completely invalidate the experiment; they will get into bizarre loops and weird tangents. They can help a lot, but if you want to have good results, it is way better if you strongly take control of the steering wheel. LLMs are basically the average developer, although with way more breadth. But still not much depth.
    • cindyllm 8mo ago
      [dead]
• waffletower 8mo ago
  I am at the tail-end of my career and I do not feel that option to ignore AI. Thankfully I am soberly fascinated with these developments. Also, I often find it is easier to articulate my coding desire with actual code, than with a descriptive prompt. And I have definitely seen AI fail in difficult scenarios. I am often needed.
• funkyfiddler369 8mo ago
  the robot does to programming what the wall street did to thievery. the police knew what's up. the law knew what's up. people knew what's up. you could be vigilant and prepared and reimbursed if the police managed to catch the thief. then came wall street and thieves (mostly) mourned their craft. the law has no idea. the police has no idea. the people have no idea. it's all fraud. no honor, no skill, no chance to reimburse those who are defrauded. jobs? demand creates jobs. doing things the right way creates jobs. not greedy, fuzzy business logic. that killed more jobs and SMEs than it created. killed more agency than it created opportunities. we know, it's just logic. but the law, the police, engineers looked the other way and worse, supported wall street. it's fun, I'm sure. but don't think the world doesn't know what role programmers played. mourn all you want. programmers had the chance to fight shady corporations and bad business practices and the darkest of dark patterns but they shat on teens and their attention and blamed the individual and worked for facebook and wall street and played key roles in expanding fraud, bad business practices and implemented more and more dark patterns and ways to hijack parents and teens minds, and to stress parents and kill agency and attention and care and vigilance. they had a chance. now they mourn their craft. I'm exaggerating. Relax. Y'all be fine. Others won't.
• AdeptusAquinas 8mo ago
  It's always 'eventually', 'soon', 'by the latter half of this year' with AI. Meanwhile I am both bemused and horrified as I watch a bunch of idiots desperate ly trying to find the magical 10x trick with AI unleash more and more mediocre code full of security vulnerabilities, running on agents with root permissions, that I somehow have to 'secure' for the company :D At least I have job security! Up until we get hacked sideways at least.
• KaseKun 8mo ago
  An excellent read. I mourn and i celebrate. I can't think of another craft for which the implicit goal was to make itself obsolete, but we've just about done it! and that is something to celebrate
• yason 8mo ago
  Most everything I've done professionally in my whole life has been about figuring out how to build something that doesn't yet exist. Usually this means a process of trial and error where I first try to build the full problem domain in my head and then proceed to think about what really needs to be done, given whatever the setting I'm in. For this, no farm of agents that can give me an answer because they don't know anymore than I do without going through the process of picturing it all out, and to be able to carry out this duty of the code dictator you have to have comprehension about the high-level stuff beyond the mechanical parts. You need a human objective, and you need to come up with one in order to implement it or ask AI to implement it. What this means is that there's always going to be a bleeding edge, a wave of the known unknown, where someone has to sit down and think before anything can happen. Once that is done then AI can work out part of or the rest of the implementation. The problem is that I genuinely like programming myself. I like the process of thinking in terms of drafting code, seeing how it works, and discovering new insights I get while doing the Nth rewrite. I don't mind AI writing smart boilerplate code for me to get things going but I have very little of that in the first place. However, I like the interactive process of designing by programming and I don't get at all the same excitement from interacting with an AI and letting an agent do all the "hard" work of prototyping the code. It's likely that my job will be more about the latter than the former, and I'm not thrilled about that. I know I can still find work doing the thinking what needs to be done part but the reason my work has been so enjoyable is how I've navigated through the whole high-level process by doing it in programming. If I were a bricklayer I'd enjoy building arches, tiny details, stairs, cupolas, and whatnot that ultimately, tie together on a higher level and produce a vast building (a cathedral!) that somehow carries its own weight. I wouldn't mind an AI assistant laying a tediously long brick wall for me, but part of how I figure out how everything will play together is in me building the distinct features one by one, and brick by brick. If my job would be changing into pre-drawing all these features and sections on paper and then handing it out to a horde of assistants to do the actual laying of bricks I'd be equally miserable. I know someone like me would still have to do the design part for each building but without also doing the bricklaying it's like imagining having sex with your wife. You like to imagine, too, but only because you know it's all backed up by sufficiently hands-down reality. Luckily, programming being what it is, I can program on my spare time just the way I like. All I need is a laptop. I don't have to give up what I like. And I already don't finish much anything I do on my own, I don't need to productise what I work on, I just enjoy working on it. So there's no reason for me to let AI "help" in being more productive at home. However, all through my working life I've had the utmost luxury of doing what I love for work and money. This might shift and change in the coming years in this world where productivity and shipping mean everything. My work won't go away but it will change onto a plane where the creativity and discovery needed for the design process get uncoupled from the raw, physical work of programming. I'd be asking AI to accomplish what I want enough many times that it starts to hit close enough, instead of writing iterations of prototypes myself. Or I'll instruct an AI to drive the process of running more AI in order to build and implement the end product. That's no doubt much less fun and nothing I signed up for, really.
• timbritt 8mo ago
  An architect knows the difference between this window and that, this door and another, a partition wall and a firewall, a tile roof and a metal one. The architect understands how to orient them and work the materials together. But the architect does not have to make the windows, or the doors, or the walls…or the roof to create the house. There are lots of things that autonomous agents are not so good at. Most of the things it took away from me are things that were holding me back in the first place.