8 ms·

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are

by sho_hn 8mo ago

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results. The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks. I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
- sho_hn 8mo ago
  I resonate with that. I also find writing code super pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with a giddy high. What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop. It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.
  - bearfox 8mo ago
    I'm in the enjoy writing code camp and do see merits of the hybrid approach, but I also worry about the (mental) costs. I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration. In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only now without coding sessions to clear my brain.
    - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
      I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your mental model of the code. Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace. LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes. Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
      - bearfox 8mo ago
        It rings true. Then we have a question in front of use - when you're doing the changes yourself you are also building and adapting the mental model of the system - which approach needs less effort in total?
  - kelvinjps10 8mo ago
    I get a dopamine hit with AI by being able to accomplish tasks fast, mostly in frontent or using a dynamic language like python because you see the changes in real time
  - duskdozer 8mo ago
    I'll use some small code completion but that's it. And only when I can do it locally with non-proprietary software.
- jayd16 8mo ago
  Hope: I want to become a stronger dev. Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.
  - organsnyder 8mo ago
    > ...the reward of mentoring. I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to codify it in the prompt. And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-of-the-art of the industry.
  - rurp 8mo ago
    LLMs are similar in a lot of ways to the labor outsourcing that happened a generation or two ago. Except that instead of this development lifting a billion people out of poverty in the third world a handful of rich people will get even more rich and everyone else will have higher energy bills.
- JeremyNT 8mo ago
  This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
  - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mbgerring 8mo ago
      You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless, for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best of luck
    - takklob 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
        Either you're thinking of the "room temperature semi-conductor" thing out of Korea, or you're some boomer who forgot that cold fusion was in the 80s.
        selcuka 8mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
    - goatlover 8mo ago
- blibble 8mo ago
  exactly thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now am more or less continuing to work because I want to which will end for my employer if they insist on making me output generative excrement
- p-t 8mo ago
  i agree. it seem like an expectation these days to use AI sometimes... for me i am happy not using it at all, i like to be able to say "I made this" :)
  - neilellis 8mo ago
    I suppose the question is "Do you feel Steve Jobs made the iPhone?" Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test - about what you feel defines 'making this'?
    - p-t 8mo ago
      it's more just a personal want to be able to see what I can do on my own tbh; i don't generally judge other people on that measure although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol
      - neilellis 8mo ago
        So not disagreeing as you say, it is a personal thing! I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too. I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have always been my output. It's just that before I had to write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the problems and the AI makes it into code. I think that this probably the dividing line, some people enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors), some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide when looking at AI. Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will have a very different feeling :-)
        abustamam 8mo ago
        If you managed an AI (or rather, ai system) that wrote a compiler or web browser like Claude code or cursor did, would you feel like you did it? Just a curious question, not trying to be combative or anything. I myself will go into planning mode and ask it to implement a feature, and ask it to give me tradeoffs between implementation details. Then I might chat with it a bit to further understand the implementation before it writes the plan. I find it to be very effective and gives me a sense of agency in my features.
- icedchai 8mo ago
  There's room for both. Give AI the boilerplate, save the exciting stuff for you.
  - r_lee 8mo ago
    but are employers going to be fine with that?
    - icedchai 8mo ago
      That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.
      - harimau777 8mo ago
        These are the same employers that mandate return to office for distributed teams and micro-manage every access of our work. I think we know how its going to play out.
      - cstever 8mo ago
        It does NOT remain to be seen. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-staff-who-cant-be-reskilled-on-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-s... Big players are already moving in the direction of "join us or leave us". So if you can't keep up and you aren't developing or "reinventing" something faster with the help of AI, it was nice knowing you.
        icedchai 8mo ago
        I didn't say don't use AI at all, I said give it the boilerplate, rote work. Developers can still work on more interesting things. Maybe not all the interesting things.
        cstever 8mo ago
        That may be fine ... if it remains your choice. I'm saying companies are outmoding people (programmers, designers, managers, et al) who don't leverage AI to do their job the fastest. If one programmer uses AI to do boilerplate and then codes the interesting bits personally and it takes a week and another does it all with AI (orchestrating agents, etc) and it takes 2 hours and produces the same output (not code but business value), the AI orchestrator/manager will be valued above the former.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- QuercusMax 8mo ago
  I like writing new, interesting code, but learning framework #400 with all its own idiosyncrasies has gotten really old. I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. It's very sad, for me. Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games. I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs. It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them. I don't see a solution here.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth. Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does. While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.
    - lelanthran 8mo ago
      > Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. You are not the first person to say things like this. Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
- qingcharles 8mo ago
  AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire career. I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me. I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.
  - nomel 8mo ago
    Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level design/structure part of it. THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns. Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
    - qingcharles 8mo ago
      Definitely go for that middle step. If it's something bigger I get them to draw out a multi-phase plan, then I go through and refine that .md and have them work from that.
    - burnerToBetOut 8mo ago
      > …I suspect going a more visual block > diagram route, to generate some > intermediate .md or whatever, might have > promise, especially for defining clear > bounds/separation of concerns… Can confirm [1] So can my automaton bud [2]… _____ MODEL … The Verdict: If you provide a clear instruction like "Before you touch the code, read architecture.puml and ensure your changes do not violate the defined inheritance/dependency structure," the agent will be very effective at following it. If you just "hope" it bears it in mind, it probably won't. _The agent is a tool, not a mind-reader; it will take the shortest path to a passing test unless you wall that path off with your architectural models_. … To make it actually work, you need to turn the UML from a "suggestion" into a "blocker." You should add a section to your AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md ) that looks like this: 1. Tool Trigger: By using words like "…" … Why this works: … _____ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935979 [2] https://g2ww.short.gy/TheMightyBooch https://g2ww.short.gy/TheMightyBooch
- mbesto 8mo ago
  Woodworking is still a thing despite IKEA, big box furniture stores, etc.
  - cstever 8mo ago
    People will pay for quality craftsmanship they can touch and enjoy and can afford and cannot do on their own - woodworking. Less so for quality code and apps because (as the Super Bowl ads showed us) anyone can create an app for their business and it's good enough. The days of high-paid coders is nearly gone. The senior and principals will hang on a little longer. Those that can adapt to business analyst mode and project manager will as well (CEOs have already told us this: adapt or get gone), but eventually even they will be outmoded because why buy a $8000 couch when I can buy one for $200 and build it myself?
- resonious 8mo ago
  Then don't delegate it to AI.
- brian_cunnie 8mo ago
  > For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it ... This. On my fun side project, I don't accept pull requests because writing the code is the fun part. Only once did someone get mad at me for not accepting their pull request.
- nylonstrung 8mo ago
  I think this is subjective, I personally enjoy "managing" agents more than handwriting code and dealing with syntax At the very least, it feels ergonomic and saves me keystrokes in the same way as stuff like snippets & aliases
  - abustamam 8mo ago
    Likewise! It's a fun puzzle to solve to figure out the right incantation to get the LLM to do what I want it to do without going off the rails.
- carefree-bob 8mo ago
  Why do you need to delegate writing code to AI? I don't do that. Is your job mandating that you vibe code? How would they know?
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    They would know when you are two or three times slower producing code because you insist on having your own handcrafted, bespoke artisanal code that doesn’t meet the requirements any better than Claude could do.
    - carefree-bob 8mo ago
      Two to three times faster? Has productivity doubled or tripled? Stuff shipping in 1/3 the time? I'm not aware of this - which company is now shipping features twice as fast? AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward. You can also use AI to write unit tests, documentation, and stuff like that, while writing the code yourself.
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers. And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code. Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting. Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity. I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time. Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional [1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.
- bestthrowaway 8mo ago
  I don't understand the problem. Nothing is stopping you from writing code.
- plastic-enjoyer 8mo ago
  > I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. Maybe this is the reason why I don't care that much about coding agents or have a strong opinion about them, because code was only a means to an end for me. What I enjoy is to learn about and understand systems and designing those systems, whether it's computers, operating systems or software architectures. I never did enjoy just hacking away or writing CRUD stuff.
- nextaccountic 8mo ago
  In your own open source projects you can ban AI. A number of projects did just that. Programming doesn't need to be an activity people do just to earn money.
ex-aws-dude 8mo ago
I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than experienced developers.
mannanj 8mo ago
For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and an AI replaces us fully.
- joquarky 8mo ago
  For some of us, our jobs have already been completely disrupted by other factors (e.g., ageism) so there is nothing to lose here after 2 years and 2400+ job applications with nothing to show for it. Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding. If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.
  - mannanj 8mo ago
    Ah yes I hear that - I am hearing you share that it has felt society neglected and even discriminated actively against you. I am so sorry and can feel your pain. One push back I have for you is to inquire about what "society" really means here for you and if its really society thats doing this for/to you or some other force or influence. IMO it's a selective class of a few who drive things and hold exhorbant influence, the unaccountable leadership class I'll call them. It is they who fund and hold accountable the news organizations to drive their agendas, in a real-life conspiracy scenario it is actively as you say and I feel the constricting onto my own livelihood too as you say. On the other hand I don't believe ever the maxim you said of "everyone for themselves" as that's never true and never really has been. I think part of the messaging and programming of the unaccountable leadership class that they use the "news" to reinforce is this sense of powerlessness and disconnection, isolation from others. It's like we haven't been taught on how to organize and support each other and were made reliant on those systems outside us that they once let give us enough to survive. Now as they are reeling back those support systems we are back to what it always was: organizing with our communities, with strangers online and finding kindness and hope enough to organize ways of living that support us all. Not the select few. I guess thats my way of saying even if we are defecting against each other to survive, we would do well to never forget what our greater intention and purpose is: to help each other ultimately and not these few rich actors who own the companies.
bambax 8mo ago
Yes, absolutely. I think the companies that don't understand software, don't value software and that think that all tech is fundamentally equivalent, and who will therefore always choose the cheaper option, and fire all their good people, will eventually fail. And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.
OptionOfT 8mo ago
I think the issue is that given the speed the bad dev can generate sub-par results that at face value look good enough overwhelm any procedures in place. Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.
icedchai 8mo ago
I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.
- joquarky 8mo ago
  So fire them and hire the experienced people excluded due to ageism who can't get a foot in the door anywhere because their resume shows that they went to college before the internet became commercialized.
- abustamam 8mo ago
  I think if companies are gonna allow engineers to vibe code they really need to provide training on how to vibe code and not produce slop. If a company is gonna REQUIRE vibe coding as an accelerator then it is in the company's best interest to invest in education!
nprz 8mo ago
I think there is more existential fear that is left unaddressed. Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a while, but will they? And for how long? $660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the models trained in these facilities be capable of?
- hinkley 8mo ago
  When the VC money runs out, the AI will have to get twice as good in order to make the price work out to be the same. Or they'll keep the price and enshittify the results.
bmitc 8mo ago
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting. Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.
- joquarky 8mo ago
  It used to be fun before companies figured out how to put claustrophobic guardrails on our autonomy.
tehjoker 8mo ago
It's a combination of things... it's not just that AI feels like it is stripping the dignity of the human spirit in some ways, but it's also that the work we are doing is often detrimental to our fellow man. So learning to work with AI to do that faster (!!) (if it is actually faster on average), feels like doubling down.
kgwxd 8mo ago
One thing I'm hoping will come out of this is the retiring of coders that always turn what should be a basic CRUD app (just about everything) into some novelty project trying to pre-solve every possible concern that could ever come up, and/or a no-code solution that will never actually get used by a non-developer and frustrate every developer that is forced to use it.
akdev1l 8mo ago
I’m not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the point I’d consider leaving the industry entirely I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all
- jbeninger 8mo ago
  I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete. When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself. YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
  - akdev1l 8mo ago
    I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
    - jbeninger 8mo ago
      Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I don't have that problem
    - saghm 8mo ago
      Having bad coworkers who write sloppy code isn't a new problem, and it's always been a social problem rather than a technical one. There was probably a lot less garbage code back when it all only ran on mainframes because fewer people having access meant that only the best would get the chance, but I still think that opening that up has been a net benefit for the craft as a whole.
flatline 8mo ago
I think it represents a bigger threat than you realize. I can't use an AI for my day job to implement these multi-agent workflows I see. They are all controlled by another company with little or no privacy guarantees. I can run quantized (even more braindead) models locally but my work will be 3-5 years behind the SOTA, and when the SOTA is evolving faster than that timeline there's a problem. At some point there's going to be turnover - like a lake in winter - where AI companies effectively control the development lifecycle end-to-end.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
saithound 8mo ago
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner. But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper. My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.
- bonsai_spool 8mo ago
  >We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner. The chess board is still there, not sure I see how LLM tools compels one to stop writing personal projects without AI assistance.
- saghm 8mo ago
  Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
  - saithound 8mo ago
    > you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it. Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved. Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.
TechDebtDevin 8mo ago
[dead]

by sho_hn 8mo ago

bigstrat2003 8mo ago

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

sho_hn 8mo ago
I resonate with that. I also find writing code super pleasurable. It's immediate stress relief for me, I love the focus and the flow. I end long hands-on coding sessions with a giddy high. What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop. It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.
- bearfox 8mo ago
  I'm in the enjoy writing code camp and do see merits of the hybrid approach, but I also worry about the (mental) costs. I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration. In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only now without coding sessions to clear my brain.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your mental model of the code. Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace. LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes. Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
    - bearfox 8mo ago
      It rings true. Then we have a question in front of use - when you're doing the changes yourself you are also building and adapting the mental model of the system - which approach needs less effort in total?
- kelvinjps10 8mo ago
  I get a dopamine hit with AI by being able to accomplish tasks fast, mostly in frontent or using a dynamic language like python because you see the changes in real time
- duskdozer 8mo ago
  I'll use some small code completion but that's it. And only when I can do it locally with non-proprietary software.
jayd16 8mo ago
Hope: I want to become a stronger dev. Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.
- organsnyder 8mo ago
  > ...the reward of mentoring. I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to codify it in the prompt. And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-of-the-art of the industry.
- rurp 8mo ago
  LLMs are similar in a lot of ways to the labor outsourcing that happened a generation or two ago. Except that instead of this development lifting a billion people out of poverty in the third world a handful of rich people will get even more rich and everyone else will have higher energy bills.
JeremyNT 8mo ago
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
- Der_Einzige 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mbgerring 8mo ago
    You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless, for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best of luck
  - takklob 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
      Either you're thinking of the "room temperature semi-conductor" thing out of Korea, or you're some boomer who forgot that cold fusion was in the 80s.
      - selcuka 8mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
  - goatlover 8mo ago
blibble 8mo ago
exactly thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now am more or less continuing to work because I want to which will end for my employer if they insist on making me output generative excrement
p-t 8mo ago
i agree. it seem like an expectation these days to use AI sometimes... for me i am happy not using it at all, i like to be able to say "I made this" :)
- neilellis 8mo ago
  I suppose the question is "Do you feel Steve Jobs made the iPhone?" Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test - about what you feel defines 'making this'?
  - p-t 8mo ago
    it's more just a personal want to be able to see what I can do on my own tbh; i don't generally judge other people on that measure although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol
    - neilellis 8mo ago
      So not disagreeing as you say, it is a personal thing! I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too. I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have always been my output. It's just that before I had to write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the problems and the AI makes it into code. I think that this probably the dividing line, some people enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors), some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide when looking at AI. Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will have a very different feeling :-)
      - abustamam 8mo ago
        If you managed an AI (or rather, ai system) that wrote a compiler or web browser like Claude code or cursor did, would you feel like you did it? Just a curious question, not trying to be combative or anything. I myself will go into planning mode and ask it to implement a feature, and ask it to give me tradeoffs between implementation details. Then I might chat with it a bit to further understand the implementation before it writes the plan. I find it to be very effective and gives me a sense of agency in my features.
icedchai 8mo ago
There's room for both. Give AI the boilerplate, save the exciting stuff for you.
- r_lee 8mo ago
  but are employers going to be fine with that?
  - icedchai 8mo ago
    That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.
    - harimau777 8mo ago
      These are the same employers that mandate return to office for distributed teams and micro-manage every access of our work. I think we know how its going to play out.
    - cstever 8mo ago
      It does NOT remain to be seen. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-staff-who-cant-be-reskilled-on-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-s... Big players are already moving in the direction of "join us or leave us". So if you can't keep up and you aren't developing or "reinventing" something faster with the help of AI, it was nice knowing you.
      - icedchai 8mo ago
        I didn't say don't use AI at all, I said give it the boilerplate, rote work. Developers can still work on more interesting things. Maybe not all the interesting things.
        cstever 8mo ago
        That may be fine ... if it remains your choice. I'm saying companies are outmoding people (programmers, designers, managers, et al) who don't leverage AI to do their job the fastest. If one programmer uses AI to do boilerplate and then codes the interesting bits personally and it takes a week and another does it all with AI (orchestrating agents, etc) and it takes 2 hours and produces the same output (not code but business value), the AI orchestrator/manager will be valued above the former.
deleted 8mo ago
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QuercusMax 8mo ago
I like writing new, interesting code, but learning framework #400 with all its own idiosyncrasies has gotten really old. I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.
lelanthran 8mo ago
> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. It's very sad, for me. Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games. I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs. It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them. I don't see a solution here.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth. Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does. While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.
  - lelanthran 8mo ago
    > Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. You are not the first person to say things like this. Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
qingcharles 8mo ago
AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire career. I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me. I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.
- nomel 8mo ago
  Same here, and I also really enjoy the high level design/structure part of it. THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns. Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
  - qingcharles 8mo ago
    Definitely go for that middle step. If it's something bigger I get them to draw out a multi-phase plan, then I go through and refine that .md and have them work from that.
  - burnerToBetOut 8mo ago
    > …I suspect going a more visual block > diagram route, to generate some > intermediate .md or whatever, might have > promise, especially for defining clear > bounds/separation of concerns… Can confirm [1] So can my automaton bud [2]… _____ MODEL … The Verdict: If you provide a clear instruction like "Before you touch the code, read architecture.puml and ensure your changes do not violate the defined inheritance/dependency structure," the agent will be very effective at following it. If you just "hope" it bears it in mind, it probably won't. _The agent is a tool, not a mind-reader; it will take the shortest path to a passing test unless you wall that path off with your architectural models_. … To make it actually work, you need to turn the UML from a "suggestion" into a "blocker." You should add a section to your AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md ) that looks like this: 1. Tool Trigger: By using words like "…" … Why this works: … _____ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935979 [2] https://g2ww.short.gy/TheMightyBooch https://g2ww.short.gy/TheMightyBooch
mbesto 8mo ago
Woodworking is still a thing despite IKEA, big box furniture stores, etc.
- cstever 8mo ago
  People will pay for quality craftsmanship they can touch and enjoy and can afford and cannot do on their own - woodworking. Less so for quality code and apps because (as the Super Bowl ads showed us) anyone can create an app for their business and it's good enough. The days of high-paid coders is nearly gone. The senior and principals will hang on a little longer. Those that can adapt to business analyst mode and project manager will as well (CEOs have already told us this: adapt or get gone), but eventually even they will be outmoded because why buy a $8000 couch when I can buy one for $200 and build it myself?
resonious 8mo ago
Then don't delegate it to AI.
brian_cunnie 8mo ago
> For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it ... This. On my fun side project, I don't accept pull requests because writing the code is the fun part. Only once did someone get mad at me for not accepting their pull request.
nylonstrung 8mo ago
I think this is subjective, I personally enjoy "managing" agents more than handwriting code and dealing with syntax At the very least, it feels ergonomic and saves me keystrokes in the same way as stuff like snippets & aliases
- abustamam 8mo ago
  Likewise! It's a fun puzzle to solve to figure out the right incantation to get the LLM to do what I want it to do without going off the rails.
carefree-bob 8mo ago
Why do you need to delegate writing code to AI? I don't do that. Is your job mandating that you vibe code? How would they know?
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  They would know when you are two or three times slower producing code because you insist on having your own handcrafted, bespoke artisanal code that doesn’t meet the requirements any better than Claude could do.
  - carefree-bob 8mo ago
    Two to three times faster? Has productivity doubled or tripled? Stuff shipping in 1/3 the time? I'm not aware of this - which company is now shipping features twice as fast? AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward. You can also use AI to write unit tests, documentation, and stuff like that, while writing the code yourself.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers. And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code. Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting. Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity. I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time. Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional [1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.
bestthrowaway 8mo ago
I don't understand the problem. Nothing is stopping you from writing code.
plastic-enjoyer 8mo ago
> I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth. Maybe this is the reason why I don't care that much about coding agents or have a strong opinion about them, because code was only a means to an end for me. What I enjoy is to learn about and understand systems and designing those systems, whether it's computers, operating systems or software architectures. I never did enjoy just hacking away or writing CRUD stuff.
nextaccountic 8mo ago
In your own open source projects you can ban AI. A number of projects did just that. Programming doesn't need to be an activity people do just to earn money.

ex-aws-dude 8mo ago

I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than experienced developers.

mannanj 8mo ago

For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and an AI replaces us fully.

joquarky 8mo ago
For some of us, our jobs have already been completely disrupted by other factors (e.g., ageism) so there is nothing to lose here after 2 years and 2400+ job applications with nothing to show for it. Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding. If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.
- mannanj 8mo ago
  Ah yes I hear that - I am hearing you share that it has felt society neglected and even discriminated actively against you. I am so sorry and can feel your pain. One push back I have for you is to inquire about what "society" really means here for you and if its really society thats doing this for/to you or some other force or influence. IMO it's a selective class of a few who drive things and hold exhorbant influence, the unaccountable leadership class I'll call them. It is they who fund and hold accountable the news organizations to drive their agendas, in a real-life conspiracy scenario it is actively as you say and I feel the constricting onto my own livelihood too as you say. On the other hand I don't believe ever the maxim you said of "everyone for themselves" as that's never true and never really has been. I think part of the messaging and programming of the unaccountable leadership class that they use the "news" to reinforce is this sense of powerlessness and disconnection, isolation from others. It's like we haven't been taught on how to organize and support each other and were made reliant on those systems outside us that they once let give us enough to survive. Now as they are reeling back those support systems we are back to what it always was: organizing with our communities, with strangers online and finding kindness and hope enough to organize ways of living that support us all. Not the select few. I guess thats my way of saying even if we are defecting against each other to survive, we would do well to never forget what our greater intention and purpose is: to help each other ultimately and not these few rich actors who own the companies.

bambax 8mo ago

Yes, absolutely. I think the companies that don't understand software, don't value software and that think that all tech is fundamentally equivalent, and who will therefore always choose the cheaper option, and fire all their good people, will eventually fail. And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.

OptionOfT 8mo ago

I think the issue is that given the speed the bad dev can generate sub-par results that at face value look good enough overwhelm any procedures in place. Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.

icedchai 8mo ago

I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.

joquarky 8mo ago
So fire them and hire the experienced people excluded due to ageism who can't get a foot in the door anywhere because their resume shows that they went to college before the internet became commercialized.
abustamam 8mo ago
I think if companies are gonna allow engineers to vibe code they really need to provide training on how to vibe code and not produce slop. If a company is gonna REQUIRE vibe coding as an accelerator then it is in the company's best interest to invest in education!

nprz 8mo ago

I think there is more existential fear that is left unaddressed. Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a while, but will they? And for how long? $660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the models trained in these facilities be capable of?

hinkley 8mo ago
When the VC money runs out, the AI will have to get twice as good in order to make the price work out to be the same. Or they'll keep the price and enshittify the results.

bmitc 8mo ago

> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting. Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.

joquarky 8mo ago
It used to be fun before companies figured out how to put claustrophobic guardrails on our autonomy.

tehjoker 8mo ago

It's a combination of things... it's not just that AI feels like it is stripping the dignity of the human spirit in some ways, but it's also that the work we are doing is often detrimental to our fellow man. So learning to work with AI to do that faster (!!) (if it is actually faster on average), feels like doubling down.

kgwxd 8mo ago

One thing I'm hoping will come out of this is the retiring of coders that always turn what should be a basic CRUD app (just about everything) into some novelty project trying to pre-solve every possible concern that could ever come up, and/or a no-code solution that will never actually get used by a non-developer and frustrate every developer that is forced to use it.

akdev1l 8mo ago

I’m not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the point I’d consider leaving the industry entirely I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all

jbeninger 8mo ago
I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete. When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself. YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
- akdev1l 8mo ago
  I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
  - jbeninger 8mo ago
    Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I don't have that problem
  - saghm 8mo ago
    Having bad coworkers who write sloppy code isn't a new problem, and it's always been a social problem rather than a technical one. There was probably a lot less garbage code back when it all only ran on mainframes because fewer people having access meant that only the best would get the chance, but I still think that opening that up has been a net benefit for the craft as a whole.

flatline 8mo ago

I think it represents a bigger threat than you realize. I can't use an AI for my day job to implement these multi-agent workflows I see. They are all controlled by another company with little or no privacy guarantees. I can run quantized (even more braindead) models locally but my work will be 3-5 years behind the SOTA, and when the SOTA is evolving faster than that timeline there's a problem. At some point there's going to be turnover - like a lake in winter - where AI companies effectively control the development lifecycle end-to-end.

deleted 8mo ago

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saithound 8mo ago

> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner. But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper. My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.

bonsai_spool 8mo ago
>We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner. The chess board is still there, not sure I see how LLM tools compels one to stop writing personal projects without AI assistance.
saghm 8mo ago
Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
- saithound 8mo ago
  > you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it. Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved. Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.

TechDebtDevin 8mo ago

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