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> 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 t

> 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 9mo 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 9mo 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?
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity. You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough. Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
    - lelanthran 9mo ago
      > Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud” Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument. I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on: > If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
      - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
        There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code. Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
      - NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
        > The argument is not Then what is it. be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.
- nunez 9mo ago
  Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit. It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    Well as depressing as it is, check out the 2024 and 2025 YC batches. Guess how many of them are “ai” something or other? It’s never been about “hackers”. Not a single founder who takes VC funding is thinking about a sustainable business - at least their investors aren’t - they are hoping for the “exit”. It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.
  - danparsonson 9mo ago
    > Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work. > It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income. The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter. I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago
I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context
- whtrbt 9mo ago
  Business Analyst
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc. They know everything, except how to program.
  - zabzonk 9mo ago
    > They know everything, except how to program In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program.
    - lelanthran 9mo ago
      > In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program. In my experience (Banking, Insurance, Fintech, etc) they were invaluable. If, while developing, you hit some ambiguity in the spec, you could always go to the BA that wrote the spec and clarify, and I've never had the situation where they responded "Wait, let me ask the customer"; they knew what the business process should be, what the workflow should be, etc. It worked for the customer as well - when they had trouble deciding "should or workflow do $FOO or $BAR?", a quick chat to our BA would be enough for them to make a decision. Now, having worked in Agile shops (which I believe are the majority), there is no space for a BA - the ethos is "through something together, and if the customer doesn't want it, refine it until they do", so any BAs in this shop tend to be superfluous anyway because there is no place for them in the process anyway. That's a failure of the process, not a failure of the role.
  - nunez 9mo ago
    I was a BA forever ago during a summer job in college. That job wasn't for me at all! Looking back on the experience, putting together a FRD felt much like writing a CLAUDE.md with some prompts thrown in!
sincerely 9mo ago
I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't really have much ground to complain
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
marcus_holmes 9mo ago
I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing. Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much. I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.
- iqp 9mo ago
  ^ This. People bemoan the death of coding, but easily 80%+ of the code I've written commercially was just CRUD or ETL shite. I've done a few interesting things (a formula parser, a WYSWIG survey builder for signature pads, a navigation controller for line-guided industrial vehicles, etc.) but yeah, don't miss writing reams of boilerplate. I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say!
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. LLMs are a multiplier. If this depressed you, then there is no way I can see the following happening. > If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say! What LLMs are going to do is multiply the amount of "none of your colleagues care" and "Management only does lip-service to ..."
    - marcus_holmes 9mo ago
      It's not that none of my colleagues care, or that management is necessarily bad. That doesn't help, but it's not the cause. It's the nature of the job. A CRUD REST server needs to be built. It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it. The interesting part of the job is over there, in whatever actually-novel part of the system is being built. But someone still has to build the CRUD REST server. There are frameworks and patterns that help, but not as much as you'd think, or they claim. It's just part of the job. By far the largest and least interesting part of the job.
bestthrowaway 9mo ago
I play video games for fun. I also enjoy automation games where the point is to get the game to play itself. I like achievements, but I won't "cheat" to get them. My company pays me to build software that helps make them money. They don't care how I write that software as long as I do it fast and correctly. If that's by hand, I'll do it by hand. If vibe coding can get the job done, then I'll do that. "Vibe coding" isn't just writing specs. It's ensuring that the vibe coding process doesn't introduce regressions, new bugs, etc. My boss writes specs for me, which, if I were to naively plop them into cursor or Claude code, would generate stuff that kinda works but not in a way that could be considered production ready. I plan, adjust the plan, generate, regenerate, refine. Could it be done faster by hand? Maybe. But it's the tool I've chosen for the job and the bosses are happy with it.
ern_ave 9mo ago
> letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. I'd love to get to the point where I'm still writing code, but the LLM is typing it for me. Part of the problem though, is that I actually kind of think in code, and I often have to start typing in order to fully form an algorithm in my head.

raw_anon_1111 9mo 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 9mo 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?
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity. You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough. Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud” Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument. I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on: > If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code. Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
    - NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
      > The argument is not Then what is it. be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.
nunez 9mo ago
Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit. It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  Well as depressing as it is, check out the 2024 and 2025 YC batches. Guess how many of them are “ai” something or other? It’s never been about “hackers”. Not a single founder who takes VC funding is thinking about a sustainable business - at least their investors aren’t - they are hoping for the “exit”. It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.
- danparsonson 9mo ago
  > Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work. > It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income. The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter. I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)

HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago

I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context

whtrbt 9mo ago
Business Analyst
lelanthran 9mo ago
> I cannot figure out what you mean by "BA" in this context Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc. They know everything, except how to program.
- zabzonk 9mo ago
  > They know everything, except how to program In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program.
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program. In my experience (Banking, Insurance, Fintech, etc) they were invaluable. If, while developing, you hit some ambiguity in the spec, you could always go to the BA that wrote the spec and clarify, and I've never had the situation where they responded "Wait, let me ask the customer"; they knew what the business process should be, what the workflow should be, etc. It worked for the customer as well - when they had trouble deciding "should or workflow do $FOO or $BAR?", a quick chat to our BA would be enough for them to make a decision. Now, having worked in Agile shops (which I believe are the majority), there is no space for a BA - the ethos is "through something together, and if the customer doesn't want it, refine it until they do", so any BAs in this shop tend to be superfluous anyway because there is no place for them in the process anyway. That's a failure of the process, not a failure of the role.
- nunez 9mo ago
  I was a BA forever ago during a summer job in college. That job wasn't for me at all! Looking back on the experience, putting together a FRD felt much like writing a CLAUDE.md with some prompts thrown in!

sincerely 9mo ago

I've been coping by reminding myself that I was absurdly lucky to have found a job that was also enjoyable and intellectually stimulating for so long, and if all AI does is bring software engineering down to the level of roughly every other job in the world in terms of fun, I don't really have much ground to complain

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

marcus_holmes 9mo ago

I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing. Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much. I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.

iqp 9mo ago
^ This. People bemoan the death of coding, but easily 80%+ of the code I've written commercially was just CRUD or ETL shite. I've done a few interesting things (a formula parser, a WYSWIG survey builder for signature pads, a navigation controller for line-guided industrial vehicles, etc.) but yeah, don't miss writing reams of boilerplate. I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say!
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. LLMs are a multiplier. If this depressed you, then there is no way I can see the following happening. > If LLMs make this shit more bearable then bring 'em on, I say! What LLMs are going to do is multiply the amount of "none of your colleagues care" and "Management only does lip-service to ..."
  - marcus_holmes 9mo ago
    It's not that none of my colleagues care, or that management is necessarily bad. That doesn't help, but it's not the cause. It's the nature of the job. A CRUD REST server needs to be built. It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it. The interesting part of the job is over there, in whatever actually-novel part of the system is being built. But someone still has to build the CRUD REST server. There are frameworks and patterns that help, but not as much as you'd think, or they claim. It's just part of the job. By far the largest and least interesting part of the job.

bestthrowaway 9mo ago

I play video games for fun. I also enjoy automation games where the point is to get the game to play itself. I like achievements, but I won't "cheat" to get them. My company pays me to build software that helps make them money. They don't care how I write that software as long as I do it fast and correctly. If that's by hand, I'll do it by hand. If vibe coding can get the job done, then I'll do that. "Vibe coding" isn't just writing specs. It's ensuring that the vibe coding process doesn't introduce regressions, new bugs, etc. My boss writes specs for me, which, if I were to naively plop them into cursor or Claude code, would generate stuff that kinda works but not in a way that could be considered production ready. I plan, adjust the plan, generate, regenerate, refine. Could it be done faster by hand? Maybe. But it's the tool I've chosen for the job and the bosses are happy with it.

ern_ave 9mo ago

> letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me. I'd love to get to the point where I'm still writing code, but the LLM is typing it for me. Part of the problem though, is that I actually kind of think in code, and I often have to start typing in order to fully form an algorithm in my head.