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> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding sin
by pmarreck 7mo ago
> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression
this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing
but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivot in the short term
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoI’m retired, so a career pivot isn’t in the cards for me. I’m also not really in the HN gestalt, so to speak. I have some views that are common, hereabouts, and some, not so much. I’m enjoying having an LLM “pair partner.”
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoYes, it's a partner you can discuss things with, and it never belittles you or gets tired.
- krd8ssb 7mo agoI'm with you on this being incredibly exciting. I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly. I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was just a means to do that and the new tools with LLM and agents have allowed me to do the core of what I love way more than coding by hand could have ever allowed
- accounting2026 7mo agoSame boat (though 44M) - I don't think it has become less fun, on the contrary it can help with the stuff that was trivial but could still take time to get right. Now it can crank out that stuff often correctly on first try. Of course I have the same fear of job security as everyone else and it is sad to see something you were good at being taken over by machines, but it is not because I enjoy the work itself less, quite the contrary.
- amelius 7mo agoCoding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it. That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.
- ngcazz 7mo agoI live with a feeling of nonaccomplishment, never having taken a project to completion thanks to my shitty executive function. The AI craze has robbed me of any hope that I might still meaningfully* achieve this in my career.
- axus 7mo agoCouldn't an AI help you take a project to completion, at least until you run out of money?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ngcazz 7mo agoI didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I signed up for was writing my own software. I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years. That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus. But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things? (I hope I'm getting my idea across)
- ygjb 7mo agoYou have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions. I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension. Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'. Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :) Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.
- skeeter2020 7mo agoWay to blame the poster for their problems, and what the hell is a "short term career pivot"?
- infecto 7mo agoI don’t think anyone is blaming but it’s hard to ignore the progress we are seeing and thinks that these workflows will not be the norm in instead of the exception.
- pmarreck 7mo agoWho is blaming anyone? Does someone blame the manual loom operators when automated weaving comes out? The elevator operators? The carriage drivers? The milkmen? No. So please stop reading your preconceived grievances into what I said. I just see this as something that is not going to go away so the only rational choice is to get ahead of it and master it before it runs you over. If you love the act of creation and can adapt to a certain amount of change (or even see it as exciting), you'll be fine at this. If you have emotional hangups, well, that's irrational (no blame or judgment implied, it just... is literally irrational), and you might have to make some difficult choices that sit better with you. I'm well-familiar with making irrational choices. I left a well-paid Microsoft shop and joined a startup and took a pay cut just so I could work with open source, years ago. It ended up paying off. Do what your gut says. It's making the bets, after all. And guess what. The people who have stared at code for years now are the ones who best stand to gain.
- matsemann 7mo agoYour analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country skiing. The connection with nature, the silence. Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a smell of gasoline.
- qnleigh 7mo agoI think the analogy hits home on both sides. You go faster, but you miss the meditative experience of going slow.
- heddycrow 7mo agoMy knee jerk is that there are quite a few people who can't or won't snowmobile when needed and ski when needed. That's where the analogy starts to break a bit. You can't mode switch between skis and snowmobile, but you sure can ai assist/not pretty quickly. One more quick one - imagine skiers showing up to the snowmobile club hating on snowmobiles and vice versa. I, for one, have still not properly got a grip on how tech enables this sort of a analogy-breaking reality. Effing go ski then; there's even a club for that! (rhetorical, not directed at anyone in particular) And shame on me cause I show up to the ski club on a snowmobile with skis on my back.
- qnleigh 7mo agoActually I think it still kinda works: - You could ski easy routes but snowmobile harder ones (not that anyone actually does this). - Snowmobiles are loud and chew up the snow, analogous to AI flooding a repo with low-effort PRs?
- heddycrow 7mo agoI can guess that you like this exercise and you seem to be adept at it. I can't help but think you are my kind of people in that regard. Kudos!
- 7mo ago
- ay 7mo agoI am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently; The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a “tool for writing boilerplate”. I have tried a few ideas for agents but didn’t see how it could work. That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it’s like magic! And if something doesn’t work - jumping into the code and debugging it is huge fun! Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been very busy! :) My harness doesn’t “pressure cook” since it doesn’t make sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting things from it ! The distribution of people’s moods related to AI seems indeed bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the “enthusiastic” rather than “depressed” part of it. To the folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don’t know why it is this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.
- techpression 7mo agoSo you’ve tried at least a hundred ideas by now, care to share fifty of them? I’m very curious as to what they are. Opus is too slow to even complete one idea per day for me, and that’s fine, I don’t have hundreds of them :)
- ay 7mo agoI dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones that I ended up using but can’t share: a streaming radio for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server for talking with my family; a process-level virtualization based on KVM. Of the ones I can share: Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data https://netpoke.com https://netpoke.com - use magic code “DEMO” to see what’s it about - the source is at https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to Rust: https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment A study on LLM prompting techniques: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM for experiments: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack. A true “stochastic parrot” using hash tables: https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn’t need to be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to github. Many end up thrown away.
- witx 7mo agoIt's so bizarre I see everyone happy using llms trained unethically, so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers
- pmarreck 7mo agoThere is no strong argument that they were "trained unethically". You can google or ask an LLM to argue pro/con that claim... but of course, you haven't, since doing so would itself violate your apparent worldview. > so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers Bullshit (and, speaking as an old, incredibly whiny). Figuring out the right way to talk to yet another API is not the "creative and interesting part." Coming up with entirely new concepts and building them faster than I ever thought possible given that I have zero time to myself since I have a kid is literally the most "creative and interesting" thing I've experienced in my entire life. /shrug I don't know what to say to folks like you anymore other than "byeeeeee, got too many ideas I can build now to waste time arguing with people who are simply not getting it... and maybe never got it in the first place because they got pushed into STEM instead of being cursed from the gods with it like I definitely did"
- witx 7mo agoThere is plenty of proof on how these models were trained, you're just too enamored with your "more code, move faster" button to care. That's fine no one's perfect we all look away from some things here and there, me included. But don't throw shade