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The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude

by simonw 6mo ago

The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps to safely run in an iframe sandbox inside a larger application. Just understanding why that's a useful thing that can be built requires deep knowledge of sandboxing, security threats, browser security models, and half a dozen different platform features that have been evolving over a couple of decades. A vibe coded without that technical understanding would have zero chance of prompting such a thing into existence, no matter how much guidance the LLMs gave them. It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable.

keybored 6mo ago
I can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building (for what else?). I’ll just fade somewhat gradually into unemployment, I imagine.
- simonw 6mo ago
  I firmly believe that your existing skills and experience are more valuable in a world where the AI tools can speed up the bit where you type the code.
  - NiloCK 6mo ago
    It's great that you believe this, but are you hiring? I don't intend this to read as pure snark, but someone's abstract value isn't much good to them if the job market itself can't / won't recognize it.
    - therealdrag0 6mo ago
      You’re right. Hiring depends on revenue streams. Code being cheaper means less coders needed for same code. Less-sr-coders-needed means more senior engineers competing for limited architect/leadership roles. However, the happy path is that as more code is written, more revenue streams will be developed and more sr engineers will be needed and hired to manage those ballooning codebases. That will be a gradual process of growing the pie though.
    - AngryData 5mo ago
      This echos my sentiments with trade work and repair skills, everyone claims it is so valuable and rare skills, but the job market doesn't seem to agree with it. There are people with 30 years of experience that could build a house from scratch then go home and rebuild their car engine, but are barely making more than people waiting tables at Olive Garden. What skills people think are valuable and prized, and what skills corporations are willing to pay for, are often very different.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building One, I think the talk about AI replacing developers is tripe. We’re still correcting the post-Covid hiring binge. Two, even if that level is breached, I’d consider your skillset more broadly than what you can literally do right now. Organizing people and technical systems is hard. And the article highlights how that doesn’t seem to be something AI is focused on improving on right now. (Would take larger context windows. Which would make inference more expensive.)
miyoji 6mo ago
> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. 1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets things wrong. I don't like any of this, it's awful and I would never have gone into this field if someone had told me that it would be like this one day. 2. I cannot condone the means by which these tools were created, which is, as far as I am concerned, theft. I think it's unethical to use them at all, because they were created unethically. I dislike using stolen work, I think it's wrong, and I think everyone who uses it is making the world worse and normalizing theft. If continuing in my career means that I have to compromise my ethics, I wouldn't do it even if I loved this stuff, and see point (1). 3. Is anyone going to pay me more for my "more valuable" skills? Doesn't seem like it, engineering salaries on the whole are going down right now. You can believe they'll go up eventually if you like, but there's no evidence that will happen, or that it's happening. If my employer captures all the value, why should I care whether I'm creating more of it?
- echelon 6mo ago
  > Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I'm your exact opposite. I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more. So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it. I've never had so much fun with software. It's starting to feel like magic. And because we possess deep understanding, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this. The AST is not the objective. The finished product is. Our DNA is by all accounts filled with garbage. Let your feelings about code purity and sanctity go. It's the job to be done that matters. Code is not holy. In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things. Treat it that way today. Means to an end.
  - customguy 6mo ago
    "the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the better.
dakiol 6mo ago
> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. But that's not what senior executives think. That's all that matters. If they think that AI can replace engineers, so let it be. I mean, since when senior executives know shit about what quality means? They only care about revenue and profit. So yeah, you're right, but that's not gonna happen (sadly)
- therealdrag0 6mo ago
  That’s very black and white. An org with a sizable enough engineer employment base will have leaders who understand that engineering is a deep discipline and quality matters, after all what they sell is an SLA. Sure not all orgs are like that, but AI has not changed the calculus: fast / cheap / good, are tradeoffs long discussed before AI.
ieieie 6mo ago
“ the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually”. I posted something here not long ago re. There is a huge amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and great product. And it received a lot of downvotes. LLM’s don’t change this in reality. That’s why we haven’t seen an explosion of high value products. Creating a product in the first place that create value is VERY, VERY HARD! The arrogance of people to dismiss it because of the existence llm’s is hilarious.
- simonw 6mo ago
  Right! And it's not just the product design either - the number of steps it takes to get a piece of software in front of other people, correctly deployed, with backups and analytics and monitoring and a domain name... Even with all the LLM help in the world you still need to know a whole lot about how web software works to pull that off.
jeanloolz 5mo ago
This is a refreshing opinion, and also matches with my own experience. Many software engineers around me have now made the conclusion that AI will take their jobs and they're thinking changing careers already. I feel this is too early to tell. The prompts I write are all very technical, someone without my expertise would struggle with just an agent to talk to. Every time I do something outside my expertise, it is not as fast as one would imagine. Expertise do help tremendously and keep things in order
- anonyfox 5mo ago
  in fact engineering job openings are skyrocketing, just far beyond the big megacorps. AI was a neat excuse to correct the covid overgiring phases, now axes happened while lots of people built lots of new things they couldn't before and at some point it "swamps" under the complexities of reality at scaling up, thus engineers are needed. jibs are shuffling around yes, but demand will be surging even more soon.

by simonw 6mo ago

keybored 6mo ago

I can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building (for what else?). I’ll just fade somewhat gradually into unemployment, I imagine.

simonw 6mo ago
I firmly believe that your existing skills and experience are more valuable in a world where the AI tools can speed up the bit where you type the code.
- NiloCK 6mo ago
  It's great that you believe this, but are you hiring? I don't intend this to read as pure snark, but someone's abstract value isn't much good to them if the job market itself can't / won't recognize it.
  - therealdrag0 6mo ago
    You’re right. Hiring depends on revenue streams. Code being cheaper means less coders needed for same code. Less-sr-coders-needed means more senior engineers competing for limited architect/leadership roles. However, the happy path is that as more code is written, more revenue streams will be developed and more sr engineers will be needed and hired to manage those ballooning codebases. That will be a gradual process of growing the pie though.
  - AngryData 5mo ago
    This echos my sentiments with trade work and repair skills, everyone claims it is so valuable and rare skills, but the job market doesn't seem to agree with it. There are people with 30 years of experience that could build a house from scratch then go home and rebuild their car engine, but are barely making more than people waiting tables at Olive Garden. What skills people think are valuable and prized, and what skills corporations are willing to pay for, are often very different.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building One, I think the talk about AI replacing developers is tripe. We’re still correcting the post-Covid hiring binge. Two, even if that level is breached, I’d consider your skillset more broadly than what you can literally do right now. Organizing people and technical systems is hard. And the article highlights how that doesn’t seem to be something AI is focused on improving on right now. (Would take larger context windows. Which would make inference more expensive.)

miyoji 6mo ago

> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. 1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets things wrong. I don't like any of this, it's awful and I would never have gone into this field if someone had told me that it would be like this one day. 2. I cannot condone the means by which these tools were created, which is, as far as I am concerned, theft. I think it's unethical to use them at all, because they were created unethically. I dislike using stolen work, I think it's wrong, and I think everyone who uses it is making the world worse and normalizing theft. If continuing in my career means that I have to compromise my ethics, I wouldn't do it even if I loved this stuff, and see point (1). 3. Is anyone going to pay me more for my "more valuable" skills? Doesn't seem like it, engineering salaries on the whole are going down right now. You can believe they'll go up eventually if you like, but there's no evidence that will happen, or that it's happening. If my employer captures all the value, why should I care whether I'm creating more of it?

echelon 6mo ago
> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I'm your exact opposite. I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more. So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it. I've never had so much fun with software. It's starting to feel like magic. And because we possess deep understanding, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this. The AST is not the objective. The finished product is. Our DNA is by all accounts filled with garbage. Let your feelings about code purity and sanctity go. It's the job to be done that matters. Code is not holy. In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things. Treat it that way today. Means to an end.
- customguy 6mo ago
  "the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the better.

dakiol 6mo ago

> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. But that's not what senior executives think. That's all that matters. If they think that AI can replace engineers, so let it be. I mean, since when senior executives know shit about what quality means? They only care about revenue and profit. So yeah, you're right, but that's not gonna happen (sadly)

therealdrag0 6mo ago
That’s very black and white. An org with a sizable enough engineer employment base will have leaders who understand that engineering is a deep discipline and quality matters, after all what they sell is an SLA. Sure not all orgs are like that, but AI has not changed the calculus: fast / cheap / good, are tradeoffs long discussed before AI.

ieieie 6mo ago

“ the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually”. I posted something here not long ago re. There is a huge amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and great product. And it received a lot of downvotes. LLM’s don’t change this in reality. That’s why we haven’t seen an explosion of high value products. Creating a product in the first place that create value is VERY, VERY HARD! The arrogance of people to dismiss it because of the existence llm’s is hilarious.

simonw 6mo ago
Right! And it's not just the product design either - the number of steps it takes to get a piece of software in front of other people, correctly deployed, with backups and analytics and monitoring and a domain name... Even with all the LLM help in the world you still need to know a whole lot about how web software works to pull that off.

jeanloolz 5mo ago

This is a refreshing opinion, and also matches with my own experience. Many software engineers around me have now made the conclusion that AI will take their jobs and they're thinking changing careers already. I feel this is too early to tell. The prompts I write are all very technical, someone without my expertise would struggle with just an agent to talk to. Every time I do something outside my expertise, it is not as fast as one would imagine. Expertise do help tremendously and keep things in order

anonyfox 5mo ago
in fact engineering job openings are skyrocketing, just far beyond the big megacorps. AI was a neat excuse to correct the covid overgiring phases, now axes happened while lots of people built lots of new things they couldn't before and at some point it "swamps" under the complexities of reality at scaling up, thus engineers are needed. jibs are shuffling around yes, but demand will be surging even more soon.