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If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actu

If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.

TakeItToTen 4mo ago
I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate. I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  There was a thread[1] about this the other day! People have different goals, motivations, and reasons for developing. I guess I just like sorting colored blocks. I'll agonize over the code... I really will go back to a class I wrote months ago and ask "Do I really need this member variable?" and "Does this really need to go on the heap or can it live on the stack and be automatically cleaned up?" "Can I use a pImpl C++ pattern here and reduce the number of headers that this header file includes?" 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056
- dgellow 4mo ago
  I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.
  - KronisLV 4mo ago
    > I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth. If your goal is to become better at writing code, it almost certainly is a net negative. If you define growth as shipping stuff and getting things done that you previously wouldn’t have had the time for, then it might be a positive. Hell, it’s probably both at the same time and what each person cares more about is the deciding factor.
    - dgellow 4mo ago
      Programming/software engineering isn't writing code. It's understanding and designing systems. The code is the way we encode the logic. The runtime/compiler of your language is one system among many engineers have to understand and develop expertise in. When working yourself on problems you learn about the various protocols, interfaces, past design decisions and their trade offs, tooling, and develop your general system thinking. When you delegate to AI you get the resulting artifact but none of the personal growth that comes with developing it. Think of the recent bun rewrite from zig to rust, around 1M lines of code. If you would have a team do that migration they would very likely have to become close to Rust expert, and develop an intimate knowledge of the codebase, its tradeoffs, have ideas for future improvements, good understanding of the technical debt they accepted, reliability of tests, etc. That's A LOT of expertise you can then apply to other things in your professional life. Instead they went the AI way. The got the artifact (the migration) in ~1 week. But that's pretty much it? What did they learn from that project, other than the fact the AI can do that work? My guess would be pretty much nothing. And pretty much any other software engineer could have done the same migration. There is zero personal growth here.
      - addandsubtract 4mo ago
        How is bun going to progress from here, though? Is it feature complete, never to need another update? No. So are they just going to vibe code in Rust now? Keep developing in zig and convert each merge to Rust? Or hire/become the Rust experts they need to maintain the project?
- xiaoyu2006 4mo ago
  > I am becoming a better architect with AI Be careful with that claim. Abstractions more or less leak especially in CE where the OS and hardware you built on are already full of leaky abstractions, e.g. performance traits. It is still important to look through and comprehend code.
- abustamam 4mo ago
  I agree. I use the grill me skill and superpowers brainstorming to learn different methods of building stuff as far as architecture goes. Stuff I wouldn't normally think of if I just continued being "just a FE engineer"
- dominotw 4mo ago
  ai can do architecture too.
- acedTrex 4mo ago
  > I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code. I don't believe this, every architect ive ever worked with that was not regularly in the weeds on various things in the codebase were universally terrible and out of touch.
- StefanSko 4mo ago
  That's probably all true. But I wonder if brains are just wired differently. I was never the developer that cared much about the particular shapes of any concrete IF/ELSE blocks in the code, so initially I was very bullish on using Claude Code a year ago. I realized that I'm the kind of guy who discovers the high-level architecture by writing the low-level code though. I'm not always sure what that architecture is up front, but the sheer act of writing code into a specific module sets off an internal background task probing the specific invariants of the module with respect to the architecture I have in mind, allowing me to revise and improve the design. That is all lost. All my agentically engineered projects look crude from an architectural perspective.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
mapontosevenths 4mo ago
To me, English is just another programming language. Some of us will always be better at it than others, and the ones that know other programming languages well will always have an advantage over those who do not. When you are good at it there can be craft in it still.
- runarberg 4mo ago
  English is not a programming language though. I don’t understand how such an obviously false sentence can be so persistent.
  - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
    I'm not even sure what you mean. Of course it is. A programming language is a formal intermediate language for turning human comprehensible instructions into machine instructions by means of an interpreter or compiler. We've now allowed that intermediate language to be English, because that's preferable to most people, and the "compiler" has become very complicated indeed as a result of that. You still have to be able to express what it is you want in a way the machine can understand, it's just both simpler and less deterministic now.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - randy909 4mo ago
    This. Just because an llm can translate any language into a programming language doesn’t suddenly make all languages programming languages. Until I can ‘brew install englishc’ and so on, it’s not a f**ing programming language.
    - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
      Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.
ryukoposting 4mo ago
If a photo has strong composition and symbolism, does it matter if the photographer took the photo as opposed to prompting it into existence?
- beering 4mo ago
  An interesting question because photos are mostly machine-generated to begin with. The photographer just hits a button.
  - runtime_terror 4mo ago
    "Just hits a button" is an incredibly reductive way to look at photography
  - cookingrobot 4mo ago
    The work of a photographer is to put something interesting in front of the lens before pressing the button.
  - soraminazuki 4mo ago
    Your comment captures the most objectionable mentality behind AI zealotry so well. So much display of hubris, no appreciation of science, engineering, art, or anything at all.
- nalinidash 4mo ago
  to many, it does not.
- Gud 4mo ago
  If the realism is important, it does matter. If realism is not important("strong symbolism"), then it is not important.
- _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
  The entire purpose of a photo is to capture a moment. What 'moment' is AI capturing? Do the books in the background represent the 'moment'? The adverts? The furniture? The clothing? The hairstyle? These are all 'parts of the moment'. When we look at old pictures, these details are the parts people LOVE going over. None of that is there in AI, and in 20 years, no one will care go look it over, because it's meaningless, unintentional slop. Not a haircut someone picked out. Funny hiphugger/mom waist/tight/loose/bellbottoms. Not currated books in the background that represent thought of the time in which the picture was taken. There is nothing in the AI photo worth re-looking at later, because there is nothing there. There is nothing to take from any of the 'details' in the image.
abustamam 4mo ago
I enjoyed writing code because it felt like playing Lego. Just putting stuff together. Now I do let AI code, and it's like putting together different Lego. That said, I wouldn't let AI build my Lego sets for me because the point of that is the building. But for work? As long as my boss is happy enough to keep funding my Lego hobby, I'm happy.
dominotw 4mo ago
"original thoughts" are not accessible to 99 percent of ppl. doenst mean they have to live a life of zero fulfillment.
kajaktum 4mo ago
I think you are right, but I still care. I want to write software that is immortal. My dream is to write code that people would be happy to read and easy to understand. It is also some kind of meditation. I can zone into something and "get my hand dirty". > I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. So yes, to be honest, some people write software for the "heck of it". Will my implementation of Lisp interpreter matter at all in the grand scheme of things? No. It is in fact a waste of time, because you _could_ have learnt how it works and implement it in less than an hour with LLM. > The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. To me, this is like saying the financial of the company is what determines the company's success, not whatever the engineering team is doing. So instead of thinking about the "The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts", just give the right monetary incentives and you will come up with a successful project. From this perspective, can you empathize with the "low level" developers?
dudeinhawaii 4mo ago
On the one hand, this feels very pragmatic. On the other hand, it feels like what people who weren't great software engineers say. It's kind of a craft. I can't imagine an exceptional artist saying "screw the craft, I just want the painting that vaguely resembles what I requested". I _can_ imagine artists that were not exceptional saying "it's so great that I can just prompt and get the damn painting, who care about how it's put together". Up next, an architect who doesn't understand how concrete pours or how steel bends under stress? Hope the AI gets it perfect? Interesting times we live in - and I realize this is an elitist take.
trumpdong 4mo ago
You should try a higher level language. Go has no concept of stack or heap neither does Java.

TakeItToTen 4mo ago

I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate. I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

ryandrake 4mo ago
There was a thread[1] about this the other day! People have different goals, motivations, and reasons for developing. I guess I just like sorting colored blocks. I'll agonize over the code... I really will go back to a class I wrote months ago and ask "Do I really need this member variable?" and "Does this really need to go on the heap or can it live on the stack and be automatically cleaned up?" "Can I use a pImpl C++ pattern here and reduce the number of headers that this header file includes?" 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056
dgellow 4mo ago
I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.
- KronisLV 4mo ago
  > I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth. If your goal is to become better at writing code, it almost certainly is a net negative. If you define growth as shipping stuff and getting things done that you previously wouldn’t have had the time for, then it might be a positive. Hell, it’s probably both at the same time and what each person cares more about is the deciding factor.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    Programming/software engineering isn't writing code. It's understanding and designing systems. The code is the way we encode the logic. The runtime/compiler of your language is one system among many engineers have to understand and develop expertise in. When working yourself on problems you learn about the various protocols, interfaces, past design decisions and their trade offs, tooling, and develop your general system thinking. When you delegate to AI you get the resulting artifact but none of the personal growth that comes with developing it. Think of the recent bun rewrite from zig to rust, around 1M lines of code. If you would have a team do that migration they would very likely have to become close to Rust expert, and develop an intimate knowledge of the codebase, its tradeoffs, have ideas for future improvements, good understanding of the technical debt they accepted, reliability of tests, etc. That's A LOT of expertise you can then apply to other things in your professional life. Instead they went the AI way. The got the artifact (the migration) in ~1 week. But that's pretty much it? What did they learn from that project, other than the fact the AI can do that work? My guess would be pretty much nothing. And pretty much any other software engineer could have done the same migration. There is zero personal growth here.
    - addandsubtract 4mo ago
      How is bun going to progress from here, though? Is it feature complete, never to need another update? No. So are they just going to vibe code in Rust now? Keep developing in zig and convert each merge to Rust? Or hire/become the Rust experts they need to maintain the project?
xiaoyu2006 4mo ago
> I am becoming a better architect with AI Be careful with that claim. Abstractions more or less leak especially in CE where the OS and hardware you built on are already full of leaky abstractions, e.g. performance traits. It is still important to look through and comprehend code.
abustamam 4mo ago
I agree. I use the grill me skill and superpowers brainstorming to learn different methods of building stuff as far as architecture goes. Stuff I wouldn't normally think of if I just continued being "just a FE engineer"
dominotw 4mo ago
ai can do architecture too.
acedTrex 4mo ago
> I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code. I don't believe this, every architect ive ever worked with that was not regularly in the weeds on various things in the codebase were universally terrible and out of touch.
StefanSko 4mo ago
That's probably all true. But I wonder if brains are just wired differently. I was never the developer that cared much about the particular shapes of any concrete IF/ELSE blocks in the code, so initially I was very bullish on using Claude Code a year ago. I realized that I'm the kind of guy who discovers the high-level architecture by writing the low-level code though. I'm not always sure what that architecture is up front, but the sheer act of writing code into a specific module sets off an internal background task probing the specific invariants of the module with respect to the architecture I have in mind, allowing me to revise and improve the design. That is all lost. All my agentically engineered projects look crude from an architectural perspective.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

mapontosevenths 4mo ago

To me, English is just another programming language. Some of us will always be better at it than others, and the ones that know other programming languages well will always have an advantage over those who do not. When you are good at it there can be craft in it still.

runarberg 4mo ago
English is not a programming language though. I don’t understand how such an obviously false sentence can be so persistent.
- mapontosevenths 4mo ago
  I'm not even sure what you mean. Of course it is. A programming language is a formal intermediate language for turning human comprehensible instructions into machine instructions by means of an interpreter or compiler. We've now allowed that intermediate language to be English, because that's preferable to most people, and the "compiler" has become very complicated indeed as a result of that. You still have to be able to express what it is you want in a way the machine can understand, it's just both simpler and less deterministic now.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- randy909 4mo ago
  This. Just because an llm can translate any language into a programming language doesn’t suddenly make all languages programming languages. Until I can ‘brew install englishc’ and so on, it’s not a f**ing programming language.
  - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
    Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.

ryukoposting 4mo ago

If a photo has strong composition and symbolism, does it matter if the photographer took the photo as opposed to prompting it into existence?

beering 4mo ago
An interesting question because photos are mostly machine-generated to begin with. The photographer just hits a button.
- runtime_terror 4mo ago
  "Just hits a button" is an incredibly reductive way to look at photography
- cookingrobot 4mo ago
  The work of a photographer is to put something interesting in front of the lens before pressing the button.
- soraminazuki 4mo ago
  Your comment captures the most objectionable mentality behind AI zealotry so well. So much display of hubris, no appreciation of science, engineering, art, or anything at all.
nalinidash 4mo ago
to many, it does not.
Gud 4mo ago
If the realism is important, it does matter. If realism is not important("strong symbolism"), then it is not important.
_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
The entire purpose of a photo is to capture a moment. What 'moment' is AI capturing? Do the books in the background represent the 'moment'? The adverts? The furniture? The clothing? The hairstyle? These are all 'parts of the moment'. When we look at old pictures, these details are the parts people LOVE going over. None of that is there in AI, and in 20 years, no one will care go look it over, because it's meaningless, unintentional slop. Not a haircut someone picked out. Funny hiphugger/mom waist/tight/loose/bellbottoms. Not currated books in the background that represent thought of the time in which the picture was taken. There is nothing in the AI photo worth re-looking at later, because there is nothing there. There is nothing to take from any of the 'details' in the image.

abustamam 4mo ago

I enjoyed writing code because it felt like playing Lego. Just putting stuff together. Now I do let AI code, and it's like putting together different Lego. That said, I wouldn't let AI build my Lego sets for me because the point of that is the building. But for work? As long as my boss is happy enough to keep funding my Lego hobby, I'm happy.

dominotw 4mo ago

"original thoughts" are not accessible to 99 percent of ppl. doenst mean they have to live a life of zero fulfillment.

kajaktum 4mo ago

I think you are right, but I still care. I want to write software that is immortal. My dream is to write code that people would be happy to read and easy to understand. It is also some kind of meditation. I can zone into something and "get my hand dirty". > I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. So yes, to be honest, some people write software for the "heck of it". Will my implementation of Lisp interpreter matter at all in the grand scheme of things? No. It is in fact a waste of time, because you _could_ have learnt how it works and implement it in less than an hour with LLM. > The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. To me, this is like saying the financial of the company is what determines the company's success, not whatever the engineering team is doing. So instead of thinking about the "The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts", just give the right monetary incentives and you will come up with a successful project. From this perspective, can you empathize with the "low level" developers?

dudeinhawaii 4mo ago

On the one hand, this feels very pragmatic. On the other hand, it feels like what people who weren't great software engineers say. It's kind of a craft. I can't imagine an exceptional artist saying "screw the craft, I just want the painting that vaguely resembles what I requested". I _can_ imagine artists that were not exceptional saying "it's so great that I can just prompt and get the damn painting, who care about how it's put together". Up next, an architect who doesn't understand how concrete pours or how steel bends under stress? Hope the AI gets it perfect? Interesting times we live in - and I realize this is an elitist take.

trumpdong 4mo ago

You should try a higher level language. Go has no concept of stack or heap neither does Java.