3 ms·

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn ne

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive LLMs for that. It really took away something I enjoyed.

fancyswimtime 3mo ago
same camp
afry1 3mo ago
Did AI take it away, or did you give it away? Now that you've made the Faustian bargain at this low low introductory price, how long until they start ratcheting up the price? How long will you be able to bear it? You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Given the rapid skill degradation that results from LLM-driven coding usage, I'd recommend it if you want to retain any skill at all.
- beremaki 3mo ago
  They are talking about the enjoyement. AI did disolve a lot of the meaning and magic behind pure code exercises. What felt like a creative endeavor now feels and is even more treated by society and other software engineers as grossly mechanical. And to me too that hurts. I think a lot of people whose identity or passion was tied to this feel like that. It is very much a "what is painting purpose now that photography exists ?" or "what is craft in an era of industrial mass production" moment for some of us. There are answers but finding them require exploration and being willing to change what we are I think that's their deeper point
- sheepolog 3mo ago
  So much life enjoyment is tied to feeling competent and respected. Seeing a new, more talented challenger on the horizon is bound to be discouraging to some extent. It's like going from high school to college all over again: you used to be the top of your class, now you're surrounded by people just as competent as you.
  - lanstin 3mo ago
    To be happy as you age, you have to embrace being a clueless newbie. Some people seem very pessimistic that there is a method of creating networked software systems in a high quality way with LLMs, but it seems no different from many other changes - there are salient technical details that matter, and there is boilerplate, and as all the tools and problems shift, we find ways to highlight the stuff that matters and reduce the problems of boilerplate. I like GCC and haven’t run into a compiler bug in decades, nor looked at disassembly much in this millennium (except some go allocation stuff that puzzled me). I feel myself gaining skills to do that with LLMs in just the same way that higher power editors changed my behavior. I am pretty old, and it does take conscious effort to give up my cherished skills and plunge into new things professionally, but it’s the only way for me. And I am not exaggerating “clueless” here - I continue my practice of expertise via making all the mistakes. When I am new to something and there are others not new, I lean on them and have my lacks very clearly seen. When I am more isolated, I take pains to have very conservative release plans. But it is worth it: I get that pleasure of understanding a lot more often with new stuff than with the same old.
- oneneptune 3mo ago
  One thing AI did take away; I love reading source code written by other people. Node modules, plugins, LUA, python scripts... whatever. I loved seeing how people organized their logic, named their variables, the flavor of their comments... all of it. I learned so much diving through the source code of all the major tools. Now it's all AI generated. You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or an LLM's attempt to reproduce. Worse; even if the AI presented something novel it produces at such a rate it's a needle in a haystack. I feel cautious of any claim people make about their use of AI. I'm not even anti-AI; I use it. But at minimum wish there were a mechanism to know where the lines were.
  - ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
    You can open linux source tree from 5 years ago and read that for a couple years. The feeling of helplessness doesn’t come from the fact that you can’t get out of the AI hype but the fact that advertisers have captured the attention of large portions of the population.
  - teiferer 3mo ago
    > Now it's all AI generated. I can assure you, it's not. You just need to avoid the areas where this is prevalent. > You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or an LLM's attempt to reproduce. In the end of the day, if it's an elegant solution why does it matter! If anything then it sharpens your senses to check whether it's great or trash. A sense that one should have had with human code already, now it just feels more important (but it really isn't because it was important before too).
    - DarkTree 3mo ago
      It matters because some people view code as a human art. Sure, AI can also probably produce a good sounding song, but that doesn't mean I will view it in the same way as a song created by a human.
- memjay 3mo ago
  > You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Not if your company decides to be "AI-first" and puts agent use on your job results.
  - lstodd 3mo ago
    Ditch that company maybe? Have some agency in your life. Sometimes people here write stuff as if being in control of their lifes is unthinkable.
drudolph914 3mo ago
I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone. we can finally be in a room and just talk about good engineering. the people we as engineers never wanted to hear from are off attempting to force the world to use a tool that everyone 40 and under passionately rejects (this is spicy for HN terms, but the avg joe hates AI. people aren't stupid - they know they only stand to lose from it in the longer term). perspective shift 2: I just read Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It taught me a lot. I came away from that book understanding what "quality" means at a very philosophical level, and it gave me a lot of confidence for some fuzzy thoughts I already felt. it's too abstract to explain here, but it does a good job of explaining that there is perceived and strong difference between caring something into existence, verses just generating something into existence. this book breaks down how quality is not some artifact that lives in what you're making, and or is some feeling you get when you look at something that is aesthetically pleasing - quality is an event that occurs before you mind has differentiated yourself from the thing subject/object you're admiring - and in that moment, quality arises from the care you give it. there must exists energy and care towards what you're doing for quality to arise. generating anything with AI will never bring that fruition. many people try to counter this stance by saying that they iterate with AI forever, and assume that iteration is a the same as the caring event described in ZATAOMM - but the difference is that grading output is not the same as creating/authorship. it's must a read and deep study I think if you're into programming and this mental state perspective shift 3: This talk from Brandon Sanderson called We are the Art [1]. I personally do a lot of creative coding - like games and such. this talk does a great job of breaking down how art and creation ultimately lives in the person. I won't summarize here, just a must a watch perspective shift 4: I got off all the mainstream social media site bc the PR machine for AI is relentless. of course you're going to feel like crap when every site says, future generations will be homeless, K shaped economy, permanent underclass, etc. you gotta log off these sites to create some distance with the beast - it's not you, the world really is just messed up rn. Also I barely browse HN anymore. this place is the public square for VCs and people who lost hte plot with technology - I just happened to be here, and wanted to help my fellow programmer grinding through the same mental trenches I was in perspective shift 5: go find some programming communities on discord. I'm in a discord with like 5000 active members that really care about coding, and doing so without AI. this is a very active discord. once you realize there is a strong community still building like this, it really showed me we're not low in numbers, and there still a large group of people that will celebrate engineering efforts done by hand. and there are still people that need to understand these machines at a very deep level - you're efforts aren't wasted perspective shift 6: look at AI on the job as a way to get your work done faster to get home to do real programming. work code can be trash, home is where the real work is done. The analogy I’ve been telling myself is that it’s like going into a gold mine - no one wants to be in the mine, but i do like leaving with gold. i gotta pay the bills, but i don’t need to love it. perspective shift 7: The overall environment we live is just depressing and is reminiscent to Fahrenheit 451. I came away feeling closer to the author and protagonist than my first read. specifically the kind of hubris/ignorance found in all the side characters of F451 mimics what it feels like to talk with ai optimists. also, the way F451 is a world filled with people that are actively disengaged and comfortable being passively entertained feels almost too real. this book draws a lot of parallels with modern times, and it's a nice book to remind you that other people have felt this way in times of large technological change - and you're not crazy to feel depressed. Go start working on that side project you use to be really passionate about. me and all the other serious engineers are excited to see it [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo
overgard 3mo ago
I just spent the past three hours debugging a long latent bug from vibe coding a thing. The only way I found it was running a debugger through the C++ code and tracing everything -- Claude was utterly useless until I basically pointed out the problem to it. I don't think understanding technical aspects of programming is a waste of time at all, it's still very necessary. The annoying thing too is that, whatever time I saved having the LLM write it, I pretty much just lost having to debug it. (For what it's worth: the bug it introduced is one I never would have introduced on my own, because it fundamentally misunderstood a key component of the design)
sublinear 3mo ago
I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few days. It wouldn't even matter if I got it done faster since the bottleneck is decisions in the next meeting or waiting to hear back from another team. Dev time was always trivial and irrelevant. Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal. What else are you doing with your time? How much discussion does your team even have if the nuances of the code aren't important to you?
- kazinator 3mo ago
  If you ship something, by some means, you get blame if it goes wrong. But when it goes right, you can only get credit if you wrote it yourself. If you're risking being blamed, that should be balanced with credit.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  > Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal. Web search engines are mostly for quick navigation this day as a lot of sites don’t bother with a good navigation menu. It’s faster to search the title of the page than to deal with the offered navigation widget. > Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. Same here. I read and write code just like I read and write English (which is not even my second language). Coding is trivial. Most of the time is spent on communication (with the team and the stakeholder) and on reading documentation (so that you know the implications of using a function or what’s inside an object at a point of time). And even the latter is shortened as you got more familiar with the libraries.
peter_retief 3mo ago
I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit
brokegrammer 3mo ago
It's not true at all. I recently vibe coded a REST API in Golang even though I never wrote any production Go code. However, I had to make copious use of my previous experience as an engineer to achieve quality. You can see this in the real world. The people who are getting the most out of AI are the ones who already have experience coding without AI. CEOs don't want to admit it but AI can't code anything non-trivial on its own.
- pelasaco 3mo ago
  I agree with you, but now we have managers pushing code to production, people that never coded but are "IT versed"..so you get PR/MR not just with code, but with PR/MR comment written by Claude, Commit Message written by Claude.. all super verbose, and you know the people operating Claude, have no clue. Super dangerous combination. But part of the reality.
  - brokegrammer 3mo ago
    Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway. If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place. The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced. AI isn't generating high quality compilers or OS kernels, for example, because we haven't found a way to mass produce those yet. I suggest you stop listening to clowns like Elon Musk and Super Mario.
    - pelasaco 3mo ago
      Your comment makes 0 sense.. > Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway. non-trivial code shouldn't be written by experienced engineers? Please explain > If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place. How did you come to this conclusion? I am concerned about verbose AI documentation, 10 lines of commit message, MR comments with 50+ lines, the typical AI workflow that we all love: One huge commit with 10000+ changes. > The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced. In your opinion, you mean? Because AI is doing everything which involves thinking. Art, Code, Music.. not "mass producted" things.. > I suggest you stop listening to clowns like Elon Musk and Super Mario. Sounds like you are not really reading, thinking, writing.. only writing i guess?
MASNeo 3mo ago
I really do differentiate between fast & vast changes of commodity code and critical sections. For the latter I’d explore with AI and then rewrite, line by line, with deliberate concern for all aspects relevant. This does retain the joy of coding for me and takes away the pain of what is commodity and hard to do without tiresome meetings (mostly UI/UX and API/MCP as my products don’t differentiate on these).
teiferer 3mo ago
> learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms Let's be honest here: how many actually distinct paradigms are we really talking about here? I challenge you to name more than 5 which are not just flavors of the same core approach. Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software.
- pelasaco 3mo ago
  > Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software. Why it should be relevant for production software?
  - teiferer 3mo ago
    Because I find that an interesting question. There are lots of experimental and somewhat esoteric things out there. And sure, it can be fun learning about them. But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language.
    - pelasaco 3mo ago
      > But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language. That's not true at all. In first place, what you can think is good for production, i can think otherwise.. Beside it there is a lot of things/paradigms/languages that we learn, to help us to either understand better the basics or because it is easier for beginners. There are a lot of Science and Research that you can just throw away, but that was super important for further development. Pascal, Smalltalk, Minix are example of technologies, that we learn(ed) and not necessary are widely used in production. Haskell helped me to understand is pure immutability is actually practical or not, and so on..
      - teiferer 3mo ago
        [dead]
frankie_t 3mo ago
Same here. FWIW, you can still absolutely do it, just like you can weave your own fabric. You probably won't be able to monetize it though, as it won't give you as much edge in the workspace anymore. It's just a thing to do in your spare time. Not sure if it helps with the feeling of futility or not. For me, it doesn't really help that much because ultimately I want the skills and knowledge I gathered to benefit me in some way. For example, previously I would be able to better understand computers and software, be an "overall better" programmer, better thinker (in terms of computation). If the results you get are not used in any way, it's on the same level as memorizing rule sets for some obscure game that no one knows or cares about. Maybe pivoting to something else like philosophy could make sense as a hobby. Of course, there's always going to be some demand for knowing computers, knowing programming languages first-hand, etc. Writing or auditing code for critical systems. Teaching the next generations of people that will do critical systems. Some people are optimistic in that they are going to fall into that demand. I'm not optimistic about myself.
peheje 3mo ago
I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I’ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and health, and now I’m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want while repurposing an old Android device as the server. Do I miss nerding out over implementing a B-tree, or learning async programming in F#, Go, Crystal, Nim, C++, C#, JavaScript workers, or Java green threads? I don’t know, man. Maybe a little. But it has also never been easier to say: “Hey AI, teach me this concept using five examples. Give me one task, then evaluate my solution. And teach it in this particular style.” We lost something. I genuinely think we did. But I also think we gained much more. It’s okay to mourn what was lost, as long as you can still look forward.

fancyswimtime 3mo ago

same camp

afry1 3mo ago

Did AI take it away, or did you give it away? Now that you've made the Faustian bargain at this low low introductory price, how long until they start ratcheting up the price? How long will you be able to bear it? You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Given the rapid skill degradation that results from LLM-driven coding usage, I'd recommend it if you want to retain any skill at all.

beremaki 3mo ago
They are talking about the enjoyement. AI did disolve a lot of the meaning and magic behind pure code exercises. What felt like a creative endeavor now feels and is even more treated by society and other software engineers as grossly mechanical. And to me too that hurts. I think a lot of people whose identity or passion was tied to this feel like that. It is very much a "what is painting purpose now that photography exists ?" or "what is craft in an era of industrial mass production" moment for some of us. There are answers but finding them require exploration and being willing to change what we are I think that's their deeper point
sheepolog 3mo ago
So much life enjoyment is tied to feeling competent and respected. Seeing a new, more talented challenger on the horizon is bound to be discouraging to some extent. It's like going from high school to college all over again: you used to be the top of your class, now you're surrounded by people just as competent as you.
- lanstin 3mo ago
  To be happy as you age, you have to embrace being a clueless newbie. Some people seem very pessimistic that there is a method of creating networked software systems in a high quality way with LLMs, but it seems no different from many other changes - there are salient technical details that matter, and there is boilerplate, and as all the tools and problems shift, we find ways to highlight the stuff that matters and reduce the problems of boilerplate. I like GCC and haven’t run into a compiler bug in decades, nor looked at disassembly much in this millennium (except some go allocation stuff that puzzled me). I feel myself gaining skills to do that with LLMs in just the same way that higher power editors changed my behavior. I am pretty old, and it does take conscious effort to give up my cherished skills and plunge into new things professionally, but it’s the only way for me. And I am not exaggerating “clueless” here - I continue my practice of expertise via making all the mistakes. When I am new to something and there are others not new, I lean on them and have my lacks very clearly seen. When I am more isolated, I take pains to have very conservative release plans. But it is worth it: I get that pleasure of understanding a lot more often with new stuff than with the same old.
oneneptune 3mo ago
One thing AI did take away; I love reading source code written by other people. Node modules, plugins, LUA, python scripts... whatever. I loved seeing how people organized their logic, named their variables, the flavor of their comments... all of it. I learned so much diving through the source code of all the major tools. Now it's all AI generated. You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or an LLM's attempt to reproduce. Worse; even if the AI presented something novel it produces at such a rate it's a needle in a haystack. I feel cautious of any claim people make about their use of AI. I'm not even anti-AI; I use it. But at minimum wish there were a mechanism to know where the lines were.
- ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
  You can open linux source tree from 5 years ago and read that for a couple years. The feeling of helplessness doesn’t come from the fact that you can’t get out of the AI hype but the fact that advertisers have captured the attention of large portions of the population.
- teiferer 3mo ago
  > Now it's all AI generated. I can assure you, it's not. You just need to avoid the areas where this is prevalent. > You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or an LLM's attempt to reproduce. In the end of the day, if it's an elegant solution why does it matter! If anything then it sharpens your senses to check whether it's great or trash. A sense that one should have had with human code already, now it just feels more important (but it really isn't because it was important before too).
  - DarkTree 3mo ago
    It matters because some people view code as a human art. Sure, AI can also probably produce a good sounding song, but that doesn't mean I will view it in the same way as a song created by a human.
memjay 3mo ago
> You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Not if your company decides to be "AI-first" and puts agent use on your job results.
- lstodd 3mo ago
  Ditch that company maybe? Have some agency in your life. Sometimes people here write stuff as if being in control of their lifes is unthinkable.

drudolph914 3mo ago

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone. we can finally be in a room and just talk about good engineering. the people we as engineers never wanted to hear from are off attempting to force the world to use a tool that everyone 40 and under passionately rejects (this is spicy for HN terms, but the avg joe hates AI. people aren't stupid - they know they only stand to lose from it in the longer term). perspective shift 2: I just read Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It taught me a lot. I came away from that book understanding what "quality" means at a very philosophical level, and it gave me a lot of confidence for some fuzzy thoughts I already felt. it's too abstract to explain here, but it does a good job of explaining that there is perceived and strong difference between caring something into existence, verses just generating something into existence. this book breaks down how quality is not some artifact that lives in what you're making, and or is some feeling you get when you look at something that is aesthetically pleasing - quality is an event that occurs before you mind has differentiated yourself from the thing subject/object you're admiring - and in that moment, quality arises from the care you give it. there must exists energy and care towards what you're doing for quality to arise. generating anything with AI will never bring that fruition. many people try to counter this stance by saying that they iterate with AI forever, and assume that iteration is a the same as the caring event described in ZATAOMM - but the difference is that grading output is not the same as creating/authorship. it's must a read and deep study I think if you're into programming and this mental state perspective shift 3: This talk from Brandon Sanderson called We are the Art [1]. I personally do a lot of creative coding - like games and such. this talk does a great job of breaking down how art and creation ultimately lives in the person. I won't summarize here, just a must a watch perspective shift 4: I got off all the mainstream social media site bc the PR machine for AI is relentless. of course you're going to feel like crap when every site says, future generations will be homeless, K shaped economy, permanent underclass, etc. you gotta log off these sites to create some distance with the beast - it's not you, the world really is just messed up rn. Also I barely browse HN anymore. this place is the public square for VCs and people who lost hte plot with technology - I just happened to be here, and wanted to help my fellow programmer grinding through the same mental trenches I was in perspective shift 5: go find some programming communities on discord. I'm in a discord with like 5000 active members that really care about coding, and doing so without AI. this is a very active discord. once you realize there is a strong community still building like this, it really showed me we're not low in numbers, and there still a large group of people that will celebrate engineering efforts done by hand. and there are still people that need to understand these machines at a very deep level - you're efforts aren't wasted perspective shift 6: look at AI on the job as a way to get your work done faster to get home to do real programming. work code can be trash, home is where the real work is done. The analogy I’ve been telling myself is that it’s like going into a gold mine - no one wants to be in the mine, but i do like leaving with gold. i gotta pay the bills, but i don’t need to love it. perspective shift 7: The overall environment we live is just depressing and is reminiscent to Fahrenheit 451. I came away feeling closer to the author and protagonist than my first read. specifically the kind of hubris/ignorance found in all the side characters of F451 mimics what it feels like to talk with ai optimists. also, the way F451 is a world filled with people that are actively disengaged and comfortable being passively entertained feels almost too real. this book draws a lot of parallels with modern times, and it's a nice book to remind you that other people have felt this way in times of large technological change - and you're not crazy to feel depressed. Go start working on that side project you use to be really passionate about. me and all the other serious engineers are excited to see it [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo

overgard 3mo ago

I just spent the past three hours debugging a long latent bug from vibe coding a thing. The only way I found it was running a debugger through the C++ code and tracing everything -- Claude was utterly useless until I basically pointed out the problem to it. I don't think understanding technical aspects of programming is a waste of time at all, it's still very necessary. The annoying thing too is that, whatever time I saved having the LLM write it, I pretty much just lost having to debug it. (For what it's worth: the bug it introduced is one I never would have introduced on my own, because it fundamentally misunderstood a key component of the design)

sublinear 3mo ago

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few days. It wouldn't even matter if I got it done faster since the bottleneck is decisions in the next meeting or waiting to hear back from another team. Dev time was always trivial and irrelevant. Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal. What else are you doing with your time? How much discussion does your team even have if the nuances of the code aren't important to you?

kazinator 3mo ago
If you ship something, by some means, you get blame if it goes wrong. But when it goes right, you can only get credit if you wrote it yourself. If you're risking being blamed, that should be balanced with credit.
skydhash 3mo ago
> Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal. Web search engines are mostly for quick navigation this day as a lot of sites don’t bother with a good navigation menu. It’s faster to search the title of the page than to deal with the offered navigation widget. > Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. Same here. I read and write code just like I read and write English (which is not even my second language). Coding is trivial. Most of the time is spent on communication (with the team and the stakeholder) and on reading documentation (so that you know the implications of using a function or what’s inside an object at a point of time). And even the latter is shortened as you got more familiar with the libraries.

peter_retief 3mo ago

I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit

brokegrammer 3mo ago

It's not true at all. I recently vibe coded a REST API in Golang even though I never wrote any production Go code. However, I had to make copious use of my previous experience as an engineer to achieve quality. You can see this in the real world. The people who are getting the most out of AI are the ones who already have experience coding without AI. CEOs don't want to admit it but AI can't code anything non-trivial on its own.

pelasaco 3mo ago
I agree with you, but now we have managers pushing code to production, people that never coded but are "IT versed"..so you get PR/MR not just with code, but with PR/MR comment written by Claude, Commit Message written by Claude.. all super verbose, and you know the people operating Claude, have no clue. Super dangerous combination. But part of the reality.
- brokegrammer 3mo ago
  Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway. If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place. The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced. AI isn't generating high quality compilers or OS kernels, for example, because we haven't found a way to mass produce those yet. I suggest you stop listening to clowns like Elon Musk and Super Mario.
  - pelasaco 3mo ago
    Your comment makes 0 sense.. > Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway. non-trivial code shouldn't be written by experienced engineers? Please explain > If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place. How did you come to this conclusion? I am concerned about verbose AI documentation, 10 lines of commit message, MR comments with 50+ lines, the typical AI workflow that we all love: One huge commit with 10000+ changes. > The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced. In your opinion, you mean? Because AI is doing everything which involves thinking. Art, Code, Music.. not "mass producted" things.. > I suggest you stop listening to clowns like Elon Musk and Super Mario. Sounds like you are not really reading, thinking, writing.. only writing i guess?

MASNeo 3mo ago

I really do differentiate between fast & vast changes of commodity code and critical sections. For the latter I’d explore with AI and then rewrite, line by line, with deliberate concern for all aspects relevant. This does retain the joy of coding for me and takes away the pain of what is commodity and hard to do without tiresome meetings (mostly UI/UX and API/MCP as my products don’t differentiate on these).

teiferer 3mo ago

> learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms Let's be honest here: how many actually distinct paradigms are we really talking about here? I challenge you to name more than 5 which are not just flavors of the same core approach. Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software.

pelasaco 3mo ago
> Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software. Why it should be relevant for production software?
- teiferer 3mo ago
  Because I find that an interesting question. There are lots of experimental and somewhat esoteric things out there. And sure, it can be fun learning about them. But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language.
  - pelasaco 3mo ago
    > But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language. That's not true at all. In first place, what you can think is good for production, i can think otherwise.. Beside it there is a lot of things/paradigms/languages that we learn, to help us to either understand better the basics or because it is easier for beginners. There are a lot of Science and Research that you can just throw away, but that was super important for further development. Pascal, Smalltalk, Minix are example of technologies, that we learn(ed) and not necessary are widely used in production. Haskell helped me to understand is pure immutability is actually practical or not, and so on..
    - teiferer 3mo ago
      [dead]

frankie_t 3mo ago

Same here. FWIW, you can still absolutely do it, just like you can weave your own fabric. You probably won't be able to monetize it though, as it won't give you as much edge in the workspace anymore. It's just a thing to do in your spare time. Not sure if it helps with the feeling of futility or not. For me, it doesn't really help that much because ultimately I want the skills and knowledge I gathered to benefit me in some way. For example, previously I would be able to better understand computers and software, be an "overall better" programmer, better thinker (in terms of computation). If the results you get are not used in any way, it's on the same level as memorizing rule sets for some obscure game that no one knows or cares about. Maybe pivoting to something else like philosophy could make sense as a hobby. Of course, there's always going to be some demand for knowing computers, knowing programming languages first-hand, etc. Writing or auditing code for critical systems. Teaching the next generations of people that will do critical systems. Some people are optimistic in that they are going to fall into that demand. I'm not optimistic about myself.

peheje 3mo ago

I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I’ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and health, and now I’m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want while repurposing an old Android device as the server. Do I miss nerding out over implementing a B-tree, or learning async programming in F#, Go, Crystal, Nim, C++, C#, JavaScript workers, or Java green threads? I don’t know, man. Maybe a little. But it has also never been easier to say: “Hey AI, teach me this concept using five examples. Give me one task, then evaluate my solution. And teach it in this particular style.” We lost something. I genuinely think we did. But I also think we gained much more. It’s okay to mourn what was lost, as long as you can still look forward.