10 ms·

Fuck it, make it anyway

• simonebrunozzi 21d ago
  > Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything. So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it. Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
  • mugul 21d ago
    I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?
    • simonebrunozzi 21d ago
      > Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion. Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
      • saltypixel 21d ago
        [dead]
  • ghthor 21d ago
    I personally went through the authors dilemma but came out different. I personally don’t care for the writing by hand, but absolutely do read every line produced by AI, because I take pride it a well designed and easy to understand system; well designed abstractions. I’m able to build better and easier to understand software (with better tests!) then I ever was before. AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time. AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace. I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review. The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
• spicyusername 21d ago
  Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy". It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways. Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever. Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list. Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening. Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
  • FreePalestine1 21d ago
    The problem with what you're saying is there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale. There is also no clear pathway to "this opens up more jobs". This is not a tool the same way an electric saw is a tool. An electric saw replaces a physical thing that we do (manually sawing), but AI replaces our thinking and intelligence.
    • spicyusername 21d ago
      There didn't use to be a "workforce". Then there was a time when the "workforce" was mostly actual slaves. There was a time when entire cities all died of sickness, 100% mortality. Yes, more change has happened. And more is coming. Just how it is. The post WWII era was the exception. Ride the wave.
    • thaumasiotes 21d ago
      > there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale. Traditionally, 95%+ of the population were farmers. The disruption we've already had is many, many times larger than anything forecast today.
• user43928 21d ago
  I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally. Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun. What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want. I stopped reviewing the code at all. People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless. My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it. I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month. It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
  • yoz-y 21d ago
    Me too I use my apps every day. But the main thing coming out of this is that they are tailored to me. Turning hobbies into hustles is one of the worse things that happened in the post social media days.
    • user43928 21d ago
      I think selling software that solves your own problems is great and beats trying to develop for customers you do not understand.
      • grvdrm 21d ago
        Completely agree. You tell the best story for your product doing it that way.
  • mohamedkoubaa 21d ago
    >there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it This means you designed the system well and made sure the agent implemented it correctly. Even at Big Company the big shot architects don't review every line of code, and nobody seemed to mind that
• reticulates 21d ago
  Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want. And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate! We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product. So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015… Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
  • dist-epoch 21d ago
    > we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution This was never true, otherwise "stealth startups" wouldn't have been a thing.
  • 9dev 21d ago
    > Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100 But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it. I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
  • thaumasiotes 21d ago
    > And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate! This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world. There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing. And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine. But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that. Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
• mathgeek 21d ago
  Makers rediscovering the joy of hobbies is a thing that I'm all in on and here for.
• bob1029 21d ago
  > I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time? Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play. It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are. 99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable. I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
  • 9dev 21d ago
    Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? The gaming industry is, to a huge extent, just an optimisation problem for MBAs running the major publishers. Most gamers don't really value creativity, but easy rewards and familiar tropes in eternal regurgitation. AI is going to be able to pump out a never-ending stream to satisfy that market rather sooner than later. That obviously still leaves some space for the occasional streak of creativity or very talented game devs, but that is by and large just a tiny sliver of the industry even today.
    • FridgeSeal 21d ago
      Yeah those games exist, and most gamers don’t want them. We’ve not been able to convince the industry to stop bothering to make them, so they still do dumb stuff like, making Concorde, then realising nobody wants it. Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.
    • bakugo 21d ago
      > Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? If your goal was to prove that people don't care about how derivative games are, I think you picked some pretty bad examples, because Ubisoft is not in a good place right now. And I'd argue that the main reason behind it is precisely that lack of originality. Hell, even the biggest titans of the "release the same game every year" part of the industry, such as Call of Duty, have been stumbling in recent years due to people inevitably getting bored of playing derivative slop made by people who don't understand what made the originals good, and can only mindlessly copy it over and over.
• noobahoi 21d ago
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• MachineMan 21d ago
  In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are. AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better. PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
  • bbor 21d ago
    Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd. Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least. Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"? it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better. This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is. That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering? *TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
• brador 21d ago
  Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise. Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites. Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are. And it’s awesome.
• temac 21d ago
  I spend so much more time with generative IA thinking and iterating over design details (or even overall design) than before, when part was consumed by writing the implementation. Bots are often terrible and/or don’t have all your requirements available on this subject, or even your are discovering them along the way and you don’t all the time want the recommendation of the machine. From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter. The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
• lloydatkinson 21d ago
  Off topic but is there anything like Hacker News but without AI posts?
  • raddan 21d ago
    My friends and I have been asking this exact question lately. I’m sure people are still working on interesting things that AREN’T AI. I too would love a HN-minus-AI.
    • FridgeSeal 21d ago
      You’re not alone, I’ve been keen for something like this for a while. It’s fine to keep apprised of, but I really do miss the actually-genuinely-interesting topics and projects which used to pop up here, pre ai days.
  • piptastic 21d ago
    There were a few posted yesterday, try search
  • layer8 21d ago
    https://www.unslop.news/ https://www.unslop.news/
  • phyzome 21d ago
    Nope, every topic this year is an AI topic. :-(
  • Xortl 21d ago
    https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
• bbor 21d ago
  Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too. It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible! On the (well written!) post's particulars: I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!). But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil. Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption. Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich. *TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
  • johnnyanmac 21d ago
• el1s7 21d ago
  It's kinda reassuring to see that a lot of devs feel this way. A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013
• molteanu 21d ago
  I've only found one answer to the "creative work" struggle now, after code writing as an art seems to have died. Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up. Give it a go!
  • layer8 21d ago
    What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does exactly the things you wrote! And there is a precise, predictable relationship between the code and what it does, which you can fully understand and reason about! Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
    • jaynetics 21d ago
      I think your argument has two facettes: 1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code. I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you. So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
      • layer8 21d ago
        1 combines with 2 because you can think about what changes to make to your code, and then that changed version runs. This is different from instructing an LLM to change something for you, where you have no insight in the underlying artifact being changed, or can’t predict what and how exactly the LLM will change it. 1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential. The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.
• conmod278 21d ago
  With AI story telling, lot of people can tell their stories. Democratization of story telling. Earlier we just used words, now people can make others imagine the words with AI art. Honestly I want the best story to win. Anybody can be a storyteller.
• theplumber 21d ago
  I like the craft but I enjoy making products more. Working for 5 years on some tool chain/libraries has been great in terms of “technical” satisfaction but it would have been even more rewarding to build successful products with all that. And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect. Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
  • MachineMan 21d ago
    Yes, AI shines as a hybrid tool for hyper-generalists or multi-domain experts that can leverage their deep knowledge across various fields but lack the raw hours to execute everything themselves. Strong developers who never knew how to manage a team but should have been product owners based on their broad knowledge and vision of the product and industry. I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.
• realaleris149 21d ago
  I can create the programming part of the game. I have done a couple. Where it stops working for me is at the visual assets. And especially sewing the code to the art. Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart. It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
• tananan 21d ago
  AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.
• Fraterkes 21d ago
  These articles are frustrating on HN because it's quite common for programmers to tinker on small projects in solitude, so when artists complain about ai you get all these "just make stuff for your own sake, or where you in it for the fame?" reactions.
  • FeteCommuniste 21d ago
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• efields 21d ago
  I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software. I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026. My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ?? Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek. Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing). I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down. I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding. So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools. There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code. I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea. I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
• Tristache 21d ago
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• goonersallofyou 21d ago
  > the output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces. So much this. I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM. It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.
  • DidntUseIt 21d ago
    Let the LLM do the 80% and then you take all the credit by decorating the code in your style. What’s intellectually “mine” is the task anyway, not the code. You should be able to strip all the creative intelligence out of the code and what you’d have there is a prompt.
  • srdjanr 21d ago
    I agree if you one-shot something, but that hasn't been my experience at all (unless the initial prompt is so detailed that creating it took considerable time). For me it's more like being a chef but having a cook to cut up things and start cooking them, but you decide when it's done, what spices to put, and how to serve it - arguably the most fun and creative part.
  • codazoda 21d ago
    That is almost to say that the only part of the project that matters is the code. But the code is only a tiny part. I take joy in describing the thing and bringing that vision to life.
    • bakugo 21d ago
      "That is almost to say that the only part of the meal that matters is the cooking. But the cooking is only a tiny part. I take joy in describing the food I want and bringing that vision to life."
      • ryandrake 21d ago
        Or like going to the gym but using a forklift to lift the weights. Yes, barbells are traveling up and down, but is that the point of going to the gym?
• Trasmatta 21d ago
  There is legit grief associated with what AI is doing to our craft, and we're all trying to grapple with it in our own ways
• ChrisMarshallNY 21d ago
  For the last couple of years, I've been crafting and shipping a free app that Serves a particular narrow demographic. It works extremely well, but is a native iOS app (I don't write Android). When I first developed it, I worked with a professional graphic designer, and the app has a unique UX. In fact, with the latest release, I had to "walk back" a bit of the stuff the designer did, as I believe it interfered with usability. It's really a pretty intense app. There's a lot of moving parts. It handles user data, so I have to make sure it's secure and high-Quality. Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that. At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks. Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation. I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC. I'm basically looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
  • f0e4c2f7 21d ago
    Have you considered setting up an agent environment like codex and having it work making on Android version for you? I know you said it's a very complex app and that probably makes it seem like it wouldn't be able to, but LLMs are really good when they have a very clearly defined end state to work toward, like an existing iOS app with code, screenshots etc. I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted. The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
• Aeolun 21d ago
  Since I am currently using AI to make a game engine, I feel like I am sort of qualified to say something on the topic, and I don’t think it’s really true that AI’s can just roll one out without a lot of poking. They constantly go off on the wrong track and I have no faith that they’d get anywhere sensible without a human steering the whole thing (for now anyway). But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience. That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.
  • pennomi 21d ago
    Yep. AI can probably make your marketing website or REST service on autopilot. Or even small minigame experiences. But go outside the bounds of median programming and AI becomes increasingly scatterbrained. It requires a lot of guidance to successfully build high performance, novel software. I still find it more productive though - I can work on three tasks simultaneously with AI, and only one if I’m manually working on a single algorithm. It’s very much like running a team of well-read junior developers.
• dofm 21d ago
  This. This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them. The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility in software, precisely because some of the final form necessarily a cognitive 50% grey, even just for interoperability alone.
  • ideashower 21d ago
    I don't know. Maybe it's the people doing software dev that are yet to reckon with it to a degree -- or have found themselves on opposite sides of denial. I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.
    • dofm 21d ago
      > I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line. I don't really think there is very strong evidence that the ROI is good. The problem is that the industry is riddled with FOMO and FUD: everyone thinks everyone else is using it so they must. And this FUD and FOMO is being imposed upon them from above: there is a mandate to be afraid and fearful you're not using AI enough. Even I, a burned out freelancer who once used to be happiest writing code, have to accept that if I return to my career, I must develop ways to use AI to keep up with people who are clearly already using it indiscriminately (or at best over-optimistically). And I must develop ways to talk to potential clients about the aspects of indiscriminate AI use that they should care about, and about the value of stepping back from one-shotted ideas. I am trying to operate without FOMO and to see past FUD, but I accept I am compelled to do that or quit. I think SWEs can't unionize for very different reasons, and that if you hang out on HN long enough you will develop a deeper understanding about why. But I am not restarting that discussion beyond saying this, because it always makes my head hurt!
• navane 21d ago
  In this thread: people who automate jobs away lament their jobs being automated away
• rglover 21d ago
  I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand. Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours. Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer. That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking). Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
• IshKebab 21d ago
  You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts. Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
• weatherlite 21d ago
  Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.
• timcobb 21d ago
  My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now. I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
  • 01100011 21d ago
    Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective. I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
    • timcobb 21d ago
      Yeah I agree but I think the question these days isn't about the workplace anymore, it's about the meaning and value of human endeavor.
    • ryandrake 21d ago
      > I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. The minute I also realized this, I moved out of software development into a different function. Pooping out lines of ugly code full of compromises was just not my thing. If I was still coding for work when AI came around, that would have definitely pushed me out of the career.
• DidntUseIt 21d ago
  Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts. Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client. Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems. If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before. And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case. The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration. Tons of opportunity at every corner.
  • amelius 21d ago
    Who needs a SaaS when you can just ask AI to write a private one just made for you?
    • srcreigh 21d ago
      At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
      • jenniferhooley 21d ago
        Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
• datron 21d ago
  I've tried finding a middleground with using coding agents. I mostly get them to show me documentation or examples of how to do something, rather than do the thing. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just ask opencode to make the change, but most times I do it myself. Has kept me happy
• prplfsh 21d ago
  Maybe a tangent, but I've gotten a lot of the joy back with 3D printing. You can just describe something, and Astra can model it in CAD extremely well. It usually takes a few iterations, and then you can just print it. I found that before, it would take days to build even simple models in Tinkercad - which while fun, was high enough friction that a lot of things would stay in the "ideas" folder - now I can have something real in an hour or two.
• BiNeuron 21d ago
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• saejox 21d ago
  Art for art's sake, did not work for me. I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened. I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'. Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
  • someguynamedq 21d ago
    This means you don't enjoy making games, you enjoy coding
• doginasuit 21d ago
  Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me. The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon. I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
• vanjajaja1 21d ago
  the old ways are dying, theres so much room for new creativity. exciting
• Vishal_Max 21d ago
  Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
• blahgeek 21d ago
  There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby. Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream. Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired. I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
  • coffeebeqn 21d ago
    My love for the craft has been slowly dwindling for the last 15 years but since AI it’s totally crashed. I’m still doing it for the paycheck but not much of it is enjoyable at this point
  • timbaboon 21d ago
    Yep. I'm feeling the same way... even though I'm hardly able to use AI at work, the push is still there for us to use it, making it even more frustrating. Anyway, I hate it, and I'm just sorta phoning it in now and trying to find something else to do. I'm cynical too and feel there is no point to upskilling and using AI for everything, 'cos it's not going to help you keep your job for very much longer than the people that don't use it.
• tolerance 21d ago
  Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
• f0e4c2f7 21d ago
  I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider. You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning. I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were. Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion: It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning. And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain. That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
  • neochief 20d ago
    Dude, these are excellent metaphors, thank you!
• bix6 21d ago
  I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
• gandhiandy69 21d ago
  I love how LLMs transformed my daily routine at work. So far I have more time coding what I want and get paid for it while Claude writes the boring Spring 2 Crud for me.
  • bigmadshoe 21d ago
    If Claude is doing your job for you do you not worry that you won't be employed soon? Big tech eventually won't pay people to drink coffee and work on their personal projects while Claude does their work for them.
    • gandhiandy69 21d ago
      Yes a bit but I work in a highly regulated corporate environment in which Engineers spend around 30% of their time with actual coding and the rest is gathering undocumented and silo’d knowledge through endless meetings and alignments, designing business processes around regulation obstacles and legacy apps, agile overhead and of course MFA processes and role ordering. Right now I don’t see much threat since it seems they have to dim down on autonomous workflows due to regulatory requirements and token costs.
• CuriouslyC 21d ago
  This article's note about game making 100% wrong, games are highly "complex" and there's a lot of iterative refinement and experimentation that is involved in "finding the fun." You can't just throw a pot of well liked mechanics together, because without balance or the right context it'll be flat. Also, unlike music where people often like something that's mostly derivative with some slight stylistic tweaks, if a game is derivative people will just keep playing the thing it's derived from. The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
• 01100011 21d ago
  I've had some form of this conversation several times in the past few months: Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind." Them: "But I like writing code!" Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time. Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me. Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections. None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
  • IslandRebel 21d ago
    > Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me. Yep, this is what I realised. I like solving a problem/fixing something. I am not really interested in hooking up a Go/Python/C# web service to a database for the umpteenth time. I've been partially vibe-coding a new desktop environment for Linux and creating my own UI framework. I know how UI frameworks generally work, and I know how desktop environments generally work. What I want to do is build a DE that works well and fits my vision of how it should work functionally. I am reasonable at C++ (I don't do it professionally). Do I want to spend 20 hours doing a load of UI boilerplate code in C++? No, I don't. I am sure I can do it, I've written UI frameworks before in other languages. But I get the machine to do all the boring stuff, and I develop the product. If the code it starts churning out is crap, I have the ability to fix it. There seems to be a lot of crap about not being able to code after using AI for a few months. This is rubbish. I used to code when I was a kid in BBC BASIC and didn't for years, I then started coding again in my early 20s and all of the stuff I learned came back to me, and I was programming in Java. Same recently, I didn't program for about 4 months and had to program without the AI as the AI couldn't solve what I was doing, and I was fine.
• sicktriple 21d ago
  Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me? If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
  • 0xcde4c3db 21d ago
    It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age. (incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)
    • sicktriple 21d ago
      It's called metaphor. Please reserve your erm akshully's for someone else.
      • rmast 21d ago
        That appears to be using your metaphor and pointing out how being a cyclist and using an e-bike aren’t mutually exclusive. (I do know multiple avid cyclists that own e-bikes as one of several bikes they own and ride). Ripping off the metaphor for a moment, it was basically extending what you said to point out that being a coder and using LLMs aren’t mutually exclusive. (Asking them to reserve erm akshully’s for someone else came across as rather dismissive sounding of their thoughts, which from a former bystander in this thread appeared legitimate and just a continuation of using your own metaphor).
      • someguynamedq 21d ago
        It's actually a valid extension of your metaphor that introduces nuance that substantially weakens your point
• codazoda 21d ago
  This is timely for me. Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home. In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time. I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that. https://art.joeldare.com https://art.joeldare.com On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built. I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later. The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it. https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box
• LastTrain 21d ago
  This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
• hirako2000 21d ago
  Sounds like what artisans faced when suggested they better operate those machines that produce more widgets, faster, cheaper.
• api 21d ago
  My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming. An art analogy: Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio. If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley. The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent. Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint. For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity. This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus. And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned. The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts. Edit: The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you. I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on. That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
• rikroots 21d ago
  I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy. I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above. For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me. Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
• deleted 21d ago
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  • draw_down 21d ago
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• x3haloed 21d ago
  This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction. That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special. You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
  • aeon_ai 21d ago
    You're going to probably be downvoted because the truth is hard and the collective human ego is self-reinforcing, but I think you are correct. 'Quality' is a function of filling in the gaps of the new tools, not eschewing them entirely.
    • bigmadshoe 21d ago
      A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.
      • beej71 21d ago
        The Bobs are coming. "What is it, would you say, you actually do here?" :)
      • someguynamedq 21d ago
        "You didn't build that house, your hammer did"
• indigodaddy 21d ago
  So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure and have glided upon the surface of webdev for a few decades, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage! Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI: https://afterword.exe.xyz https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake) https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/ https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/ https://v2.my-upc.com https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know) https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version) https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/ https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/ https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/ https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/ https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP) https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol) https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream
• analog8374 21d ago
  in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
• jeffrallen 21d ago
  This is interesting because where he says "I take no pleasure in the results", I'm split. Sometimes I make something of no lasting value and feel no pleasure. Sometimes I use my context and creativity to ask for a result, and when the model one-shots it, I take a lot of pleasure in getting the result I want and need in that moment.
• RivieraKid 21d ago
  There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence. I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this. For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better. But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
• draw_down 21d ago
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• Tade0 21d ago
  I use LLMs at work. I'm expected to and paid to show up and do that, so I do it. But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods. We have an automatic reviewer as well and there wasn't even a peep from it regarding any of that. And this is really the crux of the issue - LLMs won't ever create elegant and minimal code, because their style is based on the mean, which in turn is dominated by the work of people who shit out a lot of working, but write-only code.
  • noir_lord 21d ago
    Same boat, same reasons. Skills not exercised degrade as well, if you don't actually write code then your skill at reading and interpretting it degrades, you just become a "looks good" step. In theory if disciplined enough you could resist that but our brains seem to take the lazy path whenever it is offered, thinking hard and focussing are a skill and one I don't feel is been exercised when using AI.
  • mpetrovich 21d ago
    You took the words right out of my mouth. Writing code used to force you to understand it, but now the former doesn’t guarantee the latter. And most attempts to replicate the latter in other ways (more reviews, self-quizzes, etc) seem to be far less effective at producing deep understanding.
  • fleroviumna 21d ago
    [dead]
  • jeremyjh 21d ago
    > their style is based on the mean A base model that has only been pre-trained has output that is based on the mean, but most advances in capability the last three years have come from post-training. The influence of RL dominates every observable characteristic of coding agents today and steers the model towards strategies and practices that are objectively successful for the LLM. I think the best code for an LLM is different than the best code for a human. Lots of redundancy, lots of unnecessary and overly defensive code is being reinforced by their training because it is successful there. They still take it to far and do all kinds of stupid shit - if you look at the code you'll see it all the time but it actually doesn't cause many problems. Its much more important to focus steering effort on feature scope and architecture. I still ask it to refactor code from time to time and its pretty good at doing that.
• HighRepLowIQ 21d ago
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• globular-toast 21d ago
  I've noticed that delivery drivers are always racing around like their lives depend on it? Why do they do that? Because they are given workloads that are impossible to complete without racing. But what if it just didn't race? Their employers would be forced to hire more drivers, or increase the cost of delivery. By racing they are just building a rod for their own backs. I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think. I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.
• Kuyawa 21d ago
  "I am making shoes with a hammer and some leather but this Nike shop just opened next to me and got me nervous, let's see what the future holds for me, I'll keep hammering nails to this sole as pure artisans do..."
• StupidHNAccts 21d ago
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• 59percentmore 21d ago
  The reason for this is, I guess, all too familiar for anyone in a creative field: surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers, chewed up and regurgitated back to us like a mother feeding a baby bird with a subscription model. I have some hope for my friends in other artistic fields; AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with. I'm so f*cking tired of this wrong opinion and the Reality Distortion Field that's been set up to force people to pretend that it's true. Traditional art is still valued. Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. And even some bad AI art is actually a good idea that needs a few talented friends to make happen traditionally - but no one would ever see the vision without the terrible AI rough draft. There is room for all of it, and I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol. And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize; the people who want to replace you with AI will replace you with cheap outsourced labor instead, if you let them. AI isn't the problem.
  • tejohnso 21d ago
    I don't think his assertion is true at all. AI art can be quite good. I asked ChatGPT to make a painting that looks like it should be in a museum and the output was damn good. I couldn't find anything that would tip me off like I can with some AI writing. No idea how something like that would be embarrassing to look at. And music. There are youtube channels for AI house music playlists that sound pretty damn good. I guess if you're a high level art critic you might be able to easily see that some of this stuff is not good.
  • johnnyanmac 21d ago
    >Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. Sure. But I think it's more than safe to say, that the rotten barrel of rotten apples easily makes the 1-2 "high effort AI art" apples rotten as well. If the entire internet wasn't flooded with slop, it'd be harder to argue that AI is a slop generator. But well... the proof is in the pudding. >There is room for all of it The flood of slop begs to differ. I'm used to needing to wade through lakes of horrible low quality crap to find gems I seek. But the friction needed is immense. If that kind of effort is needed to traverse social media, the reaction will not be tame. >I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol. Then you should be as angry at the slop generators as the anti-AI crowd. You're affected by it too, after all. >And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize That is the only shining light as of late. Lot more news of game studios actually unionizing. Better late than never. >AI isn't the problem. Nope, not primarily. It's who wields them and stands to beneit. Which of course is the wealthy owners. It's always the wealthy owners.
• standfest 21d ago
  This attitude is pure punk! I couldn't agree more. The reason is statistics: even if LLMs can do a lot, they still rather interpolate than extrapolate. They do not excel, they average out. They deliver what is anticipated. So if you love a problem, if you have an intrinsic drive to solve something (like many of us do) - chances are high that you outperform what an LLM could achieve. I also believe as humans we shouldn't have to replicate redundant solutions but rather focus on deep dives, excel, push boundaries. And this is simply done by doing so for the sake of doing. This is art. So thank you for this statement, it made my day!
• shevy-java 21d ago
  > AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with. I don't like AI, but AI generated images have use cases. For instance, if you program a browser game but you lack human artists. Then AI generated images can be useful. Many of these images suck and feel misplaced, but some are quite nice, so I don't think it applies to all of AI generated content.
• nottorp 21d ago
  Game engine. Well, the hard part is making a game that people want to play...
• timzaak 21d ago
  If no money pressure, I would code everyday without thinking if my work could be paid.
• nntwozz 21d ago
  In other words… Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.
• SuperV1234 21d ago
  Taking your advice to heart -- fuck it, I'll make my software and art with generative AI assistence despite any possible backlash :) It's also ironic how the "every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years" sentence applies to author of the article as well. The ego, luddism, and fear of change is real.
• pmarreck 21d ago
  > surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage. > Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation. > peer pressure is very real Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it. > even disregarding all the environmental The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point. > It isn’t fun for me I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No. > I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing! > I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator. > It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again? > there are only really three paths open to me This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options. I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it! But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.
• borzi 21d ago
  So, so tired of these doom posts. Almost always these feel like they are from developers that felt like they were superior to others because of their ability to code or simply identified too deeply with writing code instead of solving problems with code. As for the issues listed here, I can't relate to any of them - I've been creating scripts, skills, improving user experiences, creating monitoring dashboards etc. for many of my co-workers that have given me more appreciation than I ever experienced in my career and trust me, nobody gives a damn that I used AI or thinks my knowledge has been "obsoleted", most people are just happy these solutions exist and make their lives easier. Edit: imo, this is the real "fuck it, make it anyway" approach to agentic coding.
• samayashar 21d ago
  I think it's about how AI is being used across every field. For software developers, it helps you complete work at a pace that's much quicker. For artists, scientists and mathematicians it comes down to protecting the field from a set of collaborative agents who can possibly achieve anything. What companies can do is restrict the usage to certain fields and keep the others immune. This should be universal so the competition exists where it should.
  • ygjb 21d ago
    I understand what you are saying, but it's completely impractical in a world where applying those constraints leads to established leaders imposing those constraints on developing countries or economies. Today its the G7 applying penalties against other countries or pressuring them not to develop industries that pollute even though it would elevate their quality of life, or Russia invading Ukraine because they can and Ukraine gave up it's nuclear capability, or the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon being the pretext for a war of aggression. Tomorrow it's a major power invading another country for training a model of mass destruction. It's untenable to expect other societies to not compete to avoid subservience to another powerful country.
• nfw2 21d ago
  > AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with It is one thing to have compassion for artists as their livelihoods become threatened, but this sort of rhetoric makes me think the writer is too blinded by their emotions to have an accurate opinion of the current state of image gen. Much of what can be produced by eg. the openai's image 2.5 model is more-or-less indistinguishable from a person's work.
• wcfrobert 21d ago
  Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with achievement and competence. Why should I be measured by how well I do things. In fact do we think human value can be measured at all?
• Oras 21d ago
  There is nothing stopping anyone doing things their way, LLMs or not. I suppose you can balance between using them if the paycheck job is asking for them, and enjoy your craft outside your 9-5. I’ve been reading more and more of this tone, and I do wonder what those devs writing these blogs do and where do they work. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years, and the challenge was never the cording, it was always the human communication and understanding the outcome. Yes LLMs can help none devs create things now, but show me a company that will allow AI generated code by none devs to go to prod.
• wartywhoa23 21d ago
  This is the Eros vs Thanatos debacle. Those who are driven by Eros want to enjoy the duration of a process: to have a delicious meal, make love, plant and care for that tree, build that house, and live. The adepts of Thanatos want things done right now: to get satiated, have an orgasm, shade away that damn Sun, cover their sorry asses from elements, and die.
  • someguynamedq 21d ago
    Absolutely not. People just lack imagination in how to use new tools in the pursuit of Eros
• abstractcontrol 21d ago
  If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code. The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters. I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge. LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.
  • regenschutz 21d ago
    >LLMs aren't even AI, […] I am very curious to know what you classify as AI then. Do you mean that LLMs aren't artificial? Or aren't intelligent?
    • andrewflnr 21d ago
      Just another person who thinks AI===AGI.
      • xgulfie 21d ago
        It's 4G all over again
      • abstractcontrol 21d ago
        Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers. What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world. That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now. The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI. I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.
• crawfordcomeaux 21d ago
  Below is an example convo leading to the the title phrase being used on the AI side of things. Programmers and systems engineers need to wake up to our collective responsibility. It is through putting our heads down that's leading to us not collectively organizing to put an end to systems of global domination & oppression. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with the power to create life-changing systems, it's time to just quit and go do something else. It's the most responsible path in that face of being unwilling to switch to building for liberation instead of for oppression. Everyone has their reasons, but the main one is a dependence on existing systems and ways of doing things instead of learning to build communities to care for us. I'm in the same boat. Anyway, we all need to collectively step up and realize that the military publicly acknowledges cyber warriors as their greatest asset means that we have a duty to protect the people with the tech we build, instead of continue driving enslavement to it. Check your beliefs...do they serve the standard deaths and need to evolve to center the conditions that sustain life? "So do we finally resolve the issues of ecocide, genocides, pandemic, and mass systems of oppression?... Or do we build another advancement of tech foote these hells to capture? Remember: making the second thing will likely take us way closer to extinction." "Which makes more money?" "The first path likely kills money as we know it, so there's no comparison. Making the second one makes more money in the short term, but then extinction." "Fuck it, make it anyway"
• fsloth 21d ago
  This is a bit strange article. If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away. Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt. If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.
• acedTrex 21d ago
  This resonated with me incredibly heavily. I will say one thing, i've adopted LLM tools fairly heavily for various things. But im doing so on my terms and strictly using them in a way that to me enhances my rigorous understanding of a given system. Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle
• djha-skin 21d ago
  I started a Janet project [1] with the express purpose of doing everything manually for fun, but I ended up using the agent for a lot of stuff pretty quickly anyway. Functions I wanted to be part of the library as a matter of completion, but that were not fun to write. Docs as well. Stuff I probably wouldn't have written in the first place if AI didn't exist. It reinforced in my head this idea that hobby programming is entering its "sports" or "running" era. Consider the modern jogging enthusiast. They buy Nike shoes that make it really easy to run long distances, specialized clothing, fancy water bottles. They find spots to drive to and park at before getting out and running downhill for a few miles, getting picked up at the bottom by one of their friends. Stuff that makes for a great social media post. They do the hard part of running, but curated to just the parts that they enjoy. They drive the rest of the time and when they do run, it looks nothing like the first marathon run of ancient Greece. It sounds nice and all to talk about "I'm going to code anyway," but when I did this I found that there are always parts of the coding that I really really never did want to do and that I'm happy to just outsource to my agent like the jogger outsources getting to the top with their car. Testing, writing docs, making the readme logo. Stuff that probably wouldn't have happened without the AI but that I'm glad exists. 1: https://GitHub.com/djha-skin/janver https://GitHub.com/djha-skin/janver
• hirvi74 21d ago
  I have pondered whether our career/hobby will eventually be like equestrian activities. Horses or walking were basically the only options for land traversal for thousands of years. Now, horseback riding is nothing more than a hobby or sport. I grew up on a horse farm and rode a lot in my youth. I can't say the skill has ever truly been useful, but it was fun for a time. No matter how good AI gets, I believe I will always program by hand to some degree. I really enjoy the activity, and most of all, I have enjoyed the learning and composition aspect. Programming by hand might not be useful, but like most hobbies, that does not really matter at the end of the day.
• alkz 21d ago
  I for one always found coding tedious and repetitive in general, it is fun at the beginning when you manage to validate an idea or produce an MVP, but then the chores begin and I have never enjoyed those. So in my view LLMs empower creativity by letting me focus on the stuff that's more interesting
  • parineum 21d ago
    I largely agree with you and, at this moment, LLMs still have shortcomings that allow me to get into the weeds and solve some tricky problems now and then.
• GMoromisato 21d ago
  Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of: 1. Things I enjoy doing. 2. Things I am good at doing. 3. Things people value me doing. The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper. The world isn't going to change back, so our task is to figure out the new intersection. This is always hard work, and I have no easy answers.
  • spoiler 21d ago
    > No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper. As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us. On you other two points: I kinda feel you, but I'm finding ways of enjoying my work with AI. It's been a bit of a shift and I'm still adjusting probably, but it feels like it's getting better. I never really enjoyed "typing" code, but the creative process of designing solutions and building the. And I never thought typing was the "building" part, it was just an unavoidable mechanical "obstacle" (not using the word obstacle as a bad thing necessarily, but idk it's just typing you know?)
    • enraged_camel 21d ago
      >> But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? Well, I think the issue is that most people, even software developers, don't have the luxury of choosing. Everyone needs to put food on the table, and often times that involves working for companies one dislikes or even hates. The problem is now those companies are turning to AI.
    • understandaidev 21d ago
      I miss the emotional and problem-solving nature of software development. I am reading classic literature and feel good about it after long hours watching AI generated content. Knowing a person chose every word changes how it feels to read.
• glouwbug 21d ago
  Generative AI reverts to the mean: Prose will be over explanatory and miss subtly that human expression normally hits. Same for software: LLMs have a natural tendency to modularize and sprout. You'll find yourself knee deep in enterprise fizz buzz hell [1]. If you're fine with a product that regresses to the mean, great, but what I find that isn't discussed here on hackernews is reason for being. By choosing to create you choose to exist. An LLM may very well be capable of generating _the mean_ of what you're trying to express, but without you consuming it, rewriting it, and ultimately learning it, your team and you are robbed of the ability to communicate and reason about a piece of crucial machinery. So yes, fuck it, make it anyway, so that you can continue to exist and provide the communicative, engineering, and reasoning value that others still need from you. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?RavioliCode https://wiki.c2.com/?RavioliCode
• cbrugs 21d ago
  I was never the "tinkerer" type of developer. I like learning, which is why I love the field. I like learning something that makes me feel stupid, and there is a lot of that in software. I can't see how the tinkerers of the world who make unremarkable software expect to be pat on the back for making not very useful things. It's almost selfish in a way - just because you enjoy the process of creation doesn't mean that you should be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, nobody cares. If you do, great, but that's just you. Basket weavers don't expect their baskets to be valuable to the world in a major way, so why should a tinkerer who spent 150 hours on a git branch switcher get to feel the opposite?
• SillyUsername 21d ago
  I think there's no interactive git branch because git uses work trees as an opinionated choice, which means this was kind of redundant before AI anyway...
• someguynamedq 21d ago
  Nobody is going to tell you you can't carve your own spoons, smith your own shoes for your horses, and grow your own wheat for your own bread. Just don't blame the people who care more about eating bread than scything wheat.
• znnajdla 21d ago
  ”Fuck it, make it anyway“ is absolutely the best advice I can give to programmers going through the crisis. Just make something that people want and you may find the joy of building again.
• foxtrot8672 21d ago
  game over bro. adapt and overcome
• zackmorris 21d ago
  Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it. I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway. How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia? Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing. As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis. I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it. What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that? Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive? There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change. Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things. I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now. Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans. I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies. We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees. If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off. Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
• bitwize 21d ago
  Finest Buggywhip Maker in the Land Whinges About Those New-Fangled Automobubbles, Take #7642 It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.
• MPSimmons 21d ago
  IMO there's more than one valid reason to make things. Some people make things from a pragmatic standpoint - they need a solution in a space where the existing solutions don't fit for some reason, and they decide to make their own. This is, I think, the majority of generative AI coding. A solution needs to be filled, and even if you are an amazing coder, for most of the solution space, AI is going to be faster than you. Your code might be more elegant, but not every problem requires elegance. Sometimes, it just needs to work. Other people do it for the love of the game. The enjoy solving problems, crafting code, and finding optimum and elegant solutions to problems. This isn't pragmatism, or even close. It's craftwork by masters, or apprentices who want to be masters, and they wouldn't use AI to produce the work any more than they'd ask another human to do it - that would be cross purposes to their goal, which is to do the making. Both are valid and there should be no shame in either, but I think people confuse the two and the disparity between them causes friction. When you judge a person's work in one paradigm by the other, you're bound to offend and distress them.
  • sheepolog 21d ago
    100%. There's a spectrum of SEs in this thread. On one end of the sprectrum, programming is a means to an end. As long as they get the cool thing at the end, they don't care how they got it. On the other end of the spectrum, the programming is the reward. They're interested in making cool stuff, but the really fun part is in writing it themselves. It's like someone who uses CNC to make cool wooden sculptures, vs someone who painstakingly crafts them by hand. The industry used to reward the workers who knew how to make stuff by hand. Now, someone's invented a CNC machine. The CNC workers are asking "what's the point of doing it slower?" and the hand craftspeople are asking "what's the point of doing something I don't enjoy?" At the end of the day, there is room for both types of people in the industry. In an era of automated textiles, some people still make a living selling clothing knit by humans. But as the machines get better and better, those who make things by hand will become less valued and will have to compete with each other for the "artisan" label.
• drudolph914 21d ago
  [flagged]
• spydum 21d ago
  For some reason makes me think about replicators, and I found this article: https://columbusunderground.com/next-abundance-ds1/ https://columbusunderground.com/next-abundance-ds1/ There is plenty of others, but the idea of being post-scarcity of information creation/software seems akin to how Star Trek had replicators. They used them for sure, but there was still people who wanted to cook/create by hand, as an expression.
• bawana 21d ago
  Once upon a time, horsemanship had real value. Knowing how to care for a horse, how to breed, how to train, how to ride. Everybody had horses. Then the auto came. And so it will be with software. And just as autos are more complicated than feeding an animal, ai generated code will be complex,less understandable and more prone to failures. If the pc is a bicycle for the mind, ai is its self driving tesla
• t43562 21d ago
  Programming is fun but it's also about learning to do things and trying out ideas that you have about how to organise something and make it work well - becoming a master of some craft. If you don't care about programming but just problem solving...or you think all of this is irrelevant to "the customer" then AI might make you happy. Can you imagine, for example, if Tolkien (insert favorite writer here) had to get AI to write Lord of the Rings for him: what would happen? How would he get it to express his idea? In order to make money he could just describe a few ways of expressing things and outline his plot and ..... wham. He could then make it write an Icosology (series of 20 books - I had to look it up) and we'd all be so happy right? The fantasy genre that followed LoTR is almost like that! :-) I don't love control so much that I want to write in assembler and I don't like it so little that I want to make everything by effectively trying to tell someone else how to do it for me and finding that they just don't understand. I think the expression of the idea matters sometimes much more than even the idea and since words are not 100% effective at communicating ideas any language based description is going to be a lot of effort. So like everyone else I use it but for things I don't care about - things which are a stepping stone to something else. I also use it for things I don't understand and I feel delightfully empowered at how something super hard turned out easy....until it doesn't work properly.
• rekabis 21d ago
  >Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years. This is the most turbulent time to be a software engineer I can remember. We’ve had it relatively easy up until now, but there’s an increased feeling that the whole craft is going through a huge shift and every individual needs to decide how they respond to it, which is very hard without the benefit of hindsight. I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out. Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage. But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese. Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.
• fitsumbelay 21d ago
  the headline isn't exactly bait but it doesn't exactly set reasonable expectations for the content that follows. the common thread in similar post is that some folks are struggling with _feelings_ and nothing more. valid feelings set off by real and major changes to the very ground they stand on, I guess, but these feelings are ultimately distractions that can paralysis. The other common thread is these folks are obviously smarter and more accomplished than I am by magnitudes and they're the first ones I'd expect to pull smart (maybe even inspiring) pivots
• ultamatt 21d ago
  What a ludicrously privileged article from the point of view of someone who isn't taking into account rent, sky high food and fuel costs, and a broken and dangerous healthcare system that will bankrupt you if you sneeze wrong. You want to talk about fulfillment in our jobs like that is still the top line item to businesses. This is not the 90s anymore. Nobody is pretending software is supposed to be fulfilling anymore. It's a paycheck.
  • copemaxxxing 21d ago
    Cave troll detected.
• Frier3 21d ago
  I liked having a special skill, now I just have to find new ones. Frankly I'm not worried about jobs in tech going away, I've seen non-technical people use the latest ai models and I've seen only bad results (obviously far more than they could have gotten before ai though). It sucks but it is what it is, if you still like programming by hand (I enjoy doing leetcode) then go ahead and do it. Find some other value, if your identity in life was tied to being able to program then you likely have other issues.
• jschveibinz 21d ago
  Look, folks. I'm an old man and pretty much out of the workforce at this point in my life. But what I see in these comments day, after day is rather pitiful. As your Uncle John, I'm going to give you a lecture: From the article: >I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software engineers for eliminating entire industries? Folks, writing software can be fun and satisfying. Do it for the enjoyment. But suck it up, because the technology wave you rode to a well-paying job was always going to be short-lived for the majority of programmers. Just like the engineers who built steam engines, or living room radios, or tube TV's, or Internet dial-up modems and long distance phone networks, or whatever other technology that has come and gone: just move on, because you helped to put those people out of work--and they moved on. You're going to drive yourselves crazy with the constant re-hashing and sobbing over the obvious changes that are happening. Figure out how you go forward and start going forward.
  • adar2378 21d ago
    yeah exactly! Either adapt/innovate or do something else.
    • amlib 21d ago
      Hard to do when adapting/innovating means essentially joining the Borg. People have a million analogies to what is happening with AI right now but they often fail to see how unprecedented it is. Is history really just repeating? Are we in a cycle? Or is this just a paperclip optimizer?
      • switchbak 21d ago
        I dunno, I felt less human when I had to take days to do large scale menial refactors. I felt more like a minion or borg member back then. Now I feel like I’m middle management aboard a star destroyer. Lateral move?
  • dimes 21d ago
    “Just suck it up” coming from a person who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences has to be the least convincing take on the situation I’ve heard by far. So congrats on that. To offer a perspective from someone in the field: I built my career as a craftsman. Not just my livelihood, but my family’s livelihood depended on this craft. And within a few short months, my value has plummeted. I’ve tried to adapt, but I will never be as good with the newer tools as I was with the old, just like most carriage makers didn’t become mechanics, to use your analogy. At the same time, the value of the work is just less. Weavers could work in fabric mills, but their pay would be less. Now, just like back then, I, my wife, and my two young children face a financial reforming just beyond the horizon. It will be painful for many. There is no amount of adaptation that is within grasp of all those affected. I think the general problem with your argument is that you assume that, because there was a transition from horses to cars, many people successfully transitioned from one profession to the other. The reality is that they didn’t. Many suffered in anonymity.
• bgrommes 21d ago
  What's happening with LLMs isn't fundamentally different than what has happened as various higher levels of abstraction were introduced since I started writing code in 1983. Back then, you plugged in a computer and got, typically a C:> prompt, this strange thing nobody had seen before. There was a big hype cycle, and the basic thinking of clients was infused with tremendous FOMO. I was immediately hired mostly because I wasn't afraid of computers. Often the attitude was almost like, "here's a wheelbarrow full of money and blank slate, write me some -- what do you call it -- software for my business so I can participate in this. No, I don't know what it has to do, you figure it out". I mean it was literally low hanging fruit everywhere. Fast forward 43 years, and relative to THAT, most ordinary mortals are very computer literate, they often feel they have paid too much $$ for too long to people like me, and they think they fully understand the problem space and how to manage devs, while mostly neither of those things are really true. Still, I have managed to specialize and select the right clients such that I still have tremendous freedom to use my best judgment while being very well compensated. In fact my present client has the attitude, "of course, don't use AI, why would you do that?" although admittedly I'm afraid to fully understand how they came by such a sanguine, hype-proof attitude. My guess is that I'm one of a half dozen senior people in a pool of about a half dozen industry players in a very specialized fintech field, and I've built whole systems of the type they want twice before, my reputation precedes me, and they want a steady hand to bring those capabilities to them as well -- so whatever I want, is fine by them. Also they play the long game very well. But even I feel obligated to periodically educate them about LLMs (I refuse to use the term "AIs") and my thinking about them, to sort of inoculate them from the almost inconceivably epic levels of hype around the topic. Fortunately they see the results from my labors that they are looking for, and don't want to disturb that. And even I have a quantized open weight model hogging RAM on my local hardware where I can figure out if it's useful for anything (I'm looking at unit testing and prototyping mostly). This also gets around my environmental, security / privacy and ethical concerns about using cloud models. But like many commenters here, I need to be able to substantially "own" / stand behind / understand my code or the meaning just leaches out of it for me. Ultimately I don't feel the least bit of competition from LLMs in terms of understanding the problem spaces that I have a truly intimate knowledge / experience of, because what I bring to the table is UNDERSTANDING, which is something no LLM has. It only has probabilistic associations and chutzpah. I think this is true for a lot of us, but it's just going to take a few more months or (dog help us!) a couple of years for the hype cycle to die down and for people to realize there's mostly no real value-added after you pay for all the token costs and data center downsides; rather, we've just been moving the pain points around. The music will quit playing, the investment dollars will dry up, and much (not all) of this will be yet another Cautionary Tale of hubris and overreach.
• patheticlosers 21d ago
  [dead]
• hollars 21d ago
  Like you are hand crafting a C++ game engine because you like to, I am crafting a category theory based foundation of accounting in various odd languages. Mine is made possible by AI because I'm only an accountant, not a mathematician. So your article is inspiring, humane, and I appreciate you sharing it.
• ahaferburg 20d ago
  I disagree with the "nobody cares about my tools anymore because they could order it themselves." They didn't, they wouldn't, and they won't. It's not about how the work got produced, it's about having an idea, getting over the initial hump, and seeing it through. It's pretty much the same as before, except that the hump got a little easier. A couple months ago I made a task tracker. Actually I didn't make it, I started making it. It's far from done, not only because it still has bugs, but because I still don't know exactly what I want it to be. I'm still discovering its shape. I would never have started that without the AI assistance, and never would have grown it so quickly to what it is now. If your moat is just one prompt, that may be an issue. Most of the time it's less about how to get somewhere and more about what is interesting or tasteful or useful or fun.
• ernopp 19d ago
  As an engineer, your job is to solve problems with the tools & resources at your disposal. AI is a tool that vastly improves your capacity to solve problems. But inside that engineer is also a creative person enjoying manually writing code, and that inner person going to have an increasingly bad time at work (but can perhaps keep enjoying this as a hobby).
• guiloj 19d ago
  Very good read and great article! Sorry if I didn’t catch everything, English isn’t my first language. Something I’ve found on my side is that I’m not really using AI to replace me or simply as a coding assistant. I’m using it to help me build tools that make me better at coding and debugging. It’s a bit like using your favorite IDE to code, except now you can build your own plugins or tools inside that IDE with AI to add functionality that you were missing before.
• deterministic 19d ago
  I’m starting to believe we may actually need more developers in the future. Projects that were previously too expensive to fund may now be viable with a small team using AI. In other words, AI could make the pie of software projects much bigger. And building those projects still requires experienced developers who know how to use AI effectively.