5 ms·

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer

• Zizizizz 22d ago
  I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade. What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable) Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves. So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood. But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too. In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable. I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.
  • alchemism 22d ago
    Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it. The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.
    • Zizizizz 22d ago
      Sounds like a failure of imagination to me (I hope you're right). It doesn't have to be the CTO, it can be anyone who will sit there for the cheapest cost to read output while assuming the risk of it all working until they retire. Sounds glorious
      • alchemism 22d ago
        Even if all the changes are “good” not shoddy, awareness of changes will still require layers of cognitive filtering. One human PM clerk will not be able to oversee all of the products, one developer will not be able to oversee all changes in all codebases.
        • HappMacDonald 22d ago
          Well obviously the real solution is for the owner of the company to 1. Fire everyone else 2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?) 3. Retire to Aruba
          • alchemism 22d ago
            Right, in 5 years time the economy will be entirely vibecoded by pension fund and family office bankers. No one will be employed at all
      • Chris2048 22d ago
        > assuming the risk of it all scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.
• cmiles74 22d ago
  I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable. In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable. The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
  • jvanderbot 22d ago
    Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity. It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things. The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote. This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now. I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html
    • 22d ago
• zer00eyz 22d ago
  > Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. 30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take. My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions. > The people who are upset by this change... Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.
  • 59percentmore 22d ago
    It's interesting to hear that lawyers are coming to you with those questions, because my read was that there was almost universal contempt for AI within law (save for the few "dumb" enough to use it and get caught).
    • zer00eyz 22d ago
      The language of the law attempts to be consistent, legal English isnt entirely the same as ours, it remains somewhat inured to modernization. It is, if nothing a domain specific way of writing. (There is a great bit by Lenny Bruce on this very topic) If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed. Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.
      • 59percentmore 22d ago
        I don't think that's quite it. Particularly in America's common law system, written laws are not "the law", in terms of what actually happens in enforcement, or in judgment when something ends up before a court. You have to deal with unwritten or disparately-documented standards, norms, case law, etc. LLMs don't know and can't account for curveballs that appear in practice; they'll correctly tell you what the law actually says, and work off that documentation, and blow your case, because that law isn't "the law" in its practical totality. The lawyers with contempt for AI aren't necessarily the best "critical readers and reviewers of documents"; a good number just appreciate the substantial moat the current system keeps for them, and are contemptuous of 1) attempts to cross that moat without paying a toll, however likely that attempt is to fail, and 2) the way such failures highlight that our legal system doesn't work the way most people seem to think it does, because that increases the chances that the public will become dissatisfied and push for change. I guess if it doesn't cross that moat, there cool with it?
• xpct 22d ago
  I'm not seeing the same kind of resentment towards non-technologists as you are claiming. Overall in my life I feel like I haven't seen as much gatekeeping as people claim there is in tech.
• pastel8739 22d ago
  > The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!
  • WD-42 22d ago
    Yea this whole “your job is to create value” argument is always really shaky. Add “with computers and stuff” to the end and it becomes more plausible. Nobody gets a degree is “providing value”.
    • someguynamedq 22d ago
      Nobody is hired for a job if the person hiring does not think they will produce value
      • HappMacDonald 22d ago
        Nobody is hired for a job if the person hiring thinks that the employee will murder them. So I guess that makes the most salient job description "refraining from murdering your boss"? Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment
  • Towaway69 22d ago
    Hm “Bullshit Jobs” terminology by David Graeber seems appropriate here. Of course, “produce value” is slightly different from meaningful jobs that Bullshit Jobs was referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
• springtimesun 22d ago
  There has to be a changing economic undertone to it as well. For a lot of years, the craft that many people enjoyed also happened to pay well and had significant barriers to entry. It's easy to like the craft when it pays you well. The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself. * I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.
  • mpbart 22d ago
    As a career? Almost certainly not but I do think I (and probably many others on hn) would still do it as a hobby
    • djkurlander 22d ago
      Yes. And in retirement, I still code because I like the process of creating (hopefully cool) things. Even without remuneration. Ideally things that other people will use and benefit from in some way.
• bigstrat2003 22d ago
  > Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.
• rdiddly 22d ago
  I wish I gave a shit about producing value for a company.
• ThrowawayR2 22d ago
  I agree that the employee's purpose is to bring value. The question is, now that AI can generate code that's good enough to get by, is there enough value that a software developer brings to justify their continued employment. IMO, the answer for most software developers is no¹, even the ones eagerly embracing AI, so the smugness of AI adopters is likely unwarranted. The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking. ¹ Probably including me.
• fsloth 22d ago
  "has AI broken that stranglehold?" Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.
• andrewflnr 22d ago
  I was already pretty clear that the job of producing value was separate from the part of the job that I enjoyed. What makes me sad is the part that I enjoyed evaporating entirely.
• someguynamedq 22d ago
  Why do so many people miss that it lets software engineers build more bigger better things? It's not just people who think the job is to create value. It's anyone who cares more about creation itself than the process of the creation
• rekabis 22d ago
  >The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. Think of it another way: You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance. Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist. The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work. Would you be impressed, excited, or angry? I centainly wouldn’t be the first two. At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”
  • tpmoney 22d ago
    > You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance. I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders. We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.
• copemaxxxing 22d ago
  A lot of people create AI art and AI music and attempt to make it as if they are the one making it, they are the one that has talent. But still souless, still sucks. Its just excuse of laziness. Pick up a brush, pick up an instrument and stop jerking around all day. Talentless people are talentless because lack of effort, not because of lack of talent. In front of those people, I will always bask in my sheer superiority because I make real music and real art. People compliment my musical skills and people don't compliment those who create song with AI. We as a society need to be able to identify which one is AI generated and which one is not, and let the free market takes care of itself. Those who want AI generated things can have it, those that don't want can avoid it. Take a guess which one will have more demand.
• TacticalCoder 22d ago
  > The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users. I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code. I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book". I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily. And how many vibe-coded apps am I using? Zero. Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?
• whatevaa 21d ago
  No, I'm annoyed that they submit their sloppy code to me as some value and then I have to deal with it. Happened in our org. You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".
• daveguy 21d ago
  One question: did you jump straight from programming to depending on the AI without looking at the code? If so, I've got some bad news for you.