7 ms·

The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code becau

The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money. >In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”? Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm. Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.

mathisfun123 17d ago
> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money. before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget
- daymanstep 17d ago
  If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
  - gonzalohm 16d ago
    But of all the possible available jobs and careers, you choose the one that you enjoy, right?
- contravariant 17d ago
  I won't cry false analogy but I just have no clue what point you're trying to make. Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
gleezard 17d ago
If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.
- monospacegames 17d ago
  I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion. My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 17d ago
    What did you expect when writing software became a job though? A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking. You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say! I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
- shimman 17d ago
  Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.
bitwize 17d ago
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money. Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so. I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth. Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college. Having a business brain is the new moat. [0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
- shimman 17d ago
  Bill Gates is a known Epstein associate, had sex with a woman likely against their will while being tracked by Epstein, and had to drug his wife unknowingly to her so she wouldn't get a sexually transmitted disease he caught while having sex with said woman on said island. This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it. Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
  - mc32 17d ago
    I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
zem 17d ago
I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.
- sevenzero 17d ago
  Yea as long as ppl actually read the code they produce its just a tool to generate characters faster than typing them yourself. One of the issues I see is the hype around "just trust it bro". Somehow not looking into the product u produce became a thing.
ctrlkctrls 17d ago
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out". In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now. To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
- sevenzero 17d ago
  >To not accept the new reality Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
Razengan 17d ago
A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
yoz-y 17d ago
For tools I want to have I don’t care. For hobby projects I’ll happily code. The want ebbs and flows.
a34729t 17d ago
Yeah i feel like most people (especially those who entered the workforce in the 2000s and later) just dont give a shit about their code. One of 30yo guys i work with (a good generalist) was recently complaining how most of these chucklefucks are just churning out darios of vibeslop docs and code (darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds) that they dont understand.
- aeve890 17d ago
  >darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds What's the conversion between diarios and samas? Are the same at -40?
- lioeters 17d ago
  > churning out darios of vibeslop Thanks for the laugh, only a human could have written such a hilarious string of words. There may be hope for us after all.
wvenable 17d ago
> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists. Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
- hirvi74 17d ago
  I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.
  - huurtehoog 15d ago
    Off topic but I find it interesting that "this resonates with me" shifted to "I resonate with this" in colloquial English. Language is fun!
    - hirvi74 15d ago
      I'm, like, 99% sure I am dyslexic. So, I might be the worst example of spoken and written language usage possible. Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.
      - huurtehoog 15d ago
        You're not the first person I've seen using it shifted.
- 17d ago
aogaili 17d ago
Software developers/engineers build software - coding is a mean to an end. The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire. You are confused that is why you are surprised.
- hirvi74 17d ago
  [dead]
- bitwize 16d ago
  For some of us, writing code is a big part of how we think through a problem. It's like playing an instrument—or using a DAW—for a musician; the mundane mechanics, the part you dismiss as a mere means to an end, is the engine that gets us there. If a musician were provided a service by which they didn't have to sit around noodling on the guitar or piano, finding out which melodies or chords sounded good together, but instead just have to tell the service "write me an upbeat pop/rock song, 130 beats per minute, F# major key, emphasis on the drums and electric guitars, and the lyrics should be about a woman named Alice and how the singer longs for her exquisite beauty"—are they really composing? Are they a musician at that point? Or are they a client commissioning music? Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
  - ChickeNES 15d ago
    > are they really composing? yes
  - aogaili 16d ago
    I appreciate the response and I get it. Something was lost in this transition and you explained it well. The only pushback I can think of is that I do feel coding, which is a list of instructions to a computer, differ from music. With LLMs the translation work between English and coding primitives and concepts was reduced significantly. I think that took the challenge and the sense of control/mastery out of the craft. There is something lost in that transition. I remember my university professor used to equate coding with poetry. But after decades of working on corporate codebases, I personally welcomed the automation. I always wanted to build ambitious and quality software and this was nearly impossible with the level of abstraction we had before. So something was lost but also a lot was gained.
IslandRebel 17d ago
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money. I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing. These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone. I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.
aeve890 17d ago
>Apply the same question to music, or drawing Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code". The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck. I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?
- aogaili 17d ago
  Exactly, well said. I think folks in the craft need to mature a bit and understand this very well.
winrid 17d ago
I like to write code and still do, for like, Screeps. With AI I can have it do the mundane stuff, and use my knowledge/skills to guide it in a better product direction than others do (IMO).
TiredOfLife 17d ago
It's the same with every craftsman. Like when was the last time you eat at the restaurant that makes their own soy sauce?
trentor 17d ago
Because 99% of people don't care. It's something that gets relegated to a niche audience really fast and it's understandable especially if we take the last 25 years. People just have enough of it it's like modernism in the 80s if you want an art metaphor. I for one I am glad we are at the advent of a real Personal Computing revolution. Seeing my mom use software custom made (I am not writing developed for llm code) is just fascinating. She is 70 and she "gets" it now.
echelon_musk 15d ago
> all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written ?
ChickeNES 15d ago
I don't consider it a craft whatsoever personally. It's a means to an end, coding for me was always about getting the computer to do what I want, LLMs just moved the abstraction multiple rungs up the ladder.

mathisfun123 17d ago

> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money. before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget

daymanstep 17d ago
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
- gonzalohm 16d ago
  But of all the possible available jobs and careers, you choose the one that you enjoy, right?
contravariant 17d ago
I won't cry false analogy but I just have no clue what point you're trying to make. Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?

gleezard 17d ago

If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.

monospacegames 17d ago
I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion. My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
- 2muchcoffeeman 17d ago
  What did you expect when writing software became a job though? A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking. You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say! I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
shimman 17d ago
Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.

bitwize 17d ago

> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money. Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so. I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth. Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college. Having a business brain is the new moat. [0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry

shimman 17d ago
Bill Gates is a known Epstein associate, had sex with a woman likely against their will while being tracked by Epstein, and had to drug his wife unknowingly to her so she wouldn't get a sexually transmitted disease he caught while having sex with said woman on said island. This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it. Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
- mc32 17d ago
  I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.

zem 17d ago

I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.

sevenzero 17d ago
Yea as long as ppl actually read the code they produce its just a tool to generate characters faster than typing them yourself. One of the issues I see is the hype around "just trust it bro". Somehow not looking into the product u produce became a thing.

ctrlkctrls 17d ago

At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out". In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now. To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...

sevenzero 17d ago
>To not accept the new reality Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.

Razengan 17d ago

A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character

yoz-y 17d ago

For tools I want to have I don’t care. For hobby projects I’ll happily code. The want ebbs and flows.

a34729t 17d ago

Yeah i feel like most people (especially those who entered the workforce in the 2000s and later) just dont give a shit about their code. One of 30yo guys i work with (a good generalist) was recently complaining how most of these chucklefucks are just churning out darios of vibeslop docs and code (darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds) that they dont understand.

aeve890 17d ago
>darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds What's the conversion between diarios and samas? Are the same at -40?
lioeters 17d ago
> churning out darios of vibeslop Thanks for the laugh, only a human could have written such a hilarious string of words. There may be hope for us after all.

wvenable 17d ago

> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists. Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.

hirvi74 17d ago
I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.
- huurtehoog 15d ago
  Off topic but I find it interesting that "this resonates with me" shifted to "I resonate with this" in colloquial English. Language is fun!
  - hirvi74 15d ago
    I'm, like, 99% sure I am dyslexic. So, I might be the worst example of spoken and written language usage possible. Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.
    - huurtehoog 15d ago
      You're not the first person I've seen using it shifted.
17d ago

aogaili 17d ago

Software developers/engineers build software - coding is a mean to an end. The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire. You are confused that is why you are surprised.

hirvi74 17d ago
[dead]
bitwize 16d ago
For some of us, writing code is a big part of how we think through a problem. It's like playing an instrument—or using a DAW—for a musician; the mundane mechanics, the part you dismiss as a mere means to an end, is the engine that gets us there. If a musician were provided a service by which they didn't have to sit around noodling on the guitar or piano, finding out which melodies or chords sounded good together, but instead just have to tell the service "write me an upbeat pop/rock song, 130 beats per minute, F# major key, emphasis on the drums and electric guitars, and the lyrics should be about a woman named Alice and how the singer longs for her exquisite beauty"—are they really composing? Are they a musician at that point? Or are they a client commissioning music? Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
- ChickeNES 15d ago
  > are they really composing? yes
- aogaili 16d ago
  I appreciate the response and I get it. Something was lost in this transition and you explained it well. The only pushback I can think of is that I do feel coding, which is a list of instructions to a computer, differ from music. With LLMs the translation work between English and coding primitives and concepts was reduced significantly. I think that took the challenge and the sense of control/mastery out of the craft. There is something lost in that transition. I remember my university professor used to equate coding with poetry. But after decades of working on corporate codebases, I personally welcomed the automation. I always wanted to build ambitious and quality software and this was nearly impossible with the level of abstraction we had before. So something was lost but also a lot was gained.

IslandRebel 17d ago

> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money. I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing. These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone. I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.

aeve890 17d ago

>Apply the same question to music, or drawing Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code". The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck. I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?

aogaili 17d ago
Exactly, well said. I think folks in the craft need to mature a bit and understand this very well.

winrid 17d ago

I like to write code and still do, for like, Screeps. With AI I can have it do the mundane stuff, and use my knowledge/skills to guide it in a better product direction than others do (IMO).

TiredOfLife 17d ago

It's the same with every craftsman. Like when was the last time you eat at the restaurant that makes their own soy sauce?

trentor 17d ago

Because 99% of people don't care. It's something that gets relegated to a niche audience really fast and it's understandable especially if we take the last 25 years. People just have enough of it it's like modernism in the 80s if you want an art metaphor. I for one I am glad we are at the advent of a real Personal Computing revolution. Seeing my mom use software custom made (I am not writing developed for llm code) is just fascinating. She is 70 and she "gets" it now.

echelon_musk 15d ago

> all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written ?

ChickeNES 15d ago

I don't consider it a craft whatsoever personally. It's a means to an end, coding for me was always about getting the computer to do what I want, LLMs just moved the abstraction multiple rungs up the ladder.