4 ms·

It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasin

by bucket2015 11d ago

It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected. I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.

mjfisher 11d ago
Can I be both?
- thechao 11d ago
  Absolutely!
FailMore 11d ago
I have leaned heavily into it… and became good at “agentic thinking”, but now I’m going to reverse. I have become dumber, sloppier, lazier, more distracted. I’m less happy than before. It’s hard to escape the productivity addiction and expectations though.
- Izkata 11d ago
  I've seen this happen to multiple co-workers, in the span of months. Two were laid off so I don't know how it's going with them, and another has backed off but not fully abandoned AI code. I'm resisting it entirely because of these problems.
rspeele 11d ago
I'm very happy with the performance and ability of AI. I think the best software ever will come out of this. It's very clear to me that AI empowers one to make "just ok" software effortlessly, and "incredibly excellent" software with the same level of effort we previously used to make "just ok" software. So there will be a lot of slop, but there will also be some real diamonds created by those who put the extra work in. The extra work might not involve manually writing or even reading much code, but it is work nonetheless. I still count myself as "dejected" overall. I'm dejected by the economic shape of AI which seems destined to keep concentrating outsized rewards to the top few who own it or have enough capital to shackle it to their will. I'm fearful that intelligence, once it becomes a commodity you can rent any time you may need it, will be socially devalued in our already anti-intellectual society. I worry that in a couple decades we may resemble the world of "The Machine Stops" (1909), where nobody really knows how things work. Of course we already live in such a complex world, no one person has complete knowledge of the "stack" they rely on. I can write software in C or assembler but I can't design a CPU and don't really understand how one is manufactured. (I may someday study that field, but I haven't yet!) But I take solace in the fact that somebody out there, has put the time in to study each of those things and is an expert in them. At every layer and in every niche of our engineering world there are masters of their craft, and there are students learning the fundamentals to keep that knowledge alive and growing. What if in 30 or 40 years that is not the case, and there are whole corners of knowledge the modern world depends on where everybody is reduced to "I dunno how it works, but Claude said..."?
eggplantemoji69 11d ago
I think it's a useful tool, but peak workflow is basically the rough existing development paradigm, if that can be defined, but let AI do the grunt work (typing, some researching) and help you understand things in your own brain, from which you make well thought out decisions and are able to validate output, later define feature requirements, debug, etc....a maintained understanding of a complex system. The approach currently being foisted upon me is to offload almost everything to LLMs (have it write a complex tech spec -> one shot into tickets -> one shot implementation of said tickets), with humans reviewing throughout, and repeating this iteration until it 'looks good'...throwing sh*t at the wall until something sticks, basically. However, we're being expected to review at a far faster pace than one reasonably can while maintaining an understanding of the system. Meaning, with this paradigm, humans will largely be rubber stampers and will atrophy their abilities as a result, which will seemingly result in compounding adverse effects. TLDR in my experience the AI can help with some 'busy work' eg translating a well defined solution in my head into code. The time it takes to understand an implementation and ensure correctness will not change. LLMs cannot reliably do this. This traditionally has occurred during implementation by the implementer, and during code review by code reviewers. I don't think simply shifting the implementer's comprehension 'duties' to code reviewers provides any benefit.
waz0wski 11d ago
To me, doesn't feel much different than when infra-as-code became popular in the 2010s It was a huge shift in the world of system administration, gave birth to devops, and, along with the rise of containers & cloud computing, it radically altered how companies ran their infrastructure Some people leaned into it, others didn't and a huge rift opened up between them I used to say "automate all the things" - I still do, but I used to too AI tools are just an acceleration of that mindset and in my world of cloud/devops/sre I'm heavily leaning into AI-driven development and daily workflow
- anon7000 11d ago
  But that’s such a niche part of the industry. AI is in everything.
amelius 11d ago
It's a bit like the reality distortion field and how some engineers are not susceptible to it.
rhdunn 11d ago
I find AI autocomplete and chat (asking specific questions, getting general code I can adapt, etc.) to be useful. I'm not sold on agents and agentic workflow. When I tried using agents for something as a test it immediately started doing things instead of being part of a conversation. I want to be actively involved in the process, not sit back and let AI agents write/generate stuff that I'd have to/end up rewriting/modifying anyway when it goes against the design I have in mind. The other thing I don't like about agents is their ability to run any command [1]. That seems like a nightmare w.r.t. the potential for leaking secrets (signing/access keys, etc.) or doing damage (deleting files, database tables, etc.). [1] You can set the option to review every command it runs, but you're then just hand-holding the agent.
- zahlman 11d ago
  I'm in a similar position. I can easily imagine the kinds of tasks where "agentic workflow" seems useful. I just don't have any of them personally right at the moment, and think the world of software has more of them than the needs of software actually justify (due to previous bad engineering and planning). > The other thing I don't like about agents is their ability to run any command. You can set the option to review every command it runs, but you're then just hand-holding the agent. The thing about this is that you're treating "agent" as if it refers exclusively to the products offered for that purpose by the major LLM companies. Nothing stops you from designing and implementing your own, with a security model that you think is more sensible. The models won't have been trained against your specific tools, but you can still give them descriptions of what those tools do and then prompt them to make appropriate use of them. All that's really happening is that the LLM outputs some JSON, and your client detects that the output was a tool call (instead of a direct response), parses JSON, invokes whatever other code with whatever parameters and perhaps writes back a response. There have been several previous HN posts on this, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 .
- Mabusto 11d ago
  This is kinda where I’ve landed as well. I find the chat super helpful as a solo dev almost just as a sounding board for ideas and it is good at pointing out things I’m missing or not thinking through completely. I write almost all the code myself, I like the actual physical activity of writing code and find it keeps me engaged mentally for longer stretches. I’ve also tried the agentic thing, but I find it so draining laying out in such explicit detail exactly what I want and then cleaning up what it’s messed up, like it’s easier to clean it up than just keep prompting and pulling the magic “Do This” lever. I probably will never code without AI again. I’ve been doing this for 30 years since I was a teenager, was very fortunate in my career and don’t have to work anymore, but I still code and build because I love it, maybe even more so now with AI, but I would absolute hate my life if I was forced to just run agents all day long and never actually write or be the primary thinking driver for code.
ivanjermakov 11d ago
> but I haven't seen anything like this before Just a bunch of controversial ideas: structured programming, null, intellisense, microservices, cloud first, serverless, OOP, "Clean Code", exceptions, SaaS.
in_absentia 11d ago
For my social circle, the distinction falls almost perfectly along the line of people who see software engineering as a craft / passion, versus those who see it as something that needs to be done to get paid. The first group is generally disillusioned, for two reasons. First, it's an attack on their hobby. Second, they sort of can't let go: they want to own the product, they want to understand if the code is good or bad, and they spend a lot of time cleaning up after LLMs. Which, frankly, is not fun. You're no longer doing anything clever, you're just a janitor. The second group is over the moon about it because they feel it gives them the elite powers previously only reserved for greybeards. I don't think this is unique to coding. It's the same thing with writing. If you like writing, you probably hate LLMs. If you see writing as a boring chore that needs to be done, you are delighted to have a button you can press. Haha, take that all the influential bloggers, tech writers, etc. I can now do your job at 10x the speed.
- TheCapn 11d ago
  The one thing that poisons the entire online discourse regarding LLMs to me is just simply not knowing who you're dealing with and what their problems are. This, like all things, is complex and nuanced. For all my efforts to get LLMs to work for me, they've failed. I figure it is because the tech space I work in (Industrial Automation) simply doesn't have the training data that someone building webapps does. The few times I've put LLM to the test its failed horribly, and since my job has me existing in safety critical scenarios I don't humor what AI gives me at all. So when I bitch about LLMs and their useless nature, its because of how I've experienced them in my craft. They get 95% of the information right, but that 5% it gets wrong can have very serious repercussions. But when I'm talking with individuals online who see them as revolutionary? I don't know if their job is editing templates or formatting data or any other host of problems that AI can be revolutionary for. I don't know if they're full of themselves, having drank the AI koolaid. I don't know if they're just really deep into the LLM world and figured out things I have yet to learn (or am unwilling to pay for). But from a HN or Reddit discussion, they're all one in the same and without trying to figure out who they are, their opinions all carry the same weight.
  - phil21 11d ago
ipdashc 11d ago
I haven't really seen this, personally. Basically everyone I know is both at once. We acknowledge that it's really good at what it does and use it, but it's not enjoyable to use, and we end up dejected about the future of our craft and our jobs.
Thanemate 10d ago
Right now I'm leaning towards using it at work because I'm being paid to ship stuff, but it really forces me to NOT use it after work in order just to keep my personal skills sharp. That last step used to be optional, now it's not imo.

mjfisher 11d ago

Can I be both?

thechao 11d ago
Absolutely!

FailMore 11d ago

I have leaned heavily into it… and became good at “agentic thinking”, but now I’m going to reverse. I have become dumber, sloppier, lazier, more distracted. I’m less happy than before. It’s hard to escape the productivity addiction and expectations though.

Izkata 11d ago
I've seen this happen to multiple co-workers, in the span of months. Two were laid off so I don't know how it's going with them, and another has backed off but not fully abandoned AI code. I'm resisting it entirely because of these problems.

rspeele 11d ago

I'm very happy with the performance and ability of AI. I think the best software ever will come out of this. It's very clear to me that AI empowers one to make "just ok" software effortlessly, and "incredibly excellent" software with the same level of effort we previously used to make "just ok" software. So there will be a lot of slop, but there will also be some real diamonds created by those who put the extra work in. The extra work might not involve manually writing or even reading much code, but it is work nonetheless. I still count myself as "dejected" overall. I'm dejected by the economic shape of AI which seems destined to keep concentrating outsized rewards to the top few who own it or have enough capital to shackle it to their will. I'm fearful that intelligence, once it becomes a commodity you can rent any time you may need it, will be socially devalued in our already anti-intellectual society. I worry that in a couple decades we may resemble the world of "The Machine Stops" (1909), where nobody really knows how things work. Of course we already live in such a complex world, no one person has complete knowledge of the "stack" they rely on. I can write software in C or assembler but I can't design a CPU and don't really understand how one is manufactured. (I may someday study that field, but I haven't yet!) But I take solace in the fact that somebody out there, has put the time in to study each of those things and is an expert in them. At every layer and in every niche of our engineering world there are masters of their craft, and there are students learning the fundamentals to keep that knowledge alive and growing. What if in 30 or 40 years that is not the case, and there are whole corners of knowledge the modern world depends on where everybody is reduced to "I dunno how it works, but Claude said..."?

eggplantemoji69 11d ago

I think it's a useful tool, but peak workflow is basically the rough existing development paradigm, if that can be defined, but let AI do the grunt work (typing, some researching) and help you understand things in your own brain, from which you make well thought out decisions and are able to validate output, later define feature requirements, debug, etc....a maintained understanding of a complex system. The approach currently being foisted upon me is to offload almost everything to LLMs (have it write a complex tech spec -> one shot into tickets -> one shot implementation of said tickets), with humans reviewing throughout, and repeating this iteration until it 'looks good'...throwing sh*t at the wall until something sticks, basically. However, we're being expected to review at a far faster pace than one reasonably can while maintaining an understanding of the system. Meaning, with this paradigm, humans will largely be rubber stampers and will atrophy their abilities as a result, which will seemingly result in compounding adverse effects. TLDR in my experience the AI can help with some 'busy work' eg translating a well defined solution in my head into code. The time it takes to understand an implementation and ensure correctness will not change. LLMs cannot reliably do this. This traditionally has occurred during implementation by the implementer, and during code review by code reviewers. I don't think simply shifting the implementer's comprehension 'duties' to code reviewers provides any benefit.

waz0wski 11d ago

To me, doesn't feel much different than when infra-as-code became popular in the 2010s It was a huge shift in the world of system administration, gave birth to devops, and, along with the rise of containers & cloud computing, it radically altered how companies ran their infrastructure Some people leaned into it, others didn't and a huge rift opened up between them I used to say "automate all the things" - I still do, but I used to too AI tools are just an acceleration of that mindset and in my world of cloud/devops/sre I'm heavily leaning into AI-driven development and daily workflow

anon7000 11d ago
But that’s such a niche part of the industry. AI is in everything.

amelius 11d ago

It's a bit like the reality distortion field and how some engineers are not susceptible to it.

rhdunn 11d ago

I find AI autocomplete and chat (asking specific questions, getting general code I can adapt, etc.) to be useful. I'm not sold on agents and agentic workflow. When I tried using agents for something as a test it immediately started doing things instead of being part of a conversation. I want to be actively involved in the process, not sit back and let AI agents write/generate stuff that I'd have to/end up rewriting/modifying anyway when it goes against the design I have in mind. The other thing I don't like about agents is their ability to run any command [1]. That seems like a nightmare w.r.t. the potential for leaking secrets (signing/access keys, etc.) or doing damage (deleting files, database tables, etc.). [1] You can set the option to review every command it runs, but you're then just hand-holding the agent.

zahlman 11d ago
I'm in a similar position. I can easily imagine the kinds of tasks where "agentic workflow" seems useful. I just don't have any of them personally right at the moment, and think the world of software has more of them than the needs of software actually justify (due to previous bad engineering and planning). > The other thing I don't like about agents is their ability to run any command. You can set the option to review every command it runs, but you're then just hand-holding the agent. The thing about this is that you're treating "agent" as if it refers exclusively to the products offered for that purpose by the major LLM companies. Nothing stops you from designing and implementing your own, with a security model that you think is more sensible. The models won't have been trained against your specific tools, but you can still give them descriptions of what those tools do and then prompt them to make appropriate use of them. All that's really happening is that the LLM outputs some JSON, and your client detects that the output was a tool call (instead of a direct response), parses JSON, invokes whatever other code with whatever parameters and perhaps writes back a response. There have been several previous HN posts on this, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 .
Mabusto 11d ago
This is kinda where I’ve landed as well. I find the chat super helpful as a solo dev almost just as a sounding board for ideas and it is good at pointing out things I’m missing or not thinking through completely. I write almost all the code myself, I like the actual physical activity of writing code and find it keeps me engaged mentally for longer stretches. I’ve also tried the agentic thing, but I find it so draining laying out in such explicit detail exactly what I want and then cleaning up what it’s messed up, like it’s easier to clean it up than just keep prompting and pulling the magic “Do This” lever. I probably will never code without AI again. I’ve been doing this for 30 years since I was a teenager, was very fortunate in my career and don’t have to work anymore, but I still code and build because I love it, maybe even more so now with AI, but I would absolute hate my life if I was forced to just run agents all day long and never actually write or be the primary thinking driver for code.

ivanjermakov 11d ago

> but I haven't seen anything like this before Just a bunch of controversial ideas: structured programming, null, intellisense, microservices, cloud first, serverless, OOP, "Clean Code", exceptions, SaaS.

in_absentia 11d ago

For my social circle, the distinction falls almost perfectly along the line of people who see software engineering as a craft / passion, versus those who see it as something that needs to be done to get paid. The first group is generally disillusioned, for two reasons. First, it's an attack on their hobby. Second, they sort of can't let go: they want to own the product, they want to understand if the code is good or bad, and they spend a lot of time cleaning up after LLMs. Which, frankly, is not fun. You're no longer doing anything clever, you're just a janitor. The second group is over the moon about it because they feel it gives them the elite powers previously only reserved for greybeards. I don't think this is unique to coding. It's the same thing with writing. If you like writing, you probably hate LLMs. If you see writing as a boring chore that needs to be done, you are delighted to have a button you can press. Haha, take that all the influential bloggers, tech writers, etc. I can now do your job at 10x the speed.

TheCapn 11d ago
The one thing that poisons the entire online discourse regarding LLMs to me is just simply not knowing who you're dealing with and what their problems are. This, like all things, is complex and nuanced. For all my efforts to get LLMs to work for me, they've failed. I figure it is because the tech space I work in (Industrial Automation) simply doesn't have the training data that someone building webapps does. The few times I've put LLM to the test its failed horribly, and since my job has me existing in safety critical scenarios I don't humor what AI gives me at all. So when I bitch about LLMs and their useless nature, its because of how I've experienced them in my craft. They get 95% of the information right, but that 5% it gets wrong can have very serious repercussions. But when I'm talking with individuals online who see them as revolutionary? I don't know if their job is editing templates or formatting data or any other host of problems that AI can be revolutionary for. I don't know if they're full of themselves, having drank the AI koolaid. I don't know if they're just really deep into the LLM world and figured out things I have yet to learn (or am unwilling to pay for). But from a HN or Reddit discussion, they're all one in the same and without trying to figure out who they are, their opinions all carry the same weight.
- phil21 11d ago

ipdashc 11d ago

I haven't really seen this, personally. Basically everyone I know is both at once. We acknowledge that it's really good at what it does and use it, but it's not enjoyable to use, and we end up dejected about the future of our craft and our jobs.

Thanemate 10d ago

Right now I'm leaning towards using it at work because I'm being paid to ship stuff, but it really forces me to NOT use it after work in order just to keep my personal skills sharp. That last step used to be optional, now it's not imo.