Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

Reading someone else code is the worst thing, so I tend to agree

This being said it does get some uninteresting things done very fast so I’m not entirely sad

I think indie devs love it since they can focus on manually coding the fun parts and leave the AI to code the boring parts.

tl;dr: Yes; at least some of us are. I deeply am.

I wouldn't normally post a link to my blog in the comments of another thread -- I'm really not trying to shamelessly plug here -- it's just _incredibly_ relevant, and I've already poured my heart and soul into writing out exactly what I think here, so I think it's germane:

https://prettygoodblog.com/p/the-big-secret-that-big-ai-does...

> I cannot write the necessary philosophical screed this deserves, but: there are things which make us human and in our individual humanity unique; these things are art and skill of any kind; and it so greatly behooves one to strive to master art in any and all its forms.

I'm tired of getting thrown AI slop, but I think its a people problem not an AI problem.

"Hey, I made this doc, can you just make sure it looks OK, maybe add a couple things to it?" - Only to find out its completely useless AI slop and barely any details are correct and everything essential is absent.

Same situation with:

- "Hey, can you take a look at this script to see if it's ok"?

- "Hey, do you know why this code isn't working?"

- "Hey, I created that diagram..."

slop, slop, slop. Low effort people will put in low effort with these tools. I bet there's lots of people I work with that use AI and I don't know because they're high effort people.

And in all cases I've fixed the problems and helped them but I've realized two things and stop doing that recently:

When these folks use AI to generate artifacts, they take even less accountability "I dunno, that's just what the AI did..."

The also have no interest in learning. They get AI to do the thing they don't want to learn, then when that fails just try to get someone else to do it for them.

I find it a mix of really frustrating (mostly it not doing what I want it to do, making random changes alongside perfectly good changes of the type I want) and amazing when it works. With that said, I think it works best in an unconstrained environment, and when you start adding constraints (don't do it via this method, don't use this library or import any new dependencies) you find much less good results. This inevitably means it works better at the start of projects rather than coming on to something that's been around for a while and has it's own patterns.

It looks like LLMs will automate a lot of what I enjoy doing myself and increase the amount of work of the sort I dislike (such as reviewing code I didn't recently write).

So my worst-case scenario with LLMs in terms of my job is that they will make my job hard to tolerate. If that actually happens, I'll leave the field entirely as there would be no room for the likes of myself in it anymore.

I think the real sadness is that many developers may stop learning the deeper fundamentals — the things that AI can't replace.

When people start relying on the "I just want it to work this way" mentality and let AI take over, they can lose track of how things actually work under the hood. And that opens the door to a lot of problems — not just bugs, but blind trust in things they don't understand.

For me, the joy is in understanding. Understanding what each part does, how it all fits together. If that disappears, I think we lose something important along the way.

I was scared of this initially, but I've found that I mostly just use it for tedious code that I would normally procrastinate just because of how mind numbing it was (like adding another CRUD endpoint) or making a sweeping change across code that wasn't as simple as a find and replace.

For things that keep me interested, I just won't use LLM features. Sometimes at the end I'll have it audit my code and sometimes it'll catch something that can be improved.

Also test cases. It's not perfect, but a large chunk of that being automated there is very nice.

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if you think about it the resource wasteful approach pre-LLM didnt really make sense (thousands of people often times re-implementing similar use cases). LLMs are like global open source repositories of everything known to mankind with search on steroids. we can never go back, if only for this one reason (imagine of how many hours of peoples lives were lost implementing the same function, or yet another CRUD app)... so if we cant go back whats next?

the paradigm is shifting from us not deciding how to do, but deciding what to do, maybe by writing requirements and constraints and letting AI figure out the details.

the skill will be in using specific language with AI to get the desired behavior, old code as we know it is garbage, new code is writing requirements and constraints

so in a sense we will not be reviewers, nor architects or designers, but writers of requirements and use cases in a specific LLM language, which will have its own but different challenges too

there might be still a place for cream of the crop mega talented people to solve new puzzles (still with AI assistance) in order to generate new input knowledge to train LLMs

I'm retired and write apps as community givebacks and as a creative outlet.

No, I am not sad because I am in control. If there is something I want to take on as an intellectual challenge, I do it.

If it's just mechanical tasks or UI layout tweaking, AI is perfect. I can become the user who keeps asking for fine-tuning of corner radius. :-)

I mean if you’re building react buttons and using pydantic and think that makes you an engineer then yeah you’re getting replaced.

I don’t think people who know how the computer and networking works are going anywhere any time soon. Or the people who actually made react or pydantic.

I never found coding to be fun. All I care about is shipping features. However, I do care about maintainability and user experience. That's why I use AI to write much of the "dumb" code, and then I'll spend time doing quality control.

I always hated writing HTML and CSS, so I have AI do that. I always found writing tests and type annotations to be tedious, and would usually avoid those at my own detriment. Now AI is able to do those.

AI in general has been a net positive for me. I hope that it keeps getting better and better so that I can stop coding for good and focus on the products I'm building themselves.