I’m wary about the exuberance of AI displacing quality.
But some of the worst experiences I’ve had with coworkers were with those who made programming part of their identity. Every technical disagreement on a PR became a threat to identity or principles, and ceased being about making the right decision in that moment. Identity means: there’s us, and them, and they don’t get it.
‘Programmer’ is much better off as a description of one who does an activity. Not an identity.
It can mean a category flag someone waves, an identifier we ask others to respect, a group we choose to belong to, a way of understanding what it is we like about ourselves, or something we quietly aspire to.
Or literally a part of the self, which is what the OP was getting at I think. And there is plenty of that in the software world. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" and so on. There is plenty of identity ridiculousness. I've been a C programmer but I've also been a basic programmer an assembly language programmer, a PHP programmer, a FORTH programmer and a whole list of others. To me that collapses to "I'm a programmer" (even if the sage advice on HN by the gurus is to never call yourself a programmer I'm more than happy to do so). It defines what I do, not what or who I am, and it only defines a very small part of what I do. That's one reason why I can't stand the us-vs-them mentality that some programming languages seem to install in their practitioners.
In the last few decades, we went from a small handful of programming languages / libraries to a massive cambrian explosion from Github-fueled open source. Everyone's choice of Javascript framework became a dumb pissing contest and source of identity. A cudgel used at meetings to look down on some other way of doing things.
I hope AI liberates us from that dumb facade of pretend innovation. In some ways, us programmers got way too full of ourselves and filled our lives with pretend work porting apps from one thing to the next thing with no actual change in end-user value
A human problem will not be solved by the additional of AI. It's a force multiplier. If management is shit, it will be shittier. If you get arguments lime this during work, now you will get more, because it's so easy to port or rewrite or even create your own framework now. It's even easier to compete in the pissing match because you can just ask the AI for why xyz is wrong.
I feel like it's important to align team/org goals once in a while -- there's nothing wrong with a refactor or a port, but what's the ROI, etc etc. Yes I agree this framework is better but what do we gain, do we really need it etc
I agree with your comment. While reading the article, I had sympathy for the author, but also unintendedly pictured them as a mix of all of the "wizard" seniors I have worked with over the years. These are the type of people who when pair programming, constantly point out what they perceive as problems with your development setup, IDE, keyboard-macro skills, lack of tiling layout, etc etc. Not to mention what they will suggest on your actual PRs.
At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.
This piece is very sad and it resonates with me, especially after we talked about identity and definition of success. The loss of job (if any) is not as fatal as the loss of one’s social identity. Of course, there is always a way out, a way to see things in a positive light. But I believe right now it’s important to let it sink in, to realize what we have to shed on the way to tomorrow. Most (young) people don’t realize it yet.
I can't relate to this anymore and honestly after embracing vibe coding, I'm sick of reading posts like this (and I don't want to personally attack the write who I sympathize with to some degree). Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool. I also remember the brief moment of disbelief when I noticed AI could really code better than me, until I realized that the amount of problems and projects I could solve now basically exploded, while the stuff I was previously forced to deal with is now a waste of time - on to better things, as was always the case in human history.
A programmer is someone telling machines what to do - we will be doing more of that than ever in human history. That said, "coders" not so much - maybe its better to identify as a "person trying to help and care for others" than a profession, since the former will always have a place in society.
Along with value, an amature non-developer can create liabilities and technical debt if they decide to distribute something that "works." When reviewing hundreds of printed pages of LLM generated software architecture and code from ChatGPT generated in the business sphere of an org, it remains the programmer's job to advise and lead.
someone else on here analogized this perfectly: coding with AI is like solving a solved puzzle. you engage other neural pathways to get the result you want, but "the thing" that made me love doing this for work is completely removed.
> Now programming is a means to an end [...] or simply an unwanted chore to be avoided.
It was always this, for everyone other than programmers.
This reminds me a little of the Go champion (the game, not the language) who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him. It's a bit like giving up running because cars are faster.
> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming.
I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways.
Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't care if an AI coded small or big parts of it, I still want to know how it works, how to make it better - what's holding the AI itself back from being a more effective programmer.
I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. And it went through levels of hype and collapse. Maybe this is the ultimate collapse. But I still want to take apart the watch to see how it ticks.
If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.
HN is a terrible barometer for our profession opinions because here is the VC World Pravda Central. There are lots of brilliant folks here, but a lot of them are in it because of carrot of multigenerational money. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is definitelly a different ethos from the old slashdot.
Programming is not going to disappear, neither AI coding assistants. But if anything I fear more a future backslash against those useful tools than being replace by them. Overly excited people using those tools without any controls are what is going to give us sooner or later a lot of high impact incidents, lik e Therac 25, but in a massive scale, and my fear is that the companies will err in overcorrecting once this inevitably happens.
Also, cheap assistants are not going to last forever, real inference costs, despite all the hand-weaving will inevitably rear their ugly heads, and investor s will tire of subsidizing inference.
I understand the sentiment, but the danger of these articles is that people give up when they should fight back.
This isn't the first industry mandated madness. Software engineers have supported any fad that their overlords dictated for a long time. It is always the mediocre 100 IQ people who act as mouthpieces for the industry and temporarily get ahead of their more intelligent colleagues.
It is no different now. You can see who is a paid shill and who is not. Python projects like NumPy, members of which are on the take from PyTorch, go to great lengths to rationalize AI usage. Anaconda people who take AI money join in.
Projects like Zig, which are much more interesting, move away from Slophub.
What concerns me is the silence of academics. There are enough tenured professors who could speak up, but they have been intimidated by various speech restrictions from different political parties over the last decade. Or they want that next industry grant.
I share the sentiment of the post. The best I can describe it is that I’m tech-savvy enough to know that “AI” is just not capable of what people want it to do and yet I apparently lack the “broligarch” gene required for me to ignore the technical reality in favour of seeking ways to exploit people who don’t know better (a-la OpenClaw guy).
This resonates because nowadays popular developer culture is about how you need to spend $200/mo with a ronco 'set it and forget it' mindset as your AI swarm writes 100k lines of code overnight so you can post about it on twitter the next day.
Anyone questioning this methodology gets a 'enjoy being left behind' mantra akin to the 'have fun staying poor' of the crypto bro 5 years ago.
If any of you here feel like you've lost your identity, I would highly recommend watching the recently released movie "No Other Choice" by Park Chan-wook.
Maybe I didn't look hard enough, as I was put off by the pervasive absurdity of it, but I don't feel like I gained anything at all from watching that film.
> For the first time in my life, I’m suddenly wary of meeting other "computer programmers" in the wild. I feel like there’s a decent chance we won’t actually have much in common, let alone values or morality.
Maybe the social group the author is referring to has split up (forked)? For example, I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer". That noun will be reserved for the original group.
For me it's weird because I was obsessed with software architecture. At university, I majored in software design. I was obsessed with UMl diagrams, sequence diagrams and architectural philosophies like loose coupling and high cohesion... I went to uni, majored in software design. My dream position was software architect...
But then it's like the software architect role got phased out completely soon after I graduated. The radical ideology that software architecture doesn't matter started becoming mainstream... And code quality got really bad. I swear, I thought this industry had become a pure "job creation factory" just churning out unnecessary complexity to create jobs. Is still think it is the case.
Byt anyway now with AI, a lot of people are finally acknowledging that architecture is important, that coding is the easy part... Yada yada... Now everyone is finally saying what I'd been saying for over a decade... And it's like I'm finally able to shed this coder /code monkey identify which was shoved upon me and I can now start to use words like "software engineering" and "software architecture" again...
You can still be a programmer and identify with and participate in that group. AI hasn't eliminated programmers or programming, and it never will.
However, my best advice as someone with many distinct interests is to avoid tying any one of these external things to your identity. Not a Buddhist, but I think that's the correct approach.
He sort of comes to this conclusion in the final "So then, who am I?" section. The answer is you are many things and you are nothing. You can live deeply in many groups and circles without making your identity dependent on them.
If you're a programmer, what happens when programming isn't needed anymore?
If you're a runner, what happens if you get injured?
It's always been helpful personally to remind myself that
I am not a programmer. I am a person who programs.
I'm on a similar arc to the OP, except that it looks like I started about rather earlier, in the late 70's. My job title is "software engineer"; but I long ago chose to regard myself as not so much an engineer but as a master craftsman, similar to a highly skilled cabinet maker (I'm talking high-end hand-built heirloom cabinetry, here, not a quick kitchen remodel). I take pride in every facet of my work, and like the OP try to be always learning new and better techniques.
By that metaphor, AI-controlled code-generation is more like large-scale automated manufacturing: the sort of thing that produces Ikea flat packs. I'm not knocking that; I own my share of Billy bookcases. But it's not what I do. It's not what I'm going to do in the future. There's a place for large-scale manufacturing and there's a place for hand-crafting, and this is even more true for software than it is for physical goods.
Final note: throughout my career I've know a few people with an outlook similar to mine. I'm always delighted to run into them, but they've never been common.
This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before.
They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.
The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.
It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.
My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.
At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
Ensure your career isn't your religion. After a decade in tech, mostly in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I realized people had not ascended to some higher intellectual belief but sleep walked into a half baked religion, myself included to some degree.
The world of tech is experiencing schisms and reformations all at a pace unseen in history. But tech is still not worth making one's religion or identity.
Delight in whatever you do and find ways to be in service of others. I am certain many of the brilliant people here reading this will not be doing the same thing a decade from today, but many of those who we consider good people, will be doing new things with the same heart of generosity. Perhaps from that is where we should build our identity.
I love programming, but the idea of hanging out with and chatting with other programmers as a regular part of my social life leaves me cold. I'm happy to be a part of online conversations about code and hardware and design, but away from the computer ... not really. I'd rather be talking about food, or hiking or travelling or culture or relationships. There have been very few people I've ever met in person that I really enjoyed "being a programmer with", and none of them live within 1000 miles of me. And that's all just fine.
The adoption of, or adherence to an "identity" is a very western habit. The thought that you or your value derives from a mental construct or external idea.
It's limiting and dangerous. Limiting because you're relying on a relatively small network in the brain, governed almost entirely by your conscious ideas to provide a set of features of who you are. And dangerous because if something else comes up, if you discover something new about yourself, you change, or your circumstances, or the world around you changes and it affects one of your "identities" - that alteration can leave you lost. As the author seems to be saying.
Instead of these quips of, "you need to know who you are", "who are you?", "know yourself" - we should rather be trying, continually, in a never ending process, to discover ourselves.
My advice: Upgrade yourself from programmer to engineer, including the learning that involves.
I now enjoy going between software and hardware/EE/mech, between writing code and CAD, between bits and metal working, between creating structures both virtual and physical, and bringing an engineering mindset to it all. There's still a lot of creative outlets out there, and a lot of community.
I never wanted to "grow out" of programming, but it feels like that's what I'm doing. I'm leaning into activism and real-life stuff, and programming is only a tool, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not.
I was always a "Love of the game" programmer. I went to a business incubator recently and saw two guys vibe-coding with Claude. One was using speech dictation. That's crazy to me. Programming should happen at a keyboard.
I have my excuses - Claude will eventually cost more. AI that runs on Someone Else's Computer is not free software, and it will never respect you. The keyboard is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. These excuses are sort-of true and sort-of pointless.
Programming is a means to an end. I guess when the chips are down, most people program to make money, which means working for disgusting people who have so much money that they can change the course of history for the worse.
I programmed for fun, and that meant lots of programming. Now I want to program for justice, and that will mean less programming and more grass-touching.
What resonates the most with me in the article is this quote
> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.
As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology.
Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is a law of nature.
Being a grown up man with a family and a kid, I gradually care less and less about my economical "social identity". It is not exciting at all. I bring bread to the table for the family. I am among the backbone of the society i.e. people who pays the largest amount of tax proportional to their income, while receiving very little benefit from the government.
Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat simply because we living in a modern feudal world.
Now come back to the "social identity" defined in the article -- "computer programmers". I do care about this identity, but as all identities, like tags, you gotta beautify it a bit -- you have to attach some meaning to it. Without the personal meaning, you handle the power of definition to other people, who naturally don't care about you.
The tag I created for myself is "Kernel Programmer", initials in capital letters. My motto is "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" and I want to put it on my table in print. Don't get me wrong though, my work has nothing to do with kernel programming. It is not system programming either. It is even more abstract (and boring) than your usual FE/BE programming. But I do kernel programming as a hobby, and as a hobby I'm my own master and I'm willing to apply the most stringent standard to myself, which I'll never do the same to my work BTW.
And who can say that I'm not a kernel programmer even when it is just the XV6 kernel? Who can say that I'm not serious about kernel programming when I'm ready to write as many tests as I can imagine for a very early Linux kernel?
Life is meaningless and I have to create meanings out of the void. That's it.
64 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 85.4 ms ] threadBut some of the worst experiences I’ve had with coworkers were with those who made programming part of their identity. Every technical disagreement on a PR became a threat to identity or principles, and ceased being about making the right decision in that moment. Identity means: there’s us, and them, and they don’t get it.
‘Programmer’ is much better off as a description of one who does an activity. Not an identity.
It can mean a category flag someone waves, an identifier we ask others to respect, a group we choose to belong to, a way of understanding what it is we like about ourselves, or something we quietly aspire to.
To clarify/nuance. Even if there was no economic nor social incentive for me to program; I'd still tinker with it, AI coding agent enhanced or not.
I hope AI liberates us from that dumb facade of pretend innovation. In some ways, us programmers got way too full of ourselves and filled our lives with pretend work porting apps from one thing to the next thing with no actual change in end-user value
I feel like it's important to align team/org goals once in a while -- there's nothing wrong with a refactor or a port, but what's the ROI, etc etc. Yes I agree this framework is better but what do we gain, do we really need it etc
At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.
Yes. Verb not noun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960408
A programmer is someone telling machines what to do - we will be doing more of that than ever in human history. That said, "coders" not so much - maybe its better to identify as a "person trying to help and care for others" than a profession, since the former will always have a place in society.
it's about enjoyment
someone else on here analogized this perfectly: coding with AI is like solving a solved puzzle. you engage other neural pathways to get the result you want, but "the thing" that made me love doing this for work is completely removed.
It was always this, for everyone other than programmers.
This reminds me a little of the Go champion (the game, not the language) who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him. It's a bit like giving up running because cars are faster.
I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways.
Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't care if an AI coded small or big parts of it, I still want to know how it works, how to make it better - what's holding the AI itself back from being a more effective programmer.
I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. And it went through levels of hype and collapse. Maybe this is the ultimate collapse. But I still want to take apart the watch to see how it ticks.
If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.
Programming is not going to disappear, neither AI coding assistants. But if anything I fear more a future backslash against those useful tools than being replace by them. Overly excited people using those tools without any controls are what is going to give us sooner or later a lot of high impact incidents, lik e Therac 25, but in a massive scale, and my fear is that the companies will err in overcorrecting once this inevitably happens.
Also, cheap assistants are not going to last forever, real inference costs, despite all the hand-weaving will inevitably rear their ugly heads, and investor s will tire of subsidizing inference.
This isn't the first industry mandated madness. Software engineers have supported any fad that their overlords dictated for a long time. It is always the mediocre 100 IQ people who act as mouthpieces for the industry and temporarily get ahead of their more intelligent colleagues.
It is no different now. You can see who is a paid shill and who is not. Python projects like NumPy, members of which are on the take from PyTorch, go to great lengths to rationalize AI usage. Anaconda people who take AI money join in.
Projects like Zig, which are much more interesting, move away from Slophub.
What concerns me is the silence of academics. There are enough tenured professors who could speak up, but they have been intimidated by various speech restrictions from different political parties over the last decade. Or they want that next industry grant.
Anyone questioning this methodology gets a 'enjoy being left behind' mantra akin to the 'have fun staying poor' of the crypto bro 5 years ago.
Maybe the social group the author is referring to has split up (forked)? For example, I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer". That noun will be reserved for the original group.
But then it's like the software architect role got phased out completely soon after I graduated. The radical ideology that software architecture doesn't matter started becoming mainstream... And code quality got really bad. I swear, I thought this industry had become a pure "job creation factory" just churning out unnecessary complexity to create jobs. Is still think it is the case.
Byt anyway now with AI, a lot of people are finally acknowledging that architecture is important, that coding is the easy part... Yada yada... Now everyone is finally saying what I'd been saying for over a decade... And it's like I'm finally able to shed this coder /code monkey identify which was shoved upon me and I can now start to use words like "software engineering" and "software architecture" again...
However, my best advice as someone with many distinct interests is to avoid tying any one of these external things to your identity. Not a Buddhist, but I think that's the correct approach.
He sort of comes to this conclusion in the final "So then, who am I?" section. The answer is you are many things and you are nothing. You can live deeply in many groups and circles without making your identity dependent on them.
If you're a programmer, what happens when programming isn't needed anymore?
If you're a runner, what happens if you get injured?
It's always been helpful personally to remind myself that
I am not a programmer. I am a person who programs.
I am not a runner. I am a person who runs.
By that metaphor, AI-controlled code-generation is more like large-scale automated manufacturing: the sort of thing that produces Ikea flat packs. I'm not knocking that; I own my share of Billy bookcases. But it's not what I do. It's not what I'm going to do in the future. There's a place for large-scale manufacturing and there's a place for hand-crafting, and this is even more true for software than it is for physical goods.
Final note: throughout my career I've know a few people with an outlook similar to mine. I'm always delighted to run into them, but they've never been common.
They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.
The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.
It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.
My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.
At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
The world of tech is experiencing schisms and reformations all at a pace unseen in history. But tech is still not worth making one's religion or identity.
Delight in whatever you do and find ways to be in service of others. I am certain many of the brilliant people here reading this will not be doing the same thing a decade from today, but many of those who we consider good people, will be doing new things with the same heart of generosity. Perhaps from that is where we should build our identity.
It's limiting and dangerous. Limiting because you're relying on a relatively small network in the brain, governed almost entirely by your conscious ideas to provide a set of features of who you are. And dangerous because if something else comes up, if you discover something new about yourself, you change, or your circumstances, or the world around you changes and it affects one of your "identities" - that alteration can leave you lost. As the author seems to be saying.
Instead of these quips of, "you need to know who you are", "who are you?", "know yourself" - we should rather be trying, continually, in a never ending process, to discover ourselves.
I now enjoy going between software and hardware/EE/mech, between writing code and CAD, between bits and metal working, between creating structures both virtual and physical, and bringing an engineering mindset to it all. There's still a lot of creative outlets out there, and a lot of community.
Aim high and grow your identity!
I never wanted to "grow out" of programming, but it feels like that's what I'm doing. I'm leaning into activism and real-life stuff, and programming is only a tool, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not.
I was always a "Love of the game" programmer. I went to a business incubator recently and saw two guys vibe-coding with Claude. One was using speech dictation. That's crazy to me. Programming should happen at a keyboard.
I have my excuses - Claude will eventually cost more. AI that runs on Someone Else's Computer is not free software, and it will never respect you. The keyboard is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. These excuses are sort-of true and sort-of pointless.
Programming is a means to an end. I guess when the chips are down, most people program to make money, which means working for disgusting people who have so much money that they can change the course of history for the worse.
I programmed for fun, and that meant lots of programming. Now I want to program for justice, and that will mean less programming and more grass-touching.
> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.
As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology.
Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is a law of nature.
The catch is that the path there are occasional local minima, and very deep local minima, like the world wars
Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat simply because we living in a modern feudal world.
Now come back to the "social identity" defined in the article -- "computer programmers". I do care about this identity, but as all identities, like tags, you gotta beautify it a bit -- you have to attach some meaning to it. Without the personal meaning, you handle the power of definition to other people, who naturally don't care about you.
The tag I created for myself is "Kernel Programmer", initials in capital letters. My motto is "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" and I want to put it on my table in print. Don't get me wrong though, my work has nothing to do with kernel programming. It is not system programming either. It is even more abstract (and boring) than your usual FE/BE programming. But I do kernel programming as a hobby, and as a hobby I'm my own master and I'm willing to apply the most stringent standard to myself, which I'll never do the same to my work BTW.
And who can say that I'm not a kernel programmer even when it is just the XV6 kernel? Who can say that I'm not serious about kernel programming when I'm ready to write as many tests as I can imagine for a very early Linux kernel?
Life is meaningless and I have to create meanings out of the void. That's it.