> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.
In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.
At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!
I could have written the same comment. Maybe it was me just sitting down one weekend and really giving them a chance but something changed early this year. The coding agents just got really good or, like I said, maybe it was me just taking a hard look at them. For better or for worse, the software dev industry is never going back to they way it was.
I think you're missing the point. My entire career has been looking up and reusing code written by humans who are objectively better at writing code than AI ever will be (please don't argue about this).
Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.
The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
When I hit that part I was like.... you don't enjoy the work. It has nothing to do with AI. One way or another you're gonna get smoked by the ones who actually like doing this stuff. There's good money in the fitness industry.
I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.
One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.
I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.
Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!
Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.
I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
Funny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.
Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“
But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.
Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.
Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
> Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
I love this! Stealing it! :)
It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak.
Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today.
> Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
This feels like a bit of a staw man argument, I'm not sure there's any reason to read into it that you could help someone do morally bad things and feel good about it.
To be clear though feeling good is not the justification per se, it's pretty much just the signal that you're aligned correctly. When you aim outward, morality becomes less about self image and more about stewardship which is why it tends to work.
I’m also not claiming morality is relative or "attained" particularly beyond normal development as an adult. I would assert that we already know what’s right, the problem isn’t discovering the moral law, it’s obsessing over our own righteousness instead of living it.
^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it.
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
> That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.
This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
So, as you saw, this provoked the age-old parenting vs CF "debate." (There isn't a right answer.)
I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision.
(I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
except it is not, no one’s actual profession (and only job) is youth soccer coach (few exception are retired people etc). it would be impossible to make a living if this was your only job
As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot.
Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.
Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
I mean if you have already adult kids (or no kids at all) you have lot of spare time, my kid's head coach is 68yo, so he has time to train them twice a week (sometimes accompanied his similar aged friend), he also goes with them to matches (not that often 1-2 a month) while giving lectures at university, third training a week is made by some regular IT guy in his 30s with own small kid(s), but he does it only once a week for 1-2 hours, so certainly doable.
Btw. this is in Central Europe, my kid can go to training by himself with tram/bus. As for the matches, I accompany him if it is in our city, but if it's outside the city then he can either join coach(es), they usually ride kids or not participate in match. We don't have car so can't drive him there. Though soon kid will have to move to higher age league, so not sure what club we will find eventually, the one they are cooperating with is outside the city with like 1+ hour commute one way by public transport, so will certainly look into something closer.
TLDR if my kids were already adult I would have also lot of spare time and teaching/helping kids it's sure more fullfiling than doomscrolling at home. Though I am lazy person, but I was in recent years thinking about helping people instead of doing my work for money, the issue is I don't like most of the people, who need help.
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good.
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.
Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.
87 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadIn response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.
This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.
One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.
I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.
Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!
Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.
I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
It's hard.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
To be clear though feeling good is not the justification per se, it's pretty much just the signal that you're aligned correctly. When you aim outward, morality becomes less about self image and more about stewardship which is why it tends to work.
I’m also not claiming morality is relative or "attained" particularly beyond normal development as an adult. I would assert that we already know what’s right, the problem isn’t discovering the moral law, it’s obsessing over our own righteousness instead of living it.
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.
This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision.
(I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.
Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
Btw. this is in Central Europe, my kid can go to training by himself with tram/bus. As for the matches, I accompany him if it is in our city, but if it's outside the city then he can either join coach(es), they usually ride kids or not participate in match. We don't have car so can't drive him there. Though soon kid will have to move to higher age league, so not sure what club we will find eventually, the one they are cooperating with is outside the city with like 1+ hour commute one way by public transport, so will certainly look into something closer.
TLDR if my kids were already adult I would have also lot of spare time and teaching/helping kids it's sure more fullfiling than doomscrolling at home. Though I am lazy person, but I was in recent years thinking about helping people instead of doing my work for money, the issue is I don't like most of the people, who need help.
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
What is a Hoosier?
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.