Maybe it’s just me but it’s still hard. Writing code wasn’t hard before. Honestly putting up guard rails is harder than writing it yourself. It just may be faster now.
Getting proper requirements, knowing what to make, update, the domain knowledge, satisfying customers was and still is the hard part.
I disagree with the article a lot. Solving problems because easier yes, the size of the problems became bigger. What I can do now with an LLM is magnitudes larger than I could've done alone.
> I legitimately think this will be the biggest sociopolitical issue over the next few years. The frustration of seeing your hard work getting one-shotted.
> This might be why despite AI automating so much work, the 996 grind culture is more alive than ever.
There's an interesting paradox which occurs when a particular field finds its work becoming easier. Suddenly, the world needs more of everyone else's job and less of your job. You have to work harder now that there's less work to do, because there's more competition.
I think it mostly got harder? You had relatively clearly defined paths to build a skill that would be valuable. And now you don't. So the skill that you need to learn now is, roughly, figuring out what to do when nobody tells you what to do.
One of the fundamentally and widely accepted concept in learning science is the need for “desirable difficulties”.
Too bad that wiping that out in favor of convenience has been the fundamental business model of Silicon Valley since two decades.
LLMS productization is just the last and more egregious step in the wrong dorection.
I disagree that something becoming easier is a negative, even if it sucks for the people who learned the hard way.
The real issue is that the floor has been lowered, but the ceiling stays as high. It's always been a problem in this profession, where you can get something running much easier than you can make something safe, maintainable and ethical.
We keep making it easier and easier to disregard those extras. Both technically and culturally. It's not a good path.
I think there should be honesty about what "Doing" some of these things means. Outsourcing is "doing" IFF you regard the end product as the sole meaningful or significant part of a given goal or process.
"Have your digital slave do it for you" is not really doing it if doing something and difficulty refers to your own action, and there's a gradient between that extreme and manually grinding rocks to make silicone wafers. I did not just refactor a bit of code, something did it for me. I cannot take ownership for something I didn't actually sodding do, no amount of semantic dishonesty changes this.
Ultimately I am not going to listen to someone who has """""done""""'" a hiphop cover of their history test if they put it into some software that automated 80+% of it from lyric to beat, and their decision-making amounts to 'fuck it that will do'. I'll absolutely listen to someone who has given it a real crack through means convenient and not, if it seems like they give a crap.
I think emotions are an underrated aspect to the "AI changes how we work" thing. Everyone I know extensively uses AI in most parts of their work. Basically everyone has multiplied their output by a lot.
But I don't know many people who say they enjoy their work more because of AI. I definitely resonate with the pain of watching something that required so many little bits of knowledge you earned over years melt into pushing a button.
I might just be the artisan cobbler watching factories rise during the industrial revolution. Making good boots was and is still hard and requires a lot of specific knowledge, but the amount of people appreciating well-made boots plummeted as factor-made, cheaper boots flooded the market.
And I know, rationally, that the line of "what is hard" is just moving. There are great industrially-made goods the same way there are great products whose code is mainly AI-generated. Like good boots, building safe, scalable, distributed systems is still hard.
But I can't help but have some nostalgia for how things were pre-AI. Work felt more honest, the skills I spent years building felt more valuable, and I was more satisfied at work.
TBQH it used to be easy. I remember watching one person with Access set up dashboards that worked 1000x better than all of the dozen SAAS tools no one can wrangle together today. Small businesses pushed updates and menus from Frontpage. We used to spin up quick code on our calculators, meanwhile our much more powerful phones act like executing our own code is an act of terrorism.
LLMs (maybe) get us a little closer to closing the complexity gap and making our personal computers personal again, but with the funny problem of needing to use someone else's computer to do so.
I remember C compilers becoming affordable, and GCC actually getting good.
I remember Java coming along, and how much easier it was to build compared to all the crazy linking and cryptic error messages my C compiler gave me once you went beyond a toy program. And god forbid you wanted it to run on BOTH Borland and visual C!
I remember CGI, and then PHP making it trivial to write web apps, and then less trivial webapps, and then webapps that people actually used in serious business.
Then I watched the same thing happen with Javascript.
All those rebuilds of the same foundations, making the same fundamental design mistakes again and again like a wheel of karma, but with prettier UX and less vendor lock-in.
And now, AI makes it even easier to re-make those mistakes. It's gotten "easier", but it's actually gotten harder. Making something that runs has never been more trivial. Making something with a solid architecture and disciplined hygiene has never been harder.
And so we begin round 4 of re-learning the lessons of the 1960s-1970s.
What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with duct tape and a prayer. Although this guy doesn't have any traditional background but still, if LLM generated coding agents were so good even a simpleton like himself should be able to create a miraculous piece of software, right?
> Turning this essay into a song in the style of 2000's Hip Hop? It used to be hard
Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.
It's maybe much easier to create code, but it's still hard to create good software, and for the next few years we have a monumental challenge of figuring out how does one create good software when cost of code is approaching zero.
It will be harder to decide what to build (or what to not build), increase the velocity, even if only for infosec patching, make use of increased velocity for features, massively increase experimenting capacity, and close the biggest loop.
Even the best teams now are barely scratching the surface of what tomorrow brings, and it's super exciting, interesting and definitely not easy.
It will be hard, but not in the part that was hard before.
34 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] thread> Is it bad that the barrier to entry for a DJ is lower? No
Lets set very modest goals, not selling out stadiums, just making median income, so you can buy a house and raise family.
It is much much much harder now! DJ is not even paid profession anymore! Actually maiking money is impossible. This field is impossible!
> we are not enough as people and worthy of good things.
That is totally true for like 90% of population. Not some sort of feelings, but based on response stats from job sites!
Getting proper requirements, knowing what to make, update, the domain knowledge, satisfying customers was and still is the hard part.
I think the problems used to be easy and here we are.
Man, what a narrow world view.
There's an interesting paradox which occurs when a particular field finds its work becoming easier. Suddenly, the world needs more of everyone else's job and less of your job. You have to work harder now that there's less work to do, because there's more competition.
Now it is too easy. I started garage band with my flatmate, we sell out stadium every weekend. Single ticktock short gets us million views.
Why people complain today? Just live celebrity life!
I for one still understand what I'm making and strive to be able to converse about it intelligently with anyone interested.
Of course I also use LLMs all day, but it's not like anyone can suddenly do my job to the same standards.
The real issue is that the floor has been lowered, but the ceiling stays as high. It's always been a problem in this profession, where you can get something running much easier than you can make something safe, maintainable and ethical.
We keep making it easier and easier to disregard those extras. Both technically and culturally. It's not a good path.
I'm taking on massively more ambitious projects than I was just a year ago, and it's taking every inch of my skill and experience to do that.
Building software feels harder now, and I'm really enjoying it.
"Have your digital slave do it for you" is not really doing it if doing something and difficulty refers to your own action, and there's a gradient between that extreme and manually grinding rocks to make silicone wafers. I did not just refactor a bit of code, something did it for me. I cannot take ownership for something I didn't actually sodding do, no amount of semantic dishonesty changes this.
Ultimately I am not going to listen to someone who has """""done""""'" a hiphop cover of their history test if they put it into some software that automated 80+% of it from lyric to beat, and their decision-making amounts to 'fuck it that will do'. I'll absolutely listen to someone who has given it a real crack through means convenient and not, if it seems like they give a crap.
But I don't know many people who say they enjoy their work more because of AI. I definitely resonate with the pain of watching something that required so many little bits of knowledge you earned over years melt into pushing a button.
I might just be the artisan cobbler watching factories rise during the industrial revolution. Making good boots was and is still hard and requires a lot of specific knowledge, but the amount of people appreciating well-made boots plummeted as factor-made, cheaper boots flooded the market.
And I know, rationally, that the line of "what is hard" is just moving. There are great industrially-made goods the same way there are great products whose code is mainly AI-generated. Like good boots, building safe, scalable, distributed systems is still hard.
But I can't help but have some nostalgia for how things were pre-AI. Work felt more honest, the skills I spent years building felt more valuable, and I was more satisfied at work.
LLMs (maybe) get us a little closer to closing the complexity gap and making our personal computers personal again, but with the funny problem of needing to use someone else's computer to do so.
I remember Java coming along, and how much easier it was to build compared to all the crazy linking and cryptic error messages my C compiler gave me once you went beyond a toy program. And god forbid you wanted it to run on BOTH Borland and visual C!
I remember CGI, and then PHP making it trivial to write web apps, and then less trivial webapps, and then webapps that people actually used in serious business.
Then I watched the same thing happen with Javascript.
All those rebuilds of the same foundations, making the same fundamental design mistakes again and again like a wheel of karma, but with prettier UX and less vendor lock-in.
And now, AI makes it even easier to re-make those mistakes. It's gotten "easier", but it's actually gotten harder. Making something that runs has never been more trivial. Making something with a solid architecture and disciplined hygiene has never been harder.
And so we begin round 4 of re-learning the lessons of the 1960s-1970s.
Have you listened to the song he links? It's very convincing. If you were just casually listening to it in the grocery store, you wouldn't notice it was made by AI.