Ask HN: Do we need a support group for developers alienated by LLMs?
Seeing my career crumble in front of my eyes, seeing my identity as software engineer questioned in the span of a few years has been, to me, traumatic, and utterly alienating because non-tech people are not unaware of how world-shattering this technology is to our niche, and many of our fellow peers either collectively shrug, or are ecstatic not to have to write code any more.
I have been trying to reinvent myself, to set out on a path where I'm no longer a professional software engineer; where I will still enjoy coding software for myself, by hand, but the emotional turmoil at this radical change has not lessened, and I have been wondering if other people are feeling the same kind of alienation, and just feel lost and a bit aimless these days.
(Please, this is meant to be a serious post about emotions some of us might be going through, and we could do without comments saying this is just an overreaction and to just embrace the future)
48 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadI was already getting annoyed with the profession and its CV-driven development, and mostly saw code as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but that only means I've not lost a sense of identity: I am absolutely also struggling to figure out what to do next.
Is that not what writing code is for? achieving a need?
If I want to feel the art or gaze upon my code masterpieces, I'll do that in my own side projects, no?
So I guess it is safe to assume that you would not be interested in a "a support group for developers alienated by LLMs?"
Yes, that is a rhetorical question.
Comments like this make it blindingly apparent that this is just a VC’s web forum.
Quit playing for a little bit. Quit working. See how quickly people derided and devalue you. If I don’t work, I don’t eat, I don’t get a place to sleep, etc. and “the role I play in the capitalist system” determines exactly how much of those things I can have.
I find it similar to “it’s not useful to compare yourself to others” adage. In society, you’re constantly evaluated or compared against others: when trying to find work, when trying to find a home, etc.
Sure maybe you can fuck off and try and live like Diogenes, but you’ll more likely to just collect a string of arrests or unwanted conflict with junkies.
You are entirely defined by your role in the capitalist system because you cannot exist outside of it.
I don’t like it, but that’s how im playing the game of life
It can translate one language into another but we already had transpilers for that.
It can find bugs quickly but we already had static analysis. It also generates many plausible looking false positives.
LLMs can write them for me, and I can happily look through them to make sure what the LLM made was neither brittle, nor testing unimportant things while missing the important stuff.
They can also help with code review, but only to a limited degree; a second pair of eyes to avoid lazy people going "LGTM", or the other way around time-wasting feedback from bike-shedders, but as with unit tests, right now you still need to be the kind of person who is happy to double-check its work — if you're the kind who was previously a little too quick to accept pull requests with a "LGTM", you may well be too willing to listen to irrelevant bike-shedding from the LLM or not realise it is missing the point of the code or the ticket.
But if you use it to replace the stuff you're already good at, and not help with the stuff you're weak at, it'll probably slow you down while also making the code worse.
Millions of programmers out there, and you're saying there's not even a 1% chance that a single one of them is moving 10x faster?
Would that mean that every other claim to be moving 10x faster is an exaggeration? It evidently is, as these claims of massively increased productivity are purely anecdotal.
If the claims were ‘5% productive across the board’, it would be huge, but 1000%? That is a ludicrous tall story that requires extraordinary proof.
It's pretty obvious that's not what's happening. To pretend otherwise would suggest that every software developer everywhere is completely unaware of what tech debt is AND that they don't care at all.
Again: it's obviously wrong if we think about it for longer than 5 seconds. This is just pure emotional cope.
> It doesn't design architecture.
It can do that. Won't say it's amazing, but it can do it.
> It doesn't think. It doesn't reason.
Can you define these in ways that aren't tautologically limited to humans? I have yet to encounter anyone who has managed this.
> All it does is search for and copy-paste code from elsewhere on the internet.
They provably don't work like that. Both because local models exist, can be run offline, still spit out code to solve problems; and because some world records have been set by them, and some CS-related maths problems the best known method was invented by an AI which used an LLM as a component.
https://the-decoder.com/openais-ai-beats-every-human-at-atco...
https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-co...
No, because that’s the point. It’s not intelligent because intelligence is a human characteristic.
> Both because local models exist, can be run offline
It’s not that they search interactively, it’s that the whole internet has been sucked into the training set.
Will you choosing a tautologically-limiting definition that equals human, prevent AI from performing well enough to replace you at work?
> It’s not that they search interactively, it’s that the whole internet has been sucked into the training set.
Training.
As in, it learned. First by reading the internet, then by feedback as it tried to make stuff and was rated by the quality of output.
For new code, I treat it like a very knowledgeable mid level engineer who has a lot of patience to search the code base. We make changes a step at a time and I review them carefully and have it make changes I want. It's still a lot faster than doing it myself.
2. Create agents to crawl the internet and invite anyone who has posted such sentiments
3. Best not to tell them that they were contacted via ai
More seriously if you set one up, it will likely attract many people.
On the other hand I definitely feel like AI makes developers lazier, and if they're not properly reviewing the code it can have some disastrous consequences. It seems to have calmed down a bit but we went through a phase of swimming in a deluge of AI slop, I guess the temperature has been turned down a bit as I no longer get three emoji-filled documents for every change I introduce. It definitely feels like the last 30 years of my career have been swept away, but the past is gone and we can't get it back, and I have a wealth of experience that is still useful.
I don't know about other companies and industries but certainly the message from our leadership is that AI is here, and it's staying, so it's either a case of get on board or look for another job. I'm currently building AI augmented tools to stay relevant and hopefully survive the next round of job cuts.
I find AI-assisted development to be quite enjoyable. I’ve logged many, many years of full-time development prior to LLMs hitting the scene. By every indication i’ve been given, I am very good at my job. I do not do this job for the money. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near SV, both physically or spiritually.
I am not a rare exception or anything. My whole team is like this. I work with many people that’re like this. There is no shortage of voices speaking to this online. You’re in denial.
Drop this “you probably just don’t love the craft if you aren’t on my side” BS. it was old six months ago. It’s inexcusably ignorant now. If your view had such merit you wouldn’t need to be this intellectually dishonest. Accept that different people are different.
Nothing felt better than writing code, and feeling proud of what I had built. Now I am being forced at work to use AI/LLMs because "it's faster" and I feel like my whole life, the career I fought for, has been sucked away.
Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...
Be careful to not falsely attribute this to AI just because the chronically online kids are all up in arms about it.
As with the sibling comment, I advise you to be skeptical of causation: lots of corporations have weird office politics and you'll need to rule that out before you can tell if it's AI or just your boss.
> Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...
I'm surprised they've not already been entirely automated away. A few lines were created fully automated and seem to have managed fine ever since. Much easier than self-driving cars.
Someone was describing their time in Navy around the 70s or 80s. They’re job was to perform maintenance on some sort of electronic system on ship. They mentioned the training in electronic design repair they were given in the Navy and how good it was, setting them up for an EE degree later in life quite well.
They went on to describe that nowadays no one does that. That job now involves removing modular commercial off the shelf hardware components, sticking them on diagnostic machines and maybe ordering by a replacement or running a calibration. No useful technical skill or knowledge learned.
LLM driven development feels like a rough analog in software. Sure, there’s going to be new jobs created, they’ll just be less valuable and worse across almost every factor.
I could maybe be content with it if they didn’t just claw back remote work. Why the fuck should I still be sitting in an office hours a day when the agents do all the real work.
Even if you're a solid software engineer and do your best to keep up in an AI world, you have to deal with all the indirect impacts that AI has had on collaboration, code quality, management decisions, product decisions, etc.
I don't have a solution and I'm really struggling to figure out what I want to do next. I've been unable to identify something that could provide me with income that hasn't been equally harmed by AI. I'm open to suggestions.
All that being said, I'd join such a support group
My employer has been encouraging us to use LLMs in our coding work, and I've been resisting, but their encouragement is rapidly converting into requirement. We have to start submitting reports from Claude showing how much we utilized it. I've been desperately wanting to return more of my time to writing, and this LLM push has been the last psychological shove I needed to start moving away from the industry[1].
I'm sure I'll still code for fun, and for my own projects, but I think I'm going to be done with day-job coding unless AI turns out to be a bubble and/or the upcoming unsubsidized price tags throw cold water on the whole enterprise. If I can't make a living with writing, I may have to open a Cajun food truck or something.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847511
I'm a hands-on learner. Peers show me their agentic workflows. I'll nod and ask questions and tell them it's cool. But inside I'm spinning out fearing my future will look like these workflows. However, then time passes and that workflow or prototype amounts to nothing but spent credits and time. Then I relax.
I'm still part of the problem. I use these tools as a "better google" and require reference links to all of it's assertions.
I keep finding myself considering going into nursing or some other in-demand, well-paying job and wonder if I wait long enough the shift will be subsidized somehow.