Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I can close an eye on using LLMs for research only.
These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all. I’d honestly switch careers rather than manage agents. But I’m currently out of work (contract ended) and wondering if there is still a sane place to work, or is it truly time to pivot to another career.
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[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 9.8 ms ] threadIf you mean using a text editor, a shell, and a makefile, then you're not alone by any stretch of the imagination.
If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).
:-?
My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.
Unfortunately, definitely not. There are lots of people still doing the same as they did a decade ago who have learned very little. Very often the people who knew very little to start with.
This is temporary though; other teams are fully embracing AI in their processes, and it's really only a matter of time until all teams use it. We have C-suite instructions to promote AI adoption. AI will slowly creep into software testing, verification, and eventually the requirements management and software development itself. I'm working on some of the pilot projects.
Yes, this is the only way I use them. As a better search tool for the collective knowledge, and to do arbitrary queries on a complicated code base.
If there are any mechanical changes, like renaming something or such, I might use an LLM for it as well.
Even though agents are building all of my code now, I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem. There is no practical use, but it make me feel good and sharp for the rest of the day.
For anyone coping with AI I suggest to give it a try, and stick to it for some time, just like with a gym.
I regret not doing this 10 years ago. Just ~20 minutes of leetcode practice for a decade. I could have landed so much better gigs. :-/
Keeping with your example, this is the equivalent of going to the gym just to do a single set on the bench press.
Your brain is still atrophying.
I’ve found aoc/leetcode pretty much reversed the accidental atrophy for me
shrug
Would love to hear your suggestions on how to stay in ”mental” shape in the AI age.
- Doing too much at the same time, it is super exhausting, and I get nervous and stressed
- Sycophancy makes me overestimate myself
- When my stress meets external pressure, quality goes down. The little voice of 'surely the AI got it right' can lead to defects and code quality going down.
Except for doing some manual coding, I've started doing a couple of other things that are probably just healthy regardless of using AI heavily in day to day life:
- Do literally nothing for at least half an hour. Read something written by humans, even better if it is fiction.
- Do something that makes you feel stupid. And don't use AI to help you through it. (That could be Leetcode, but for me it is learning about statistics)
- Slow down when you feel like things are moving too fast. By far the hardest thing, but the moment I realize I'm trying to rush for a deadline, I'm going out for a walk. Realistically, I'm moving 3-8x faster than before, this little delay is nothing, and keeps me sane and quality on a good level.
Now a machine does it for me.
To stay in shape every morning I bake a single loaf.
The transition of winning an argument change to “claude said…” which are fucking annoying facing this shit in daily basis.
Code base becoming a blackbox where god and AI know what its like, every function have 4 line of paragraph historically describing changes from past to the future.
Im thinking of resigning because i cant bear this shit anymore but seems like its not better in other place.
Its time for me to retire and change career IG. Im sick of this becoming middleman between my manager and the AI
Dont get me wrong, these LLM will wipe out everyone any time soon it just the matter of time.
I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
If it’s not useful now you have authority on why. And if it’s not is useful then you are better at your job.
“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’” —Mitch Hedberg
LLM-assisted coding is basically an entirely different career from software engineering, and not everyone wants to do that. (Ditto here; fortunately, I’m self-employed.)
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[1] Though if things go the way of the hype, there will either be many fewer dev jobs, or most of them will become lower paid, or both - so long term that might not be as big a deal if you aren't one of the top people²
[2] Which I know I aren't!
[3] if it isn't, then the claims that it is revolutionary are false
[5] I could be made redundant by the same distinction, by being given the choice of redundancy or moving to an AI-based role, but I can live with that
[6] Especially those of use who have been around long enough to have a pile of experience/knowledge, generally or for a specific industry.
I'm in two minds on how best to handle these kind of, "but you have to use an LLM" issues. In my heart I'm like you; they hired me to do a job. If I'm doing the job at the rate and quality expected, why should they care if I use an LLM, my brain, or randomly throw mud at the keyboard until something magically works? The practical side of me says, "I like a roof over my head" so if they mandate I have to use an LLM then I'll do it as long as they take responsibility for any negative impact from that decision.
A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up for unfair evaluations, etc. But you just straight up told the people paying you that you won't do what they're paying you to do lol. DEFINITELY make sure you work on your spin on this for future interviews, because knowing you were confidentially disobeying direct instructions is an immediate "pass" for me and anyone with any sense who may be interviewing you.
>This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
If you think LLMs are a fad that will just go away if you wait long enough, then you need to just remove yourself from this industry. They're not going away, for better or worse, and this kind of work is fundamentally changing. To be direct: you ARE wrong in taking this absolutist stance. It's profoundly naive to have done what you've done, and I hope, for your own sake, that you plan for your future accordingly.
If you have some moral issue with LLMs, then you probably need to just plan on pivoting your career. But if you're just stuck on some weird sense of pride for your "craft," then you need to take a step back and really try to appreciate what the reality of your career means to the people willing to pay you for work.
For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy is a form of office politics. Some of those things become performance metrics, or evaluations of your "attitude."
"Performance" can mean "the quality of your work." It also can mean "theater." Like when you're measuring performance by token usage, or lines of code, or office attendance... or, in a case I once encountered, manual adherence to a style guide, that required two human beings to check every line of code against a set of conventions, instead of just configuring a formatting tool and being done with it.
Regarding LLMs in particular, I don't necessarily think the absolutist stance is it here, but it is a technology worker's job to know when you can and should automate things, as well as to know when it's not an effective use of resources to throw technology at something just because. I don't know parent's company or use case. I don't know if they were doing something with it that actually enhanced productivity, or just tracking tokens. I don't know if it enhanced their product, or just shoehorned AI into it for investor-driven buzzword utilization. So I'm also not an absolutist on what you're saying.
It could be that parent is too rigid, but (as much as I'm not asking for all this context either) I don't think there's enough information here to be certain about that.
They don't have to "go away"; managers just have to stop requiring their usage. In a sane business they will care about output, not tokens. If OP cannot keep up his output because he refuses to use it, sure, fire him. But in my experience the good devs can still keep up. Your post is only true if AIs improve enough that no developer can possibly keep up without them. That is not today, and maybe not tomorrow.
I went through interviews recently; I told everyone what I think they wanted to hear about my AI usage based on their demeanor; I got a new job; I pretend to use AI at this new job. Either we're right and AI mandates get walked back, so we're in a good spot, or we're wrong and we need to hold onto our jobs for dear life.
Where I work, I have chores than a claude subscription would knock out in minutes instead of months. But I don’t have permission to run something like that, so I don’t.
Weirdly our contractors can. They wrote it into their contracts. It’s not even fair, really.
They say they’re working on it, but some people might be pushing back.
Do you draw any other conclusion than that your management wants to replace you with the contractors?
I like building and tweaking computer stuff, and managing agents is a completely different carrer than the one I signed up for. I guess corporate interests fell out of alignment with me with this one, definitely thinking about my career more these days.
If the company does try to turn the screws and force me to use it more, I'd rather exit the company (and maybe the industry entirely) than become a slop slinger. We'll see how it goes, but for now at least, I think the company has been handling it well.
I work on a product that is, in most cases, self-hosted by customers and is operating in a very regulated field. I'm in charge of a large part of the technical decisions and this includes scalability.
Debugging customer problems, especially around issues under load, weird spikes, networking weirdness and the likes really hasn't been improved by talking to LLMs. I do occasionally braindump into Claude to get some inspiration (ie research), but it's been limited in utility. I have to deal with customers sending me complete chat transcripts with ChatGPT, and this wastes much more time than it saves.
I suspect this has to do with the fact that we're dealing with relatively niche, non-mainstream problems usually. If you google something and you don't come up with much, chances are your LLM training body might also not cover the subject in great detail.
All implemention decisions are largely decided by claude these days.
We have so many useless tests, so many repetitive code, Every change, even few lines long will trigger 25-50 additional files changes just because everything is so horribly written.
I have heard this was the case before ai, but it got so much worse.
At the end, I believe it comes down to 3 things: care - which before ai you had to have at least some care. Strong leadership - the ai psychosis spreads like a desease in our csuite. Ownership - there is none, every interaction you have about something starts with "but claude thinks that or says this"
I wish we could go back.
Is it fear of the business being copied elsewhere?
Is it because monetary incentives to lessen the workforce?
Is it just all rich people's clubs laundering the same idea that AI will solve their problems, and the Cxx come back from their retreats and make it their stance that all company should use AI because muy buddy at the golf course said it?
Is it the promise of x10 the productivity?
My company has been holding on raises for a few years, but it's open bar on AI usage. And I feel it in the reviews: some are expedited without even a human in the loop. It also outs people that have no care for the result, they push things they don't even understand. The C suite has words like "every developer pushing a MR should be able to explain why and how", and in the same week, push for full automation of the Spec -> Implementation -> MR -> Review flow.
I don't quite understand the endgame here.
I think its a combination of phycosis, detachment from the codebase, and weak critical thinking