> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.
So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?
I personally went through the authors dilemma but came out different. I personally don’t care for the writing by hand, but absolutely do read every line produced by AI, because I take pride it a well designed and easy to understand system; well designed abstractions. I’m able to build better and easier to understand software (with better tests!) then I ever was before.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy".
It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.
Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.
Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.
Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.
Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
The problem with what you're saying is there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale. There is also no clear pathway to "this opens up more jobs". This is not a tool the same way an electric saw is a tool. An electric saw replaces a physical thing that we do (manually sawing), but AI replaces our thinking and intelligence.
I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally.
Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.
What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.
I stopped reviewing the code at all.
People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.
My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.
It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
>there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it
This means you designed the system well and made sure the agent implemented it correctly. Even at Big Company the big shot architects don't review every line of code, and nobody seemed to mind that
It’s just a fact that an ai will write and read faster than me. I can’t compete so getting ai to do that has freed up both time and mental capacity to actually think about the implementation details.
I'd like to think it comes down to my expertise, but at the end of the day I don't believe I did a lot of designing.
Sure, I've given a lot of inputs over the time, probably I've steered it to solutions that work.
Maybe it was also helpful that I set up a skill to use a different model to review the code for correctness, technical debt, and whether the location where the code is added is appropriate or warrants a new file or abstraction.
I set this up long before subagents were widely used.
>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
Vice City was released nearly 25 years ago! Also it's a game, so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. If you count the unique 'features' (or systems) of Vice City, you might find it's a comparable count to the number of features of a medium-sized mobile app.
You are joking right ? renderer, audio, math, physics, animation, AI, asset streaming,.... in addition to the gameplay itself, and you compare it to a medium-sized mobile app ???
Apps usually have tons of boilerplate, so pure LoC may be similar. But in density, no contest. I recently dug up an old objc app of mine and was shocked how few lines it took to send a REST request, parse and process it. Nowadays it is split into multiple files, usecases, repositories, protocols to accomplish the same. All in the name of testability or architectural “correctness”. Write that in a game and you’re fired because it kills performance.
There's a different bar for maintenance though. Many games exist in a single point in time, they ship and are done, whereas the goal with SaaS is to support the code forever.
Maintenance, sure, but also: games have one chance to be good, and that is at release. With a multi-year development cycle, what we get at release (of the good ones) is like a version 4 or 5 of an app. Everything is connected and changed (and thus maintained) over the years.
This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The idea guys were always incredibly annoying but very ignorable. Now they are constantly in your face but providing the exact same 0 value as always.
I mean, wasn’t that the case for most of them? Im not a developer anymore, but to me programming was always a means to an end. Sure you can have preferences (static vs dynamic typing, functional vs OOP, etc.), but in the end they should only be relevant if they make you more productive, makes the codebase more readable and so on.
Since these nuances are progressively getting less and less important, why would you care about the process?
There is such a thing as difficult concepts that code can express elegantly and words cannot. Its far beyond the simple preferences you allude to. Recursion is the simplest example i guess. Perhaps maths is even more elegant, but im among many a non mathmetician for whom code is the only way ive experienced it thus far.
Especially when you combine and mix those concepts in expressive, simple, intuitive ways. Im just not sure what else is like it that our minds can percieve.
My impression with how the wind is blowing is that someone is going to come along, if your app has merit, and duplicate it with Astra/Fable. Then they'd back it with significant ad spend, outcompeting yours.
> I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.
I wish you the best, but you have invested a considerable about of time and I'm guessing token budget for something with no revenue and no customers. That in itself is totally fine, but I'm not sure it gives you the authority to calling people clueless for having a different opinion on the maintainability of 200k unreviewed, llm generated code with no users.
I would be chasing altcoin revenue - those worthless things nobody wants. Hold those but encourage their spending too, with an app, is the road to riches in a world where one's IP can be immediately negated by a disgruntled robotic employee jumping ship.
Actually, I don't know if the premise works in the real world, but can't see why "crypto-enabled" isn't adopted at every turn.
Same experience here. I have published 3 apps this year that have just been ideas I've been kicking around for far too long - I never had the time outside of my day job to work on them. Most modern models write code better than I could, maintain it better, and free me up to focus on creativity and trying to add value.
I'm also having the time of my life building products I want to exist. It's like suddenly having the budget to hire a small team and materialize ideas that before would have required many months or years or your time (or taking investment).
And yet, I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the flow.
Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.
I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
> And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.
There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.
And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.
But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.
Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time?
Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.
It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.
99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.
I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations? The gaming industry is, to a huge extent, just an optimisation problem for MBAs running the major publishers. Most gamers don't really value creativity, but easy rewards and familiar tropes in eternal regurgitation. AI is going to be able to pump out a never-ending stream to satisfy that market rather sooner than later.
That obviously still leaves some space for the occasional streak of creativity or very talented game devs, but that is by and large just a tiny sliver of the industry even today.
Yeah those games exist, and most gamers don’t want them. We’ve not been able to convince the industry to stop bothering to make them, so they still do dumb stuff like, making Concorde, then realising nobody wants it.
Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.
> Are you saying Assassin's Creed 87 or Far Cry 32 aren't cheap clones of its own previous incarnations?
If your goal was to prove that people don't care about how derivative games are, I think you picked some pretty bad examples, because Ubisoft is not in a good place right now. And I'd argue that the main reason behind it is precisely that lack of originality.
Hell, even the biggest titans of the "release the same game every year" part of the industry, such as Call of Duty, have been stumbling in recent years due to people inevitably getting bored of playing derivative slop made by people who don't understand what made the originals good, and can only mindlessly copy it over and over.
This is interesting because again I think the camera phone comparison is a category error.
Camera phones are with you when inspiration strikes — when something reaches you as a person in your actual life — and there is an extraordinary battle to get a camera phone to take a really strong picture.
In so many ways they are much more challenging than non-phone cameras. They genuinely have created deep and meaningful new art traditions, provoked and annoyed photographers, shown us new real things we have not seen before, communicated experiences that were until then completely fleeting. Their limitations are obvious and frustrating and provocative, and they place the artist directly within the work. It's acutely social artwork because phones have social permission DSLRs do not.
I am probably an above average photographer but still a terrible phone photographer; people make marvels with them, and there is a community of artists pushing to make better things with them, and learning to use them can make you a better photographer in a deeper way. One of my favourite photos by someone I know is a phone camera image, and I have begun finally to get phone photos I like (and several that have been creatively useful in other ways).
AI image generators just do not have this strong a place in culture, because they derive only from creative work that already exists.
There is one, more narrow place for generative AI that I am slightly more prepared to concede: they have some value in instantaneous internet parody because they communicate using the average of all things already known; parody is inherently derivative.
But I still find myself preferring the things bolted together in a frenzy in photoshop, because someone had to make very rushed, knowing choices to do that. They are always funnier and stronger than AI memes, and as a general rule they have more cultural back story and heritage. (Whereas AI "heritage" is usually a back-and-forth modifying a single AI image)
In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are.
AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.
Exactly. Motivation is rarely a question of either/or (art for art's sake / art for recognition). And for many practitioners, being part of a community of fellow artists who "know the struggle" is also part of the fun.
"Knowing the struggle" is/was a massive part of my enjoyment of programming. I used to love browsing Github just to see what people were building and really appreciating clever ideas or the amount of work required to make something, especially when it's something of limited commercial value. Now I feel like I've lost that. So it's not just that I don't get appreciation for my work but I find it's harder to appreciate other people's work.
There will always be communities of people who want to handcraft everything, who will be available to commiserate about the struggle of their craft. We still have people doing crazy shit like collecting/smelting iron by hand and smithing it into swords (which will literally never be used).
Probably, just like now where there are still small groups of hobbyist programmers who write in little-used languages for obscure old platforms hardly anyone else cares about. But I think it's perfectly fair to mourn the prospect of something that used to be both your passion and livelihood get pushed to some dusty niche corner of the tech landscape.
I don't think that an artist or game developer wanting recognition is the problem here. I think it's the reflection of their intentions on the consumer in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to separate the cash grabs from the craft.
Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?"
And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
The nuance here is that people aren't good at evaluating their own work/progress, and use recognition as a proxy milestone of their own improvement. No matter how good they get, they don't "feel" good until someone else (or many someones) comes and tells them "you're good"
And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Expression isn't about seeking recognition, in the sense of clout or popularity, it's simply a matter of "I want other people to be able to see what I see."
If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?
The thing, which anyone who's ever done any type of art realizes, is that 99% of the time, there isn't really such a thing as a high fidelity image in your mind's eye.
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
>Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing.
Yes, it is. I say this as someone with a BFA. The feeling of a happy accident from a slip of the tablet pen and a "mistake" in the generation is the exact same: "I wasn't expecting that, but it works." Same when it's an unhappy one: "That's wrong, we need to fix that."
I don't care to spend time antagonizing you with speculation on why you have this wrong, but I can say this with certainty: at the high level of determining if something that I am willing into being, through interfacing with a process and tools outside myself, aligns with my vision and taste, there is no substantive difference between gen AI and traditional methods beyond that which exists between any two given traditional methods.
I don't really have anything to say other than the fact that you both don't thing there's a difference between using AI and actually creating something yourself, and that you also don't care for explaining why those are the same thing to you, but you also still feel the need to nevertheless reply anyway... It's fitting, is all.
That take is pretty disingenuous and it makes it hard to take an argument seriously. Who are you to say they did nothing? If someone uses an AI agent to distribute tasks to it like a tech architect does to a team of developers by teaching what to do, and assigning to whom should do it, with examples and instructions, and then reviews the output, offers feedback, and iterates for a few weeks until something is complete, how is that not doing anything? What exactly are you proposing they did for those couple of weeks? Should I imagine that all architects have done nothing their entire life?
Are developers that use a "high level" language like C++ also doing nothing because the machine did all the work of compiling to assembly and machine code for them? Nothing to celebrate and no honor?
At which point does this argument stop being valid? Is the project manager the one that created the product? Is it the CEO that is paying the people to? Is it the bank that has granted the loan to build the company?
In my view, the one that "creates" is the one that puts in the majority of the effort. Under this definition, the average vibe coder isn't creating anything.
Not to derail the conversation, but the concept of money itself is on loose screws. One might argue that compute and energy (dare I say expressed in BTC?) is arguably the (world reserve) currency of the future. The current system discounts the value of the hours of the artist based on where that artist was born, rather than on merit, and is the source of a lot of problems including trade wars, extreme globalization, offshoring, mercantilism and the entire industrial stripping of developed nations by those who purposely keep their currencies low and exploit their own population.
You can say it, and there's no reason you shouldn't dare say it, but getting other people to believe it is a whole other story. Good luck with that. Guess we know what's in your wallet :)
The petrodollar is already value expressed in energy. It's not as pure as BTC, because of geopolitical pressures and since it's sovereign fiat that can be (and has been) printed into nigh-unrecognizability... But BTC is itself warped by derivatives markets, grossly unequal distribution leading to market manipulation, etc.
I'm too young to have known the assembly wizard world, but how is the job market for people of that skill-set and expertise?
My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
If one works in AI it's quite lucrative because shaving off a couple percent is worth the big bucks. But increasingly, there is enough training data for LLMs to do the same thing because the number of unique computations is fairly small.
As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.
But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?
I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?
Getting closer to the hardware exponentially magnifies failure modes that LLMs cannot reason about. Being closer to the hardware also moves you to build and compiler machinery that LLMs lack in their training set. Being closer to the hardware also moves you closer to fields that require deep domain knowledge external to computer science, eg. electrical engineer via embedded systems (telecom and SDR), mechanical engineering and control systems via robotics, computer engineering via AAA game engine development (like OP) or silicon bringup, or rigid documentative fields like medical devices or aerospace.
You're facing strict requirements for fundamentals in 3 independent axis. If there's recommendation to anyone looking to "write code" today, its to specialize in a field where software (or firmware) is applied to hard engineering domain. This has been common advice since 2010 [1], long before LLMs:
"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."
I work on firmware and deep embedded systems. Trust me when I say LLMs are getting just as capable in this domain. Eg LLMs can do RF filter design. Tell the LLM your target metrics and it will give very reasonable design constraints, especially when you come back with simulation results and relevant feedback.
"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."
People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.
There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".
But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.
This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it.
Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.
Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.
I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.
Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....
LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
I really don't get the hate.
Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.
I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes
Each step removed one more piece of friction.
I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.
All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?
I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers...
The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.
With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...
That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.
I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.
I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.
Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.
I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.
Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.
But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.
> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
> I really don't get the hate
I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"
It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"
I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.
> I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"
Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this.
What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.
By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades.
> You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.
Yes obviously. But consider:
In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them
Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck
Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet
Why would you stop learning new things?
I lead a team of developers as part of my current role, reviewing and approving what they work on (in addition to doing development and architecture design as well) and from my experience, the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane. One person can build more than an entire team in some cases, while maintaining quality and needing little to no feedback, yet others using the same AI tools struggle to get anything done. How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?
> How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?
It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building
My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future
Maybe to cheer you up: we're doing a few tests at our org, and we found that product-minded engineers still have a tremendous leg-up compared to other people when it comes to actually shipping products. It's not even a race.
It's not just quality of code, it's also speed of execution, maintainability. Why? Because we're not building 200 database tables + 200 endpoints when 1 table + enum suffices. Yes that happened. There was also one feature that I can't comment much on because it would doxx but: a PR from non-dev took months, was 100k LOC and rejected by product and engineering as low-quality. The same feature built by my team was 900 LOC, feature complete, shipped.
Nothing beats the combination of domain expertise and expertise in the medium.
I'm always learning new things. The things I learn jsut happen to no longer align with what current speculative crazy investors want.
>the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane.
and what if I do not need agentic development for my creations? my domain is not one where "building more" is the bottleneck. I don't need to ship faster, I nee to ship more deliberately
I don't understand this comment. I also slogged through blogs, docs, forums and websites and throughout it all I found it enriching and enjoyable, despite some frustrations along the way. Even if the end result is much faster to get to, I can sit back and think to myself that I learnt a lot and had enjoyable interactions.
Some may think their pursuit of mastery is now wasted, but I find that intriguing especially in a field where mastery cannot really be obtained due to technological progress. I suppose I just don't let others reduce my own experience and what I value?
> I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.
It's possible that wishing instant death on people may make you unpopular. But also, maybe you're a poet or artist now. No one makes money of the years of toil it takes to become an expert at that craft, either. If the craft is important, then the money is secondary, and no one will ever stop you from writing code the way you love to, they just won't pay you to do it that way.
>If the craft is important, then the money is secondary
the money is secondary. Sadly, rent is primary.
Give me enough to retire and I'll happily spend the rest of my days on my craft. Until then, the options are combining your craft, minmaxing your career to minimize work (too late for me), or to do something else that pays the bills for the next 30 years. And the cost to retrain isn't cheap either.
That's most people. You have a day job that pays the bills, and you have your passion and art that fulfills you. You had the great temporary luck to have both for a bit, but it's not coming back. I don't feel sorry for us, and it's not helpful to carry so much animosity.
If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others.
A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.
I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected.
The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
>The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.
Now take away the chore of 'focusing on riding'. Genetically or chemically calm the horse so it does not get flustered or moody. Metabolically tweak the horse so it does not get tired or thirsty. Robotically till and smooth the ground so there is nothing to trip over. Notify everyone in the vicinity where the horse is going, so there are no obstacles to avoid. When you can't crash or fall off if you try, when it doesn't matter if you're focusing or not. Maybe dynamically adjust that so you know the AI overlord is pampering you to keep the difficulty 'just right' and this is not a real challenge it's elaborate wireheading.
Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.
And if they liked optimizing transport, but now the box is self-driving and the logistics are planned by machine? The farm is automated and humans get in the way. The vet is a robot. Also any other suggestion you have is automated - AI is now better at everything. Nobody needs or wants anything the human can do. AI is a more fun friend, a better singer, a more engaging teacher or entertainer, a better movie creator, a better cook, etc. All that's left is Postel's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", from cradle to grave nothing the human does matters or can matter. Then what?
Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!
The difference is that person who loved tending to horses had no delusions they were mot out of a job and their horse tending would just be a hobby with few exceptions. They didn’t complain trucks sucked and couldn’t do the job of hauling people and goods better than horses. They saw the progress and had to come to terms what it.
That’s a far cry from how many on HN are dealing with LLMs
This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs?
LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.
I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done.
Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.
I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.
>So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.
like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.
Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before.
Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.
A million lines of LLM slop?
As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.
IF you were already doing it. But LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing as well. In the same way Excel macros enabled some people to run whole businesses on a spreadsheet without hiring a "real" programmer, LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer. And yeah, some of those excel macros were a nightmare, one of the many jobs I've taken over the years was a contract job converting the business logic that used to be in excel macros and later vba script to a "real" language and application. But the business that hired me only had the sort of money they needed to hire me because they had a successful business running off that horrible spaghetti mess. I wonder what businesses will be hiring "real" programmers when their founders hit the wall of what they can accomplish on their own with AI.
So what? Just because you had one way to do something before, that means having a different way of doing it is useless? We have the C language, and it’s been letting people write applications for decades. Does that mean there’s no value in other programming languages?
I've seen a few people already descending into pure AI madness, not able (wanting?) to do their work anymore, and just repeating everything the AI says, going to it for every single decision on the job.
A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place.
It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.
That is to say - I don't really love programming. I do it out of necessity. Before product managers got looked at as 'too much headcount in an org', I kind of think I would have liked that.
I like the outcomes. I like tools that I like to use. I like writing tools and software and systems that work for me.
I also like the outcomes for OTHER people. In my line of work, things working is really important - it costs money when things are not working - so I like building those systems that work but also have good tools to inspect when things go amiss or need to be changed.
I am like an engineer (I am not) who learned how to use R or Matlab - for the outcome not for the love of the game.
Another example may be cars. I am a competent mechanic. I have been employed as a mechanic. The reason I like cars is to drive them. At the end of the day every bolt that is stuck and every radiator I have to drop is excruciating and painful and I hate it, but the look on the customers face when they can get back in their car is priceless.
> "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."
Other people think that books are a communication tool that you use in order to communicate something, and that something is the thing that is actually important. They may suffer from writing a book, and be embarrassed that they've written a book.
Enjoying the process is fine. It's a hobby, however, not a form of nobility, and enjoying it doesn't mean you're not terrible at it. If you think the book is the goal, you're lying to yourself. There are plenty of books, they're easy to get. If your goal is the reward that you receive from other people for the books itself i.e. if your goal is to create a valuable commodity, that's fine, too.
But a goal in writing books could be to convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication.
I always find it harrowing that having the goal when programming be to create a system that could enable people to accomplish some function, or could accomplish some function for people autonomously seems to be the farthest from people's mind. But it's literally the pretext. You have to be trying to do that or lying about trying to do that to even program at all. Making it a battle between whether the program that you're writing is a product/resume item or a fidget spinner abstracts away reality for a contest between ruthless capitalism and middle-class self-actualization. Greed and narcissism.
If you actually want to accomplish something in the world (other than burnishing your self-image), AI is just a tool, not a threat to your identity.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Expect burnout. That did come my way.
Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks.
Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?
It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.
I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...
Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough.
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.
> I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Exactly!
And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.
Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.
>It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens.
For me the more interesting and productive thinking happens when I'm trying to understand what I want the code to do, not when I'm thinking about the implementation details.
Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?
I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd.
Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least.
Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?
This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"?
it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is.
That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?
*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
I've observed this dichotomy myself. Some people will make things because they enjoy the experience of making. Others make things because they enjoy achieving an outcome- happy client, open source community, a new useful tool for themselves, whatever the case may be.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
Sorry if it came off as combative. The points I made are not mutually exclusive but they are in some cases. There is a difference between someone that chose computer science because Silicon Valley was the next Wallstreet, or someone who has been tinkering out of sheer curiosity since elementary school.
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.
However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.
I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.
In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics.
So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
I think it captures it perfectly, and the question is what are tomatoes here. Is it being challenged intellectually and proud of solving a puzzle, or is it getting praised, valued or paid?
People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of building out the engine, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce those or make them go away.
I don’t see the analogy? AI is not preventing the craftsman programmer from coding. Your compiler hasn’t stopped “yielding fruit”, so to speak.
The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?
Modify the analogy: nobody cares about the mother’s tomatoes and everyone around her says they’re indistinguishable from the cheap supermarket variety. Even if it’s not true
I haven't seen people say it's indistinguishable quality, but that it doesn't matter. Quite similar to mass-produced foods in the supermarket, actually. We all know they're not as good as a small batch made by hand by someone, but they still get the job done.
The market for small batch locally made produce is huge. Entire grocery stores dedicated to local organic offerings is the standard in every upper middle class neighborhood on the entire west coast.
The reason is obvious: a salad made with crappy tomatoes is a crappy salad.
We aren’t at this point in software yet because most consumers of software have no taste
I agree. If grandma grows her own tomatoes she can only try four tomato-related recipes. If she goes to the grocery store she can try thirty.
The AI is enabling a lot more experimentation with software. The AI supplies the tomatoes (infrastructure / grunt work), grandma tries her recipes (the software / business idea).
Sure of course there will be some internal reason or some non-zero value behind doing any craft. But the analogy to AI & software engineering careers is that there are corporate for-profit tomato farms today. They have pushed out plenty of small farm businesses. Your mom enjoys tomato growing in spite of the availability of cheap high quality tomatoes. Your comment seems to me to agree with and support the GP comment entirely; you mom found value in doing the work despite there being no financial incentive.
Many people have argued over the years that it would be great when we have an economy that takes care of all the labor and everyone in society is free to choose to spend all of their time on things that have no financial incentive.
> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.
Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.
If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling.
If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
Welcome to the world everyone else has to muddle through.
The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."
Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.
Well, the key is understanding that the old paradigm wasn't just rare and lucky; there's a good chance that it was unfair, and actively robbing someone else of dignity.
What's happening to you now may also feel unfair, but it's up to you if you're just going to be pissed on your own behalf, or if, now that you recognize that everyone else is going through what you've been newly-introduced to, you're going to go, "Hey, no one should have to live like this! Fix this crap for everyone."
This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.
The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.
I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.
I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.
The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable.
In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.
The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity.
It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.
The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.
This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.
What a great comment, I wanted to quote my favorite parts but would just have to quote the whole thing. The people whose identity are tied to gatekeepers by programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.
For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they felt met their arbitrary bar of "good developer" with trivia or a command of arcane details. It makes the work harder and it discourages talented people who are new to the field, like junior devs.
Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.
In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.
Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.
> people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity
I came across too many of those people in my career and I can't say I'm sad that LLM are taking this away from them.
The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.
NGL, its a little annoying and disheartening that many can now partially build with an LLM tool what I spent so many years learning. It does not cover all cases, but there is an element of this.
> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.
30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take.
My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions.
> The people who are upset by this change...
Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.
It's interesting to hear that lawyers are coming to you with those questions, because my read was that there was almost universal contempt for AI within law (save for the few "dumb" enough to use it and get caught).
The language of the law attempts to be consistent, legal English isnt entirely the same as ours, it remains somewhat inured to modernization. It is, if nothing a domain specific way of writing. (There is a great bit by Lenny Bruce on this very topic)
If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed.
Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.
I don't think that's quite it. Particularly in America's common law system, written laws are not "the law", in terms of what actually happens in enforcement, or in judgment when something ends up before a court. You have to deal with unwritten or disparately-documented standards, norms, case law, etc. LLMs don't know and can't account for curveballs that appear in practice; they'll correctly tell you what the law actually says, and work off that documentation, and blow your case, because that law isn't "the law" in its practical totality.
The lawyers with contempt for AI aren't necessarily the best "critical readers and reviewers of documents"; a good number just appreciate the substantial moat the current system keeps for them, and are contemptuous of 1) attempts to cross that moat without paying a toll, however likely that attempt is to fail, and 2) the way such failures highlight that our legal system doesn't work the way most people seem to think it does, because that increases the chances that the public will become dissatisfied and push for change.
I guess if it doesn't cross that moat, there cool with it?
I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.
What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)
Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.
So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.
But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.
In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.
I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.
Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it.
The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.
Sounds like a failure of imagination to me (I hope you're right). It doesn't have to be the CTO, it can be anyone who will sit there for the cheapest cost to read output while assuming the risk of it all working until they retire. Sounds glorious
Even if all the changes are “good” not shoddy, awareness of changes will still require layers of cognitive filtering. One human PM clerk will not be able to oversee all of the products, one developer will not be able to oversee all changes in all codebases.
> just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas
Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.
You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.
Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.
I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.
I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.
I agree with you, it's the same experience I've had. But I've seen completely nontechnical people build some sites and become convinced themselves, and if those people control the purse then it doesn't matter as much what devs think the reality of agentic dev is. (Until they get burned enough times).
> people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.
I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.
What if engineers push out all non-engineer CXOs precisely because of what you are saying. Hypothetically, if you replace all employees with engineers (so all the non-engineering roles) and allow them to optimize processes using LLMs, isn’t this like lean/six sigma on crack?
Yep, that could happen as well. I suspect some engineers would be surprised how much work, time and effort it takes to build the relationships to market and sell to (along with all the other roles).
I hope that everyone agrees to collectively recognise we all need to still do some things together and the knowledge in our heads is still much more important.
I'm not seeing the same kind of resentment towards non-technologists as you are claiming. Overall in my life I feel like I haven't seen as much gatekeeping as people claim there is in tech.
> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!
Yea this whole “your job is to create value” argument is always really shaky. Add “with computers and stuff” to the end and it becomes more plausible. Nobody gets a degree is “providing value”.
Nobody is hired for a job if the person hiring thinks that the employee will murder them. So I guess that makes the most salient job description "refraining from murdering your boss"?
Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment
I don't see it as "do a job because adding value" or "do a job because enjoying the activity".
I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.
Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.
Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.
But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).
Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.
If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.
Huh, I like using my mind. The thing I despise about AI in software engineering is that it is much more difficult to engage my mind consistently and fully.
I coded for fun before I ever coded for money. However, at this point I've been a professional software engineer for enough years that the interest in software that I once had has been almost entirely drained out of me. I think that if I found a different way to make money, I could be perfectly happy going the rest of my life without ever looking at another piece of code.
There are offshore oil mining rig that needs workers. They pay big bucks too. You get some months off. The physical movement is better than cleaning the bathroom.
Interesting idea. Only problems for me are: it sounds dangerous and physically straining for someone like me who hasn't done manual labor in many years and has no experience relevant to oil rigs. And also, there are almost no women. I guess oil rig workers probably pack in their women time hardcore when they're on their months off.
I lived in the same building with a bloke who did dangerous construction type work in the Pacific NW. Sawing branches on high cliffs, that sort of thing. He'd make a grip on a job, cone back home and spend it all on booze, weed, and women, go out and do it all again. I thought of him as my life's version of Lawrence from Office Space.
I believe my job as a programmer is to produce value, but your retort is very strong. Cleaning bathrooms would not be fullfilling for me.
Ultimately, I like the creation part of programming: creating something that doesn't exist that is of value to at least one person (usually me). In general, though, I get more satisfaction when more people get value out of my creations.
Through that lens, AI does change things: a whole set of things that I can create no longer have value to people (at least the value is lower, because AI can do it better than whatever product I create). But at the same time, I can now create more sophisticated and more powerful things with the help of AI.
On the whole, I'm more satisfied with AI than without.
I approach the thing differntly. My goal is not to add value (value means money and I don't care). I'm in for "creativity" though. I like to create programs. I'm not particularily fond of programming though. So what I have always done is to work on never-done-before stuff. Oh, I don't mean rocket science nor anything spectacular, but I like to be where defining the problem or understanding the problem is as much or more important as the skill needed to solve it.
For example, I'm working on an emulator in a field where emulators do exist since long. So I set myself to improve these emulators by emulating tricky corner cases. These corner cases do not exist in AI's memory because nobody has ever coded them. So although I use quite a lot of AI to investigate the corner cases, the actual problem solving is entirely mine. So I stay happy :-)
In my daytime job, a big part of what I do already exists in some form or another (fluid dynamics). But my job is more of understanding what I do so that I can convince someone else that my programs are robust and reliable. So again, I'm programming a lot with AI, but the important stuff, it's my skill to understand it, not AI.
There has to be a changing economic undertone to it as well. For a lot of years, the craft that many people enjoyed also happened to pay well and had significant barriers to entry. It's easy to like the craft when it pays you well.
The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself.
* I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.
Yes. And in retirement, I still code because I like the process of creating (hopefully cool) things. Even without remuneration. Ideally things that other people will use and benefit from in some way.
> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.
My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.
I agree that the employee's purpose is to bring value. The question is, now that AI can generate code that's good enough to get by, is there enough value that a software developer brings to justify their continued employment. IMO, the answer for most software developers is no¹, even the ones eagerly embracing AI, so the smugness of AI adopters is likely unwarranted.
The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its proponents imagine. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.
I was already pretty clear that the job of producing value was separate from the part of the job that I enjoyed. What makes me sad is the part that I enjoyed evaporating entirely.
Why do so many people miss that it lets software engineers build more bigger better things? It's not just people who think the job is to create value. It's anyone who cares more about creation itself than the process of the creation
>The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
Think of it another way:
You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible.
Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.
The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.
Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?
I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.
At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”
> You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.
I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.
We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.
Yet you can look for accountability in all the data breach, Windows ME, GIMP, or unreliable bluetooth. I would take bricklayers that can reason and say "yeah, we need to delay because the nearest brick factory is currently in low supply", instead of a robot that will yeet bricks that no one can understand why. I value the human.
You can look for accountability. You probably won’t find it. But I’m also not saying there isn’t value in humans.
I am saying that we all have worked on projects where “artisanal software development” bore as much resemblance to our process as an abstract art painting does to reality. We’ve all worked with plenty of coworkers (and maybe have even been that coworker ourselves) who just punches the clock. We’ve all worked with developers who have had 1 year of experience for 30 years in a row. Everyone knows the average piece of software being produced is a buggy mess and it’s amazing it all works at all. Hell our industry coined the phrase “worse is better” and “move fast and break things”. To turn around now and pretend that we’re actually all master craftsmen, regularly constructing artifices of pure beauty and logic that will stand the tests of time is a bit silly.
Sure I would take a real human over a YOLO coded piece of software any day. But I’d also take a real application over an excel macro monstrosity any day too. That doesn’t mean excel macros don’t have their place or that they aren’t used to produce things of real value.
A lot of people create AI art and AI music and attempt to make it as if they are the one making it, they are the one that has talent.
But still souless, still sucks. Its just excuse of laziness. Pick up a brush, pick up an instrument and stop jerking around all day.
Talentless people are talentless because lack of effort, not because of lack of talent.
In front of those people, I will always bask in my sheer superiority because I make real music and real art. People compliment my musical skills and people don't compliment those who create song with AI.
We as a society need to be able to identify which one is AI generated and which one is not, and let the free market takes care of itself. Those who want AI generated things can have it, those that don't want can avoid it.
> The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians?
In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users.
I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code.
I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book".
I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily.
And how many vibe-coded apps am I using?
Zero.
Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?
No, I'm annoyed that they submit their sloppy code to me as some value and then I have to deal with it. Happened in our org.
You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".
The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse.
Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it.
PS: For the those seeking comfort in literature, we get some discussion on accomplishment in the work of Jane Austen, as in a worthy and virtuous entertainment for young gentlewomen, accomplishment for display, "true" accomplishment, as an ability to entertain oneself under conditions of intellectual austerity, means of intellectual independence, etc. Not to the least in "Pride and Prejudice", where accomplishment is discussed as a sibling and foil to Darcy's male conception of inner moral virtue, which, in fact, amounts to an socio-economic Regency scandal, as he entirely ignores his first-born duties in good-natured impulsiveness, bad decision making and short-sighted expenses, which an entire middle class depends on. (Is there a similar side to accomplishment?)
Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.
One thing to note is that as soon as Suno figured out hiphop artists were making $150,000 a year spewing AI songs onto Spotify, they imposed a 60 song per month download limit to stop that.
It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.
Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.
A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.
That's a definite maybe. You can bet there's a general movement afoot to replace teachers with AI because it's cheaper and always available, etc. Also, measuring the human advantage is difficult.
I would refute that since it's obvious (using a strong word here), that digital anything in the classroom is really bad[0] and consistently led to lower PISA scores. Perhaps there will be some initial changes in the wrong direction with more digitalization but eventually common sense is going to prevail. And concerned mom groups are incredibly powerful these days. Parents are going to freak out the moment a recording AI (or an androgenous teaching robot) is going to be introduced in the classroom.
This doesn’t really seem obvious to me at all. It seems to me that skills overall are being devalued, and so then will be teachers (even more than they already are). Why do you think this?
What I do for work, isn't the same as what I do for fun.
I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.
At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.
So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.
There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.
So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.
I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out.
On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft.
> I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out.
Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.
If programming was used to temporarily increase one's self esteem from it then it's not a problem with the IAs, but a psychological problem.
The problem is valuing a human being because of what they produce and not recognizing intrinsic value.
The same situation could have happened in a different profession when automation replaced it, it's not about IA.
Of course most creators actually enjoy craft, do enjoy compliments and find them motivating ... and need money and want money.
There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.
We all have intrinsic value being threatened by these systems and technologists (particularly systems/software engineers and programmers) have a responsibility to build systems to help humans meet their everyday needs without or with minimal oppression.
Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies.
Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.
> I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch
I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.
> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.
That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and synthesise a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.
Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of necessary value that pays bills.
I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI.
Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems.
Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective.
But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.
> I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG.
I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.
> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.
Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.
I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)
> The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.
Certainly, it's easier to produce solutions now, but I wouldn't underestimate the knowledge you have, and say that others who are capable of using AI to produce the same output have the same understanding that you do.
Personally, I find that I am able to produce excellent outcomes with AI with respect to the topics that I have the most expertise in, and passingly acceptable outcomes in things that I know very little about.
The idea has been to get the nerds out of computing since 1971.
Milt Bryce and his son Tim were pretty much the inventors of modern information-systems management. And they were open in their hatred of and contempt for programmers and how they worked. Their methodology, PRIDE, was centered around giving the programmers as little to do and as little autonomy and leverage over the organization as possible, because information systems is a business function and not a technical one. The key decisions would be made by systems analysts and designers, not programmers. Without AI, the part that programmers contributed in a PRIDE project was about 15%; with AI, it asymptotically approaches zero. I've been studying PRIDE a lot over the past few years, because with Tim Bryce's death it's at risk of being forgotten; and because now with AI in the mix, it helps me understand what's actually going on.
This is what management has wanted all along. Programmers are expensive, tetchy, and they resist standardization and discipline, preferring instead to employ their own little bespoke methods and tool choices. (Hello, vim vs. emacs!) Failure to keep them in tight rein can spell doom for the company, as they can use their technical skills to their advantage, potentially holding the whole business hostage. You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does (especially in traditional businesses: banking, insurance, manufacturing, etc.). Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.
>The only way out for us is to follow Rogue's mom's advice: "Have you tried not being a nerd?"
Tried and failed for decades, yes. Turns out caring for your craft makes you a nerd. Turn out what people want is to stay in their lane and simply want "the fries in the bag", with no curiosity on what's in the fries or bag as long as it tastes good.
I refuse to stop caring in this otherwise uncaring world. Now what?
>You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does
It is true. What this ultiamtely breaks down to is simple: Nerds are thinkers, and thinkers question. The context here is in tech and automation, but that's a trend that extends to a lot of systems and societies. Those in power hate the thinkers, they hate the questions. They will suppress it for as long as possible.
Use this lens in other kinds of communities and you see the pattern pops up everytime. To "stop being a nerd" in this context is akin to saying "stop questioning the system and exploit it like the rest of us".
Yet as a programmer myself, I've been in situations where I'm artificially separated from the customer against my will.
I want to build something useful for them but if they let me be too close to the customer, I'll be making important decisions that are supposed to be someone else's job.
> You may bristle and think the above is not true...
Hehe, my undergrad was comp sci, I turned down an Oxbridge postgraduate in Advanced Computing Science to do an interdisiplinary PhD, technically in the social sciences department, because I genuinely do understand and agree with you on a few levels. At the end of the day, people are the ones who need to be kept happy. The flip side of 1000's of isolated hours of screentime is a lack of practice at making people feel comfortable in real life. But, the same is true for basically any craftsman of any craft, just swap screen with lathe or instrument or other tool of choice.
I think there's a biological element to being a nerd, so "Have you tried not being a nerd?" is like asking someone with ginger hair "have you tried not being ginger?" Sure, they can try/dye, but the roots will keep growing through, fighting against something that's a massive asset in the right environment.
Regarding PRIDE, it sounds like that came from a time where people were genuinely scared/amazed/confused by computers. When you consider that, minimising the role of people who are going to make it all about tech and computers makes sense. Maybe the tide is changing over the past 2 - 5 years against tech, but the entire 2000s up until recently were defined IMO by the pervasiveness and excitement and accessibility of tech by literally everyone on the planet. In that world, where customers pay good money for magic tech they don't understand, a company of nerds brings safety and reassurance (and high salaries and decision impact for said nerds).
I worry nerds and the products of nerds at the top like Zuckerberg, Altman and Musk are causing the public attitude to shift back to what they were like pre-2000s, where tech is dangerous and powerful and scary and normal humans need to be kept away from it, and advocates of tech should be viewed sceptically.
> Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.
This is essentially my central point/worry. I hope there's more nuance to it though, mainly because 1 younger relative in particular is in his early teens, and he's clearly a naive/friendly/enthusiastic/hyper-fixating/lots of nerdy screentime type. Until a few years ago, I assumed he'd have the life a lot of us have had. Now though, I wonder what life will be afforded to nerdy, weird people born into a world where they're seen as significantly less necessary.
Regarding programming, I would say my answer would be yes to all of your questions. I think all of those feelings and pleasures can exist simultaneously.
Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined.
I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.
Honestly, enjoying the craft hasn’t resulted in a career related to it. My real job and chores take up most of my capacity, leaving little to enjoy the craft. But now with AI, I can play with crafting as if it was a video game. The end results, which nowhere near is satisfying, is better than nothing. Coding with AI feels gamified and simulated, but still somehow creates useful outcomes.
I'm building an app to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs. I'm using AI to do it because I honestly dont care how it's made, I'm the only user right now. I just want it to work.
Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff.
Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out.
Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to.
I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs.
The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.
not that it was necessarily the intent, but you laid on the "PS: you have intrinsic value" with the exact same tone and cadence as someone trying to work in a "you are loved/valued" while trying to talk someone off the tenth-floor railing. jesus, it's really bleak out there, huh.
Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise.
Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.
Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.
I spend so much more time with generative IA thinking and iterating over design details (or even overall design) than before, when part was consumed by writing the implementation.
Bots are often terrible and/or don’t have all your requirements available on this subject, or even your are discovering them along the way and you don’t all the time want the recommendation of the machine.
From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.
The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too.
It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!
On the (well written!) post's particulars:
I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).
But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.
Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.
Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.
*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
I've only found one answer to the "creative work" struggle now, after code writing as an art seems to have died.
Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.
What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does the things you wrote! And there is a precise, predictable relationship between the code and what it does, which you can fully understand and reason about!
Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world.
2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.
I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.
So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
With AI story telling, lot of people can tell their stories. Democratization of story telling. Earlier we just used words, now people can make others imagine the words with AI art. Honestly I want the best story to win. Anybody can be a storyteller.
I like the craft but I enjoy making products more. Working for 5 years on some tool chain/libraries has been great in terms of satisfaction but it would have been even more rewarding to build successful products with all that.
And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” .
Yes, AI shines as a hybrid tool for hyper-generalists or multi-domain experts that can leverage their deep knowledge across various fields but lack the raw hours to execute everything themselves. Strong developers who never knew how to manage a team but should have been product owners based on their broad knowledge and vision of the product and industry.
I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.
I can create the programming part of the game. I have done a couple. Where it stops working for me is at the visual assets. And especially sewing the code to the art.
Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.
It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
My friends and I have been asking this exact question lately. I’m sure people are still working on interesting things that AREN’T AI. I too would love a HN-minus-AI.
AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.
These articles are frustrating on HN because it's quite common for programmers to tinker on small projects in solitude, so when artists complain about ai you get all these "just make stuff for your own sake, or where you in it for the fame?" reactions.
I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software.
I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.
My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??
Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.
Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).
I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.
I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.
So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.
There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.
I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
I agree if you one-shot something, but that hasn't been my experience at all (unless the initial prompt is so detailed that creating it took considerable time).
For me it's more like being a chef but having a cook to cut up things and start cooking them, but you decide when it's done, what spices to put, and how to serve it - arguably the most fun and creative part.
That is almost to say that the only part of the project that matters is the code. But the code is only a tiny part. I take joy in describing the thing and bringing that vision to life.
"That is almost to say that the only part of the meal that matters is the cooking. But the cooking is only a tiny part. I take joy in describing the food I want and bringing that vision to life."
What are you trying to say?
There are a ton of people who care more about being able to make something they're imagining real than engaging in the process necessary to make it happen. This applies to food just as well as it does to software
It's a bad analogy, because unless you're cooking a recipe, cooking is about all the small decisions you're making during the process which could apply both to coding or the design aspect of building software with an LLM.
Except most vibe coders proudly admit that they don't even look at the code anymore. Can you really make those small decisions during the cooking process if you're not touching or even looking at the food at any point?
Th distinction that can be drawn is between the code, and the user experience of the software. You may argue that the two are inextricably linked, but I don’t think that can be treated as an absolute principle.
I mostly agree with this sentiment, and have a hard time describing anything LLM generated as "mine". However, would you say that the designers at Apple, or Steve Jobs for example didn't "bring the Macintosh to life" because they didn't work on any of the engineering or code? It's a hard line to draw.
Leading a collaborative effort can obviously be described as bringing the project to life. People want to feel like they are collaborating with LLMs and are still the visionary in the process. As the performance of these systems improves that becomes less and less the case.
E.g. if Steve Jobs had simply handed a slip of paper to a team that said "make a new kind of computer", then no, he would not have brought the Macintosh to life.
No, its a very easy line to draw. Rallying and bringing together humans is COMPLETELY different than having an LLM do something. They are not comparable.
I completely disagree. The mindset that leaves you trapped is focusing on the destination and not the journey. I will never paint like Michaelangelo but it feels good to apply myself to the pursuit of painting, even if the resulting paintings aren't good.
No, it's like ordering a meal from door dash and saying "I got food." Using a tool does not mean you didn't do the thing you used the tool to do.
You're conflating "I made X" with "I personally did every part of X with no help," which is really not something to brag about as much as it is something that might fulfill your own personal sense of value.
I don't agree. That would imply they asked for a piece of software and the LLM one-shotted it, but that's absolutely not what's happening in the vast majority of cases. If two people vibe code the same tool from the same high level desciption the results are going to be quite different.
For the last couple of years, I've been crafting and shipping a free app that Serves a particular narrow demographic. It works extremely well, but is a native iOS app (I don't write Android). When I first developed it, I worked with a professional graphic designer, and the app has a unique UX. In fact, with the latest release, I had to "walk back" a bit of the stuff the designer did, as I believe it interfered with usability.
Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.
At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much).
Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.
I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.
I'm actually looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them. With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
Have you considered setting up an agent environment like codex and having it work making on Android version for you? I know you said it's a very complex app and that probably makes it seem like it wouldn't be able to, but LLMs are really good when they have a very clearly defined end state to work toward, like an existing iOS app with code, screenshots etc.
I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.
The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
Since I am currently using AI to make a game engine, I feel like I am sort of qualified to say something on the topic, and I don’t think it’s really true that AI’s can just roll one out without a lot of poking. They constantly go off on the wrong track and I have no faith that they’d get anywhere sensible without a human steering the whole thing (for now anyway).
But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.
That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.
Yep. AI can probably make your marketing website or REST service on autopilot. Or even small minigame experiences.
But go outside the bounds of median programming and AI becomes increasingly scatterbrained. It requires a lot of guidance to successfully build high performance, novel software. I still find it more productive though - I can work on three tasks simultaneously with AI, and only one if I’m manually working on a single algorithm. It’s very much like running a team of well-read junior developers.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] threadSo, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.
Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.
Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list.
Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few centuries, and it'll keep happening.
Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.
Then there was a time when the "workforce" was mostly actual slaves.
There was a time when entire cities all died of sickness, 100% mortality.
Yes, more change has happened. And more is coming. Just how it is. Ride the wave.
Traditionally, 95%+ of the population were farmers.
The disruption we've already had is many, many times larger than anything forecast today.
Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.
What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.
I stopped reviewing the code at all.
People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.
My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.
I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.
It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.
This means you designed the system well and made sure the agent implemented it correctly. Even at Big Company the big shot architects don't review every line of code, and nobody seemed to mind that
Sure, I've given a lot of inputs over the time, probably I've steered it to solutions that work.
Maybe it was also helpful that I set up a skill to use a different model to review the code for correctness, technical debt, and whether the location where the code is added is appropriate or warrants a new file or abstraction. I set this up long before subagents were widely used.
May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
Since these nuances are progressively getting less and less important, why would you care about the process?
Especially when you combine and mix those concepts in expressive, simple, intuitive ways. Im just not sure what else is like it that our minds can percieve.
I wish you the best, but you have invested a considerable about of time and I'm guessing token budget for something with no revenue and no customers. That in itself is totally fine, but I'm not sure it gives you the authority to calling people clueless for having a different opinion on the maintainability of 200k unreviewed, llm generated code with no users.
Actually, I don't know if the premise works in the real world, but can't see why "crypto-enabled" isn't adopted at every turn.
And yet, I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the flow.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
This was never true, otherwise "stealth startups" wouldn't have been a thing.
But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.
I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.
This reminds me of a different theme in the programming world.
There was always a feeling that development spends time on meetings long past the point when the app could have been finished. And I remember a comment here on HN (which I can't find now) saying how, if you're on a team at IBM working to develop something for a client, you will feel that you could just go ahead and finish whatever functionality you're supposed to be developing.
And if you sneak in after hours and do that, you'll be met with the message that you aren't being helpful, that you've got to wait for the business to determine that that functionality really is what the client wants, that the app needs to be described a certain way to get signoff from other decision makers, etc. Anything annoying that you can imagine.
But the overall takeaway that I saw was that developers tend to be frustrated that business processes are slower than the act of producing the software, and they feel held back by that.
Given that background, it's not clear why generating more code per unit time is valuable at all. That's something developers wanted to do all along, and they were told they shouldn't. More code per developer would make sense, but why more code per time?
Generative AI is really awful at building games that are fun to play.
It is a masterclass at reproducing Minecraft clones and shiny HDRP demo scenes in one shot. But, unless you are a total novice at game dev, you should be able to see through these cheap tricks for what they are.
99% of the game dev AI doomer posts seem to spiral out of vacuous demos posted to social media. None of this AI generated slop is actually playable or marketable.
I just got done talking to chatgpt about progression sequence for a horror game and it is beyond hopeless. It would absolutely ace any mono behavior scripting, but it's totally ass at directing anything that would make it to the front page of Steam.
That obviously still leaves some space for the occasional streak of creativity or very talented game devs, but that is by and large just a tiny sliver of the industry even today.
Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.
If your goal was to prove that people don't care about how derivative games are, I think you picked some pretty bad examples, because Ubisoft is not in a good place right now. And I'd argue that the main reason behind it is precisely that lack of originality.
Hell, even the biggest titans of the "release the same game every year" part of the industry, such as Call of Duty, have been stumbling in recent years due to people inevitably getting bored of playing derivative slop made by people who don't understand what made the originals good, and can only mindlessly copy it over and over.
It's not the AI that is bad, it's the person who's not putting a lot of work in that's bad.
It's just camera phones.
Camera phones are with you when inspiration strikes — when something reaches you as a person in your actual life — and there is an extraordinary battle to get a camera phone to take a really strong picture.
In so many ways they are much more challenging than non-phone cameras. They genuinely have created deep and meaningful new art traditions, provoked and annoyed photographers, shown us new real things we have not seen before, communicated experiences that were until then completely fleeting. Their limitations are obvious and frustrating and provocative, and they place the artist directly within the work. It's acutely social artwork because phones have social permission DSLRs do not.
I am probably an above average photographer but still a terrible phone photographer; people make marvels with them, and there is a community of artists pushing to make better things with them, and learning to use them can make you a better photographer in a deeper way. One of my favourite photos by someone I know is a phone camera image, and I have begun finally to get phone photos I like (and several that have been creatively useful in other ways).
AI image generators just do not have this strong a place in culture, because they derive only from creative work that already exists.
There is one, more narrow place for generative AI that I am slightly more prepared to concede: they have some value in instantaneous internet parody because they communicate using the average of all things already known; parody is inherently derivative.
But I still find myself preferring the things bolted together in a frenzy in photoshop, because someone had to make very rushed, knowing choices to do that. They are always funnier and stronger than AI memes, and as a general rule they have more cultural back story and heritage. (Whereas AI "heritage" is usually a back-and-forth modifying a single AI image)
AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.
And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't?
Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower.
How is that comparable to the arts?
If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?
Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists
I don't care about any of that. I just want people to be able to see what's in my mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible.
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
Yes, it is. I say this as someone with a BFA. The feeling of a happy accident from a slip of the tablet pen and a "mistake" in the generation is the exact same: "I wasn't expecting that, but it works." Same when it's an unhappy one: "That's wrong, we need to fix that."
I don't care to spend time antagonizing you with speculation on why you have this wrong, but I can say this with certainty: at the high level of determining if something that I am willing into being, through interfacing with a process and tools outside myself, aligns with my vision and taste, there is no substantive difference between gen AI and traditional methods beyond that which exists between any two given traditional methods.
Are developers that use a "high level" language like C++ also doing nothing because the machine did all the work of compiling to assembly and machine code for them? Nothing to celebrate and no honor?
In my view, the one that "creates" is the one that puts in the majority of the effort. Under this definition, the average vibe coder isn't creating anything.
Well this is awkard...
We're not so different, he and me.
My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.
But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?
I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?
https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
You're facing strict requirements for fundamentals in 3 independent axis. If there's recommendation to anyone looking to "write code" today, its to specialize in a field where software (or firmware) is applied to hard engineering domain. This has been common advice since 2010 [1], long before LLMs:
"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."
[1] https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html
"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."
People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.
There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".
But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.
Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.
Interesting mix.
Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.
I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.
Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....
LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
I really don't get the hate.
Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.
I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes
Each step removed one more piece of friction.
I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.
All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?
The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.
With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...
That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.
I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.
I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.
I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.
Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.
But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.
> I really don't get the hate
I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"
It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"
I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.
Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this.
What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.
By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades.
Yes obviously. But consider:
In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them
Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck
Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet
It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building
My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future
Maybe to cheer you up: we're doing a few tests at our org, and we found that product-minded engineers still have a tremendous leg-up compared to other people when it comes to actually shipping products. It's not even a race.
It's not just quality of code, it's also speed of execution, maintainability. Why? Because we're not building 200 database tables + 200 endpoints when 1 table + enum suffices. Yes that happened. There was also one feature that I can't comment much on because it would doxx but: a PR from non-dev took months, was 100k LOC and rejected by product and engineering as low-quality. The same feature built by my team was 900 LOC, feature complete, shipped.
Nothing beats the combination of domain expertise and expertise in the medium.
I'm always learning new things. The things I learn jsut happen to no longer align with what current speculative crazy investors want.
>the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane.
and what if I do not need agentic development for my creations? my domain is not one where "building more" is the bottleneck. I don't need to ship faster, I nee to ship more deliberately
---
>have "problem"
>don't care
>have no problem
Life is literally so easy.
Some may think their pursuit of mastery is now wasted, but I find that intriguing especially in a field where mastery cannot really be obtained due to technological progress. I suppose I just don't let others reduce my own experience and what I value?
It's possible that wishing instant death on people may make you unpopular. But also, maybe you're a poet or artist now. No one makes money of the years of toil it takes to become an expert at that craft, either. If the craft is important, then the money is secondary, and no one will ever stop you from writing code the way you love to, they just won't pay you to do it that way.
the money is secondary. Sadly, rent is primary.
Give me enough to retire and I'll happily spend the rest of my days on my craft. Until then, the options are combining your craft, minmaxing your career to minimize work (too late for me), or to do something else that pays the bills for the next 30 years. And the cost to retrain isn't cheap either.
A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.
The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.
We could go back and forth on the analogy but I think it comes down to one of two things:
1. You enjoy writing code to fix a problem
2. You enjoy fixing problems and solve that by writing code
If you're in camp 1 then AI feels extremely unfulfilling and understandably so, for camp 2 it's a whole new world.
Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.
Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!
That’s a far cry from how many on HN are dealing with LLMs
LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.
Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.
I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.
"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.
like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.
Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.
A million lines of LLM slop?
As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.
IF you were already doing it. But LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing as well. In the same way Excel macros enabled some people to run whole businesses on a spreadsheet without hiring a "real" programmer, LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer. And yeah, some of those excel macros were a nightmare, one of the many jobs I've taken over the years was a contract job converting the business logic that used to be in excel macros and later vba script to a "real" language and application. But the business that hired me only had the sort of money they needed to hire me because they had a successful business running off that horrible spaghetti mess. I wonder what businesses will be hiring "real" programmers when their founders hit the wall of what they can accomplish on their own with AI.
SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this for several decades now.
A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place.
It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.
That is to say - I don't really love programming. I do it out of necessity. Before product managers got looked at as 'too much headcount in an org', I kind of think I would have liked that.
I like the outcomes. I like tools that I like to use. I like writing tools and software and systems that work for me.
I also like the outcomes for OTHER people. In my line of work, things working is really important - it costs money when things are not working - so I like building those systems that work but also have good tools to inspect when things go amiss or need to be changed.
I am like an engineer (I am not) who learned how to use R or Matlab - for the outcome not for the love of the game.
Another example may be cars. I am a competent mechanic. I have been employed as a mechanic. The reason I like cars is to drive them. At the end of the day every bolt that is stuck and every radiator I have to drop is excruciating and painful and I hate it, but the look on the customers face when they can get back in their car is priceless.
Other people think that books are a communication tool that you use in order to communicate something, and that something is the thing that is actually important. They may suffer from writing a book, and be embarrassed that they've written a book.
Enjoying the process is fine. It's a hobby, however, not a form of nobility, and enjoying it doesn't mean you're not terrible at it. If you think the book is the goal, you're lying to yourself. There are plenty of books, they're easy to get. If your goal is the reward that you receive from other people for the books itself i.e. if your goal is to create a valuable commodity, that's fine, too.
But a goal in writing books could be to convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication.
I always find it harrowing that having the goal when programming be to create a system that could enable people to accomplish some function, or could accomplish some function for people autonomously seems to be the farthest from people's mind. But it's literally the pretext. You have to be trying to do that or lying about trying to do that to even program at all. Making it a battle between whether the program that you're writing is a product/resume item or a fidget spinner abstracts away reality for a contest between ruthless capitalism and middle-class self-actualization. Greed and narcissism.
If you actually want to accomplish something in the world (other than burnishing your self-image), AI is just a tool, not a threat to your identity.
> convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication
ok, so what does a dirty novel, or some other pulp fiction convince or inform you of?
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Expect burnout. That did come my way.
A good question.
Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?
It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.
I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Exactly!
And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.
Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.
For me the more interesting and productive thinking happens when I'm trying to understand what I want the code to do, not when I'm thinking about the implementation details.
That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?
*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.
However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.
I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.
So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?
The market for small batch locally made produce is huge. Entire grocery stores dedicated to local organic offerings is the standard in every upper middle class neighborhood on the entire west coast. The reason is obvious: a salad made with crappy tomatoes is a crappy salad.
We aren’t at this point in software yet because most consumers of software have no taste
The AI is enabling a lot more experimentation with software. The AI supplies the tomatoes (infrastructure / grunt work), grandma tries her recipes (the software / business idea).
Many people have argued over the years that it would be great when we have an economy that takes care of all the labor and everyone in society is free to choose to spend all of their time on things that have no financial incentive.
I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.
Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.
If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."
What's happening to you now may also feel unfair, but it's up to you if you're just going to be pissed on your own behalf, or if, now that you recognize that everyone else is going through what you've been newly-introduced to, you're going to go, "Hey, no one should have to live like this! Fix this crap for everyone."
The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.
I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.
I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.
The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.
The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.
The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.
This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.
I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html
Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.
In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.
Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.
The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.
Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, was famously rejected from Google for not being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take.
My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions.
> The people who are upset by this change...
Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.
If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed.
Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.
The lawyers with contempt for AI aren't necessarily the best "critical readers and reviewers of documents"; a good number just appreciate the substantial moat the current system keeps for them, and are contemptuous of 1) attempts to cross that moat without paying a toll, however likely that attempt is to fail, and 2) the way such failures highlight that our legal system doesn't work the way most people seem to think it does, because that increases the chances that the public will become dissatisfied and push for change.
I guess if it doesn't cross that moat, there cool with it?
What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)
Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.
So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.
But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.
In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.
I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.
The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.
1. Fire everyone else
2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?)
3. Retire to Aruba
scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.
Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.
You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.
Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.
I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.
I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.
I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.
I hope that everyone agrees to collectively recognise we all need to still do some things together and the knowledge in our heads is still much more important.
This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!
Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment
Of course, “produce value” is slightly different from meaningful jobs that Bullshit Jobs was referring to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.
Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.
Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.
But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).
Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.
Paying me $150k to do work that produces $1.5M for your business is great value - but getting the same work done for $15k is even better value.
It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384
make an open source project without ai
No need to thank me. You're welcome.
Ultimately, I like the creation part of programming: creating something that doesn't exist that is of value to at least one person (usually me). In general, though, I get more satisfaction when more people get value out of my creations.
Through that lens, AI does change things: a whole set of things that I can create no longer have value to people (at least the value is lower, because AI can do it better than whatever product I create). But at the same time, I can now create more sophisticated and more powerful things with the help of AI.
On the whole, I'm more satisfied with AI than without.
For example, I'm working on an emulator in a field where emulators do exist since long. So I set myself to improve these emulators by emulating tricky corner cases. These corner cases do not exist in AI's memory because nobody has ever coded them. So although I use quite a lot of AI to investigate the corner cases, the actual problem solving is entirely mine. So I stay happy :-)
In my daytime job, a big part of what I do already exists in some form or another (fluid dynamics). But my job is more of understanding what I do so that I can convince someone else that my programs are robust and reliable. So again, I'm programming a lot with AI, but the important stuff, it's my skill to understand it, not AI.
The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself.
* I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.
My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.
The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its proponents imagine. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.
¹ Probably including me.
Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.
Think of it another way:
You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible.
Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.
The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.
Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?
I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.
At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”
I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.
We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.
I am saying that we all have worked on projects where “artisanal software development” bore as much resemblance to our process as an abstract art painting does to reality. We’ve all worked with plenty of coworkers (and maybe have even been that coworker ourselves) who just punches the clock. We’ve all worked with developers who have had 1 year of experience for 30 years in a row. Everyone knows the average piece of software being produced is a buggy mess and it’s amazing it all works at all. Hell our industry coined the phrase “worse is better” and “move fast and break things”. To turn around now and pretend that we’re actually all master craftsmen, regularly constructing artifices of pure beauty and logic that will stand the tests of time is a bit silly.
Sure I would take a real human over a YOLO coded piece of software any day. But I’d also take a real application over an excel macro monstrosity any day too. That doesn’t mean excel macros don’t have their place or that they aren’t used to produce things of real value.
But still souless, still sucks. Its just excuse of laziness. Pick up a brush, pick up an instrument and stop jerking around all day.
Talentless people are talentless because lack of effort, not because of lack of talent.
In front of those people, I will always bask in my sheer superiority because I make real music and real art. People compliment my musical skills and people don't compliment those who create song with AI.
We as a society need to be able to identify which one is AI generated and which one is not, and let the free market takes care of itself. Those who want AI generated things can have it, those that don't want can avoid it.
Take a guess which one will have more demand.
In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users.
I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code.
I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book".
I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily.
And how many vibe-coded apps am I using?
Zero.
Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?
You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".
Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it.
Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.
It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.
[0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/
I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.
At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.
So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.
There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.
So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.
On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft.
Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.
A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI.
Share anecdotes and examples if you have any
There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.
Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies.
Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.
I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.
I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.
That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and synthesise a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.
Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of necessary value that pays bills.
Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems.
Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective.
But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.
I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.
> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.
Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.
I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)
Certainly, it's easier to produce solutions now, but I wouldn't underestimate the knowledge you have, and say that others who are capable of using AI to produce the same output have the same understanding that you do.
Personally, I find that I am able to produce excellent outcomes with AI with respect to the topics that I have the most expertise in, and passingly acceptable outcomes in things that I know very little about.
Milt Bryce and his son Tim were pretty much the inventors of modern information-systems management. And they were open in their hatred of and contempt for programmers and how they worked. Their methodology, PRIDE, was centered around giving the programmers as little to do and as little autonomy and leverage over the organization as possible, because information systems is a business function and not a technical one. The key decisions would be made by systems analysts and designers, not programmers. Without AI, the part that programmers contributed in a PRIDE project was about 15%; with AI, it asymptotically approaches zero. I've been studying PRIDE a lot over the past few years, because with Tim Bryce's death it's at risk of being forgotten; and because now with AI in the mix, it helps me understand what's actually going on.
This is what management has wanted all along. Programmers are expensive, tetchy, and they resist standardization and discipline, preferring instead to employ their own little bespoke methods and tool choices. (Hello, vim vs. emacs!) Failure to keep them in tight rein can spell doom for the company, as they can use their technical skills to their advantage, potentially holding the whole business hostage. You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does (especially in traditional businesses: banking, insurance, manufacturing, etc.). Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.
Tried and failed for decades, yes. Turns out caring for your craft makes you a nerd. Turn out what people want is to stay in their lane and simply want "the fries in the bag", with no curiosity on what's in the fries or bag as long as it tastes good.
I refuse to stop caring in this otherwise uncaring world. Now what?
>You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does
It is true. What this ultiamtely breaks down to is simple: Nerds are thinkers, and thinkers question. The context here is in tech and automation, but that's a trend that extends to a lot of systems and societies. Those in power hate the thinkers, they hate the questions. They will suppress it for as long as possible.
Use this lens in other kinds of communities and you see the pattern pops up everytime. To "stop being a nerd" in this context is akin to saying "stop questioning the system and exploit it like the rest of us".
I want to build something useful for them but if they let me be too close to the customer, I'll be making important decisions that are supposed to be someone else's job.
Hehe, my undergrad was comp sci, I turned down an Oxbridge postgraduate in Advanced Computing Science to do an interdisiplinary PhD, technically in the social sciences department, because I genuinely do understand and agree with you on a few levels. At the end of the day, people are the ones who need to be kept happy. The flip side of 1000's of isolated hours of screentime is a lack of practice at making people feel comfortable in real life. But, the same is true for basically any craftsman of any craft, just swap screen with lathe or instrument or other tool of choice.
I think there's a biological element to being a nerd, so "Have you tried not being a nerd?" is like asking someone with ginger hair "have you tried not being ginger?" Sure, they can try/dye, but the roots will keep growing through, fighting against something that's a massive asset in the right environment.
Regarding PRIDE, it sounds like that came from a time where people were genuinely scared/amazed/confused by computers. When you consider that, minimising the role of people who are going to make it all about tech and computers makes sense. Maybe the tide is changing over the past 2 - 5 years against tech, but the entire 2000s up until recently were defined IMO by the pervasiveness and excitement and accessibility of tech by literally everyone on the planet. In that world, where customers pay good money for magic tech they don't understand, a company of nerds brings safety and reassurance (and high salaries and decision impact for said nerds).
I worry nerds and the products of nerds at the top like Zuckerberg, Altman and Musk are causing the public attitude to shift back to what they were like pre-2000s, where tech is dangerous and powerful and scary and normal humans need to be kept away from it, and advocates of tech should be viewed sceptically.
> Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.
This is essentially my central point/worry. I hope there's more nuance to it though, mainly because 1 younger relative in particular is in his early teens, and he's clearly a naive/friendly/enthusiastic/hyper-fixating/lots of nerdy screentime type. Until a few years ago, I assumed he'd have the life a lot of us have had. Now though, I wonder what life will be afforded to nerdy, weird people born into a world where they're seen as significantly less necessary.
Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined.
I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.
Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff.
Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out.
Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to.
I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs.
The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.
Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.
Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.
And it’s awesome.
From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.
The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.
It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!
On the (well written!) post's particulars:
I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).
But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.
Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.
Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.
*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013
Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.
Give it a go!
Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.
I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.
So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
And I think this is really the best of both worlds because AI coding works best when you give it constrains and without my toolchain the AI is generating crap code I wouldn’t ever want to read but using the libs I wrote and know I can constrain it to write decent code that works “at scale” .
I agree with your point on refactoring / porting. Retro consoles and homebrew will see growth, probably.
Also tried it with AI generated art. Is not there yet. I can generate a beautiful image but then cut it to pieces so I ca use it in a game breaks apart.
It can be done but it looks obviously underwhelming.
It’s fine to keep apprised of, but I really do miss the actually-genuinely-interesting topics and projects which used to pop up here, pre ai days.
I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.
My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??
Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.
Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).
I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.
I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.
So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.
There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.
I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
So much this.
I don't understand how some people seem to have no self awareness or shame in saying "I build X" where "X" was entirely prompted by an LLM.
It's like ordering a meal from door dash and calling yourself a chef.
For me it's more like being a chef but having a cook to cut up things and start cooking them, but you decide when it's done, what spices to put, and how to serve it - arguably the most fun and creative part.
E.g. if Steve Jobs had simply handed a slip of paper to a team that said "make a new kind of computer", then no, he would not have brought the Macintosh to life.
They are two different things, LLMs are not humans.
You're conflating "I made X" with "I personally did every part of X with no help," which is really not something to brag about as much as it is something that might fulfill your own personal sense of value.
Recently, a couple of very talented engineers vibe-coded a cross-platform app that is nowhere near as nice, but is highly effective at the most important aspects of the one I wrote. They are also very good at promoting, and it will get a lot of press. I have no doubt that many folks that would normally use the app I wrote, will use that.
At first, I was all mopey and emo about it, but I realized that it doesn't matter. Their app is decent. It's fairly ugly (LLM-generated UX is pretty bland), but works very well. The guys behind are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much).
Instead, I'll be doubling down on making my app as good a native experience as possible. There's still a lot of stuff I can add, and Apple keeps adding more capabilities that afford native implementation.
I have also been using an LLM as a "trusted advisor," not as an employee. It's made a huge difference. It may end up eroding my "hands on" skills a bit, but not by that much. I find that I am constantly reviewing the work it does, and my knowledge helps me to really get the most out of it. I managed a software development team for a long time, so I am pretty familiar with delegating work to employees that are actually more capable than I am. I guess that helped me to accept LLMs, as an IC.
I'm actually looking forward to this. One of the reasons that many of my apps don't have a lot of new features, is because I never had the time to study and implement them. With an LLM, it looks like that is no longer an issue.
I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.
The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.
But even if they could the best thing they’re ever going to do is reach the sum total of human knowledge. I can’t ask it to think of a novel algorithm to speed up my flows, and even the places where I feed it a literal paper and ask it to reproduce it in a production ready matter are often exercises in patience.
That said, for me it’s better because I like thinking of ideas far better than typing out code for ideas to become reality.