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.
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?
> 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!
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 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.
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’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 “I suffered so you must too otherwise you’re unworthy” is so on point. The people whose identity is tied to gatekeeping programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.
> 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.
For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they feel 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 promoters claim. 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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 produce 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 value necessary to pay 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.
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.
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?
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).
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 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 writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
Is that because they didn't type code on the keyboard? They still had to think of an idea, conceptualise it, work and prompt AI, test the results, alter things, work through problems, stick to a direction and bring about something from nothing.
Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
"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?
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I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
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.
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.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 engineering 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 a 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."
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?
They are not saying the assembly is bad all the time, but merely that sometimes, for some inputs, the assembly is bad. Which is definitely true, though I would prefer the term "suboptimal."
Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do.
They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.
> 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
Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right!
I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell.
Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.
> 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.
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 (only as a stepping stone to full removal/prevention).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.
Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good.
With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.
Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.
Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.
If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.
And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.
The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.
> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
This is my experience as well. It gets worse when the LLMs have strong priors in subject matter adjacent to your novel work. The generated output will incorrectly pull towards things the LLM has seen in it’s training data.
I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to.
But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out a W9 and emailing it to the user, cron jobs for digest emails. All very easy problems most LLMs can do. There are just countless tasks if you’re building a real SaaS and I don’t want to do them all.
The big problems LLMs can’t do are only as such because there’s no way to put it into a simple, linear instruction. Once you can though, it’s now an easy task (whether or not you use an LLM).
But yeah we’re saying the same thing - let the LLM do the 1000s of tedious tasks you normally wouldn’t be bothered to spend time on.
Build the entire SaaS (which is mostly that tedium) instead of just the MVP thing you need without any niceties. I find it opens up more opportunity, like for example, we are about to hire our first full-time employee because we’re taking on so much more business.
You're not paying attention. There is no agentic. You use the LLM the way your tax man uses a calculator. It's back and forth all the time.
Ignore agentic stuff, that is marketing. Think about it anyway - why tf would it take all day, responses take seconds. There is no "leave it running" it's a fake concept
That's fine, but then the value of the tool evaporates. I agree you have to hold the LLM's hand so that it doesn't do crazy things, but that takes so much time that you don't actually save time over just writing it yourself. That is why I continue to maintain that LLMs are not a useful tool: either you completely give up on quality to get speed gains, or you maintain quality but get no speed gains.
You definitely save a ton of time over writing it yourself, just not as much time saved as “agentic” coding. I don’t do agentic coding either, I think it’s basically a scam. But using an LLM does mean creating stuff faster, much faster. The LLM can write 500 lines of code in seconds. That takes me hours.
I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.
The "agentic" stuff has come a long way recently, it's worth revisiting it every few months, it is better and better at taking on the tedium especially.
The critical IP that isn’t in the weights yet, is often a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code. All the rest, surrounding code, is infrastructure that is indeed in the weights.
I don't have a concrete example, but it's probably the stuff that starts taking longer to describe in English than to code.
"Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way".
I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.)
But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.
Write a decent comment, for one. It struggles with some of the firmware stuff I do, though that's more due to a lack of a proper automated feedback loop.
Two recent examples I tried to get Sol/Opus to get help with, were they gave more misdirections than beinghelpful: Tracking down the root cause of a synchronization bug in a distributed platform using CRDTs, especially dumb around sequence CRDTs. Also had less fun using Sol/Opus for building and troubleshooting fractures and constraint networks in Houdini.
I'm sure these will be much better as soon as enough data is in the training set, as always. GPT models used to be horrible at electrical stuff as well, today Astra seems pretty OK at it. It changes as they keep extending what use cases are covered by training data and what they test for and so on.
I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.
Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.
It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.
Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.
That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.
Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.
Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.
This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.
It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?
Most larger businesses are kinda resistant to building stuff in house since it means that stuff has to be owned and maintained for as long as its needed (possibly decades) and you can't just rely on a SLA and the legal team to ensure things are working in perpetuity.
The danger of vibe coded SaaS:es isn't the customer building the thing themselves, but that the increased competition drives down the profit margin.
There is a small web service I need with a price tag of $39 one time payment. I’m current doing it myself for the last 1.5 hours, because I thought it would be fun. 2 minutes ago I upgraded to $120 subscription of Codex.
Reasonable thing was to pay $39 and forget about it.
At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
"not everybody" vs "50 year old business guys...months of focused chats" - I don't think you're really disagreeing here? That's also a niche population. One that knows their domain very well, absolutely, personally I think it's cool that they can DIY what they need. But still a niche population. That's not your proverbial 20year old kid right out of school with ADHD pumping out world class software.
Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
No they don't know the domain at all. I think one of the startups brings in around $10K a month now. They know nothing about the domain only that it brings in money (i.e. they run thousands of startup "tests" and this one seemed to be easiest to make money from), and even less about code (have no idea what a variable is).
I just think devs are coping by thinking that saas startups have any barrier to entry at all. You are now competing with every single person on the planet who wants to make money sitting at home on a computer, and likely the business guy with zero skill or craftsmanship is going to beat you.
The only thing with barrier to entry is insanely complex software (e.g., what used to take a genius team of 10 multiple years to make) and or more creative software like video games (where you need extreme care and taste to get something anyone will look at for > 2 hours).
Average saas products require no skill or craftsmanship and literally anyone including our grandmas can make it (assuming they will take a few months at least to chat with an LLM). To be clear I think this is great! More better software, people with smaller needs can have llms build it for them totally bespoke. For those of us with skills we have to move WAY out of our old comfort zone and make way cooler things, a standard saas that takes a few months isn't something we should waste our time on anymore.
Yeah. This makes sense. Someone who can dedicate a lot of time to scaling a SaaS serving many customers are helped a lot by AI. I believe busy professionals who already have successful businesses won't have the focus to build a one-off solution for their own needs a lot of the time.
Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.
I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone.
And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.
Yeah sure, let's go and vibe code your own e-signing solution with Claude. Sure you can do it, LLMs never say no but if someone with actual e-signing expertise would start probing the LLM about what it actually did I'm sure we would see a lof of "Actually you're right to push back", "You're right that was entirely wrong, that's on me!", "Fair point, I did not consider that"... LLMs are still a joke when it comes to implementing complex software where domain knowledge and "precision" is important, maybe some day they will be able to do that but we're not there. If they were good at precision and consistency and thinking we would see tons of high quality LLM written novels and books as well, but all we see is utter garbage that no one considers literature. In the same vein, unsupervised vibe-coded software isn't real software to me, it's garbage. You can produce high quality software with LLMs, but definitely not as an amateur without domain knowledge just prompting your way to something that resembles working software.
I find people that are the "unconscious incompetence" stage of software development absolutely love them because they produce output that looks fine to them and they can't find anything wrong with it because they simply lack the ability to perceive quality. For a contact widget that might be acceptable as it will be used a few dozen times so who cares if it breaks, but let's not pretend you can actually build a compliant e-signing or invoicing software without having domain expertise and investing a ton of editing/revision time.
Put more bluntly, a domain expert that, as of currently, refuses to use LLMs can easily start using LLMs in their work, an idiot who uses LLMs cannot easily become a domain expert. Now let's think about who you would rather hire or who do you think will have the better future career outlook. Pretty damning how many people here are willing to reject the idea that domain expertise or ability to write program code yourself is a waste of resources.
I built the e-signing experience at DocuSign in 2012 in Node/Backbone, and later became a licensed background check investigator when I built Uber and DoorDash’s background check SDK that is used over 1 million times per year.
Am I allowed to use Mistral 7b locally to build W9 automation or do I still need your permission?
Amazing how someone with your experience can have such poor reading comprehension. He never said anything about permission to use llms. They are saying that to a domain expert like you, you can effectively use LLMs because you will be more likely to spot issues and thus guide it better given your background in the domain. He is saying that some biz bro who know nothing about docusign and esigning who decides one day to use LLMs to create software in that domain is likely to produce working, but buggy and non-compliant software.
As a non expert in a domain, LLMs can seem amazing because you don’t know the field therefore have a harder time spotting errors. As an expert they seem pretty dumb or they’re useful as long as you guide them. It’s akin to Cory Doctorow’s argument about the reverse centaur.
You did a wonderful job of constructing a strawman and DESTROYING it in your comment! AI can't build an e-signing solution, but you, the expert of experts, can do it! Good job!
Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of:
1. Things I enjoy doing.
2. Things I am good at doing.
3. Things people value me doing.
The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.
The world isn't going to change back, so our task is to figure out the new intersection. This is always hard work, and I have no easy answers.
There seems to be two kinds of people whenever this conversation comes up.
If I take an analogy of two kinds of people who visit Yosemite National Park, person A would refuse to see Glacier Point unless they embark on the long all day hike themselves, while person B would happily drive to the parking lot, get out, take photos with their families and admire the view.
Either person cannot understand the other's, and yet both people will go out of their way to make the other one feel guilty for their approach if pushed.
When they built the parking lot and the roads to get there, it probably upset a lot of people at the time (only speculating). Yet, the park invests and maintains the hiking trails just as well. So if anything, the park takes the very human opinion that you should take the option that works for you, because the view is worth it.
The people who are investing in machine learning are OBSESSED with efficiency. Where I would say, v1 of Co-pilot was entirely conceived as an AI system meant to help ME as a software engineer, claude code is entirely conceived and built to replace ME as a software engineer.
Where co-pilot was a choice that I made, and willingly enabled in my workflow, claude code was forced on me by my employer. In my entire long career, we were always given autonomy to decide what tools and systems we needed to get our jobs done. This was the first time it felt like a few invisible power brokers at the top decided for me.
Anyway, my point in all this ranting, is that, unlike national parks that go out of their way to be accessible for everyone, generative AI has firmly sided with one kind of person's life philosophy at the expense of the others, yet we all still have to work together. Change is hard for sure.
I find that Camp B is a lot more likely to not understand Camp A than the other way around. Both enjoy the outcome of "we made something cool", but Camp A more heavily values the journey to get there, and many in that camp aren't particularly bothered if they didn't actually get there if the journey was good. Camp B was never interested in the journey but absolutely wants an outcome. Unfortunately, the voices of Camp B seem a lot louder, and Camp A can come off like old farts.
The thing about your analogy is that the person in Camp B might seem a bit silly to most people at face value. Even your average person values doing a bit more than sticking to the parking lot in a beautiful national park they may not visit again for decades. The reason I bring this up is that I personally don't begrudge Camp B. How can I not sympathize with people who want to shape reality to their imagination? I understand that.
Where I divorce from Camp B is on the idea that the process behind developing the architecture and the code software is inherently a roadblock and essentially has no value. They produce these specious claims like "code was never the hard part" because they view code as something completely separate from the thing the code produces, which was simply not true because the very nature of code is in describing the thing that it's implementing. The typical Camp B mindset seems to misunderstand or hate this fact of reality, and many of them don't even seem to get that other human minds have other perfectly valid objectives behind the things that they do. There is nothing wrong with becoming a programmer because you enjoy and thrive in the process in writing software, but even before LLMs, we have been increasingly infantilizing that desire because it's not seen as productive or obviously revenue producing. Valuing the process is viewed by outsiders as dilly-dallying when, in actuality, many of the greatest things in not just computer programming but technology and science have been a result of Camp A people investing effort in exploring and executing theory that Camp B has no interest in.
This is why I get pissed off when I hear that "code was never the hard part." It's like, screw you people, my job being paid to write code to satisfy the requirements of my employer/customer was and is hard. What's changed are the requirements; the new requirements are to not give a fuck about quality and sustainability and to maximize speed at which boxes can be ticked for project management. This doesn't mean that making software that's not a piece of shit isn't still a hard problem. There's a dearth of projects built with AI in the last 3 years, the vast majority of which are polished turds that have been completely abandoned by their authors. What does that tell you?
Camp B should, by all means, go ahead and do their thing. I think it's great that technology has made it possible for someone to build an app or a site with no background knowledge or hiring of contractors. What they don't deserve is disrespect Camp A and talk down to them because they find programming to be a nuisance.
> No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.
As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us.
On you other two points: I kinda feel you, but I'm finding ways of enjoying my work with AI. It's been a bit of a shift and I'm still adjusting probably, but it feels like it's getting better. I never really enjoyed "typing" code, but the creative process of designing solutions and building the. And I never thought typing was the "building" part, it was just an unavoidable mechanical "obstacle" (not using the word obstacle as a bad thing necessarily, but idk it's just typing you know?)
Yes--I very much agree with you, and that's what I mean about finding a new intersection.
The job-part of the Venn diagram is, I think, hardest for people because we can't control what companies pay for. I agree that software engineering, as a profession, will continue, but I don't think there will be many jobs that pay you to (e.g.) write C++ by hand.
The trick is finding that new intersection. I actually agree with you that the creative process is the important part--as long as I'm creating, I don't care whether I'm typing code or not.
But I also get that for some people, the typing (or the thinking about what to type) is the important part. They are having a hard time finding the new intersection.
I miss the emotional and problem-solving nature of software development. I am reading classic literature and feel good about it after long hours watching AI generated content. Knowing a person chose every word changes how it feels to read.
>> But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway?
Well, I think the issue is that most people, even software developers, don't have the luxury of choosing. Everyone needs to put food on the table, and often times that involves working for companies one dislikes or even hates. The problem is now those companies are turning to AI.
Couldn't disagree more. Here's how I look at it as a person who wrote my code by hand for 15 years. I'm the owner of my own small bootstrapped startup.
1. I've always been enjoyed delivering solutions more than the actual process of programming, and AI just helps me deliver more of that faster. And for the actual process of programming, I found a way of working with AI that makes it enjoyable. I've built my own AI agent coordinator and harness which works the way I want it to. I enjoy working with AI in that harness.
2. It is completely false that you cannot prompt the AI any better than anybody else. The likes of Terrence Tao can prompt ChatGPT to solve Millennium Prize problems in math. But I'm not a professional mathematician, so I cannot do that. Generally speaking, the more deep technical knowledge you have, the stronger prompts you can write because an amateur doesn't even know what to potentially improve. Actual real world productivity with AI is still strongly correlated with deep technical knowledge and experience, and I expect it to stay that way. This has nothing to do with AI capabilities, which I expect will keep gettinf better. This has to do with the fundamental definition of a problem requires expertise to handle it.
3. Jevons paradox suggests that the fact that building software has become cheap now may only increase demand, not decrease it. Sure, traditional software engineering jobs may not look the same. But AI has made it possible to build so many kinds of software that I would have never considered before. Like, for example, I built my own email client, which works exactly the way I want it to. Imagine every company starts building their own operating system, email client, and CRM. I can easily see that happening, and I can actually see it as a net positive as well as a fun thing to watch. And only an increase in job opportunities.
I actually think we agree. My point isn't that "we're all screwed". I do use and like AI, and I don't want to go backwards. My point is that every bubble in the Venn diagram is changing.
You're absolutely right about how each bubble is still there. But they are a different shape now, and the intersection isn't where it used to be. Some of us are still in the intersection; others are not.
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.
>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
I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.
He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.
It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you.
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
> I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
I'm afraid your hundreds of hours of prompting will reduce to "clone this product, here are 200 screenshots of every screen."
I don't understand why people aren't getting this: there is no skill in prompting! The CC leak literally showed Anthropic engineers developing Claude with broken half-english prompts like "gud, now make better".
A conundrum I see is that once someone releases a “solution” to a problem, it becomes much easier for someone else to come up with prompts to have AI make a clone of that solution.
Basically, the moat for many products is disappearing, and it would be relatively cheap for someone to make a clone that undercuts the cost of the first to market. The original product is charging $2? Cool, the clone will cost $1 - maybe it’s not as good due to less QA, but consumers will see the lower price and buy it.
That's the thing. The moment you publish, the design you spent 100s of hours on also becomes public, at which point it becomes entirely replicable with little to no recourse. Hence the theme of this entire thread: a devaluement spiral.
Hundreds of hours doing what? If you're not reviewing the code, then what are you doing, just planning features? Because that would be trivial to copy in a fraction of the time by just feeding screenshots of your app to one's AI of choice.
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.
> 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.
Altcoins - the snowball lying in wake. Bitcoins were crap too at one point but they have stood the test of time and obscurity. It's about going from HODL'ing to spending for dear life. Something like that anyway. Maybe 3+ years to go before any serious price movement because of dumping pressure being so high from pre-miners and the like. No idea.
Me too I use my apps every day. But the main thing coming out of this is that they are tailored to me. Turning hobbies into hustles is one of the worse things that happened in the post social media days.
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?
Same here. Loved hacking on things from all angles, still do. The only thing lost to me now is the yak shaving, and good riddance. I want to think in systems, solutions, integration, and first and foremost the higher level problem, not nitty gritty implementation details.
Ever since Fable and Sol level LLMs/agents came online, I have ceased to look at the code. I recently launched a project for a client that integrated many many systems, has considerable traffic with low latency requirements and everything just.. works. I've never had to do this little firefighting when launching a project of that complexity and scale. It's been liberating and I was able to focus mostly on polish and QoL improvements of the stack and systems. What a time to be alive for a technical builder.
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.
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 used to think this but then improved and found that it was a matter of tooling. Using beads[1] and getting the AI to write its own tickets and wiki articles using GitHub's wiki feature on repos, it can keep track of long horizon projects pretty easily. Then you curate some of the tickets or read through them and have them update the beads or adjust them as they work them. When they want to retain some important piece of knowledge you have them add it to the GitHub repo wiki.
Modern AI programming looks an awful lot like traditional product owner or product management roles.
Or what happens is that after 1000 lines there are hundreds of decisions it would have to consider to do anything and it doesn’t do that and instead finds the smallest path to insert its latest request.
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.
>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 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.
the headline isn't exactly bait but it doesn't exactly set reasonable expectations for the content that follows.
the common thread in similar post is that some folks are struggling with _feelings_ and nothing more. valid feelings set off by real and major changes to the very ground they stand on, I guess, but these feelings are ultimately distractions that can paralysis.
The other common thread is these folks are obviously smarter and more accomplished than I am by magnitudes and they're the first ones I'd expect to pull smart (maybe even inspiring) pivots
Programming is fun but it's also about learning to do things and trying out ideas that you have about how to organise something and make it work well - becoming a master of some craft.
If you don't care about programming but just problem solving...or you think all of this is irrelevant to "the customer" then AI might make you happy.
Can you imagine, for example, if Tolkien (insert favorite writer here) had to get AI to write Lord of the Rings for him: what would happen? How would he get it to express his idea? In order to make money he could just describe a few ways of expressing things and outline his plot and ..... wham. He could then make it write an Icosology (series of 20 books - I had to look it up) and we'd all be so happy right?
The fantasy genre that followed LoTR is almost like that! :-)
I don't love control so much that I want to write in assembler and I don't like it so little that I want to make everything by effectively trying to tell someone else how to do it for me and finding that they just don't understand. I think the expression of the idea matters sometimes much more than even the idea and since words are not 100% effective at communicating ideas any language based description is going to be a lot of effort.
So like everyone else I use it but for things I don't care about - things which are a stepping stone to something else. I also use it for things I don't understand and I feel delightfully empowered at how something super hard turned out easy....until it doesn't work properly.
This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.
The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility in software, precisely because some of the final form necessarily a cognitive 50% grey, even just for interoperability alone.
I don't know. Maybe it's the people doing software dev that are yet to reckon with it to a degree -- or have found themselves on opposite sides of denial.
I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.
> I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
I don't really think there is very strong evidence that the ROI is good.
The problem is that the industry is riddled with FOMO and FUD: everyone thinks everyone else is using it so they must. And this FUD and FOMO is being imposed upon them from above: there is a mandate to be afraid and fearful you're not using AI enough.
Even I, a burned out freelancer who once used to be happiest writing code, have to accept that if I return to my career, I must develop ways to use AI to keep up with people who are clearly already using it indiscriminately (or at best over-optimistically). And I must develop ways to talk to potential clients about the aspects of indiscriminate AI use that they should care about, and about the value of stepping back from one-shotted ideas.
I am trying to operate without FOMO and to see past FUD, but I accept I am compelled to do that or quit.
I think SWEs can't unionize for very different reasons, and that if you hang out on HN long enough you will develop a deeper understanding about why. But I am not restarting that discussion beyond saying this, because it always makes my head hurt!
You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change.
AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist).
I listen to what people say and I talk with them about how they feel about it.
> AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs,
I fully, fully disagree. I think using AI images in this way — for collage or moodboard — is ruining the point. It dilutes the value. I do know some photographers who haven't yet figured this out, unfortunately, but they will. Letting an AI image into your collage or inspiration for another piece of work is just opting out of a creative choice; you might as well place a grey rectangle, because that is what it is.
> and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on
AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
AI content might have some value as placeholder but even then you have to be careful that the prototype does not go into production.
I'm also aware of someone who used AI images to generate a series of test prints for her new alternative process printing practice, precisely to make sure that her test prints never had any accidental value — it makes it essentially compulsory for her to destroy them when they have served their purpose.
I have no particular problem with them being used as a more varied alternative to a step wedge like that, but the point is this:
AI generated creative works have zero value. Anyone who is seriously involved in creativity knows that even replacing something that is working against you with something that has no value either way is probably a bad idea. And putting out work that has this absolute zero value does you more harm than bad work.
It's way better to try and fail than not to try. Think for example of all the ambitious, earnest failures of movies you've seen; would any of them have been materially improved by AI?
> AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
You were saying that you thought it was an "amazing" tool, and now you are saying it's like drug-assisted cheating? I think you still have some of the internal work to do.
"Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it." -- The Crayon, one of the oldest art magazines.
It turns out humans have been devaluing the newer ways to create art since forever.
You're creating illusory boundaries to protect your ego. AI is not a supernatural category. It's just another thing. It can serve as inspiration the way anything else can.
You are not the arbiter of value in art, as much as you try to claim authority. You're just rationalizing your arbitrary beliefs.
I didn’t claim any authority. I just argued that I am informed and not projecting; I talk to actual working artists.
(My own work is amateur and probably shit; this is not about my creative ego)
You guys do like to read things that are not there so you can argue against them.
I don’t know any artist who has done any self-reflection about their work who thinks generative AI can do much for them at all.
At best it is tools like deep learning in upscaling and noise reduction, selection masking, separations etc. (I don’t mind AI selection tools; quite liked old style AI upscaling but I have moved away from it; I now think work should be produced with its reproduction limits in mind)
Nobody who has put in the creative ideation and self-reflection work and still wants to improve is going to tell you great things about generative AI. Because they know it is empty calories.
> AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
So, your answer to "people are doing a thing" is to just say "no they're not! NANANANA can't hear you!"
Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds, so your claim that AI outputs can't inspire artists is farcical.
You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
> Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds
I don't think you really understand how this very concept undermines your argument.
If I saw an artist making creative non-AI work critiquing AI, or even using AI to pointedly critique AI, I would feel differently about that.
But I don't think you understand the core concepts here at all.
> You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
This AI industry wizard-of-nihilism tosh gets so old. I am sure you think you're wise and informed and on some kind of nihilist high ground for saying it, though.
No wizardry involved friend, it's pretty clear to see from the way things are playing out now and the history of technological innovation/automation. You are 100% an old man waiving his fist at clouds/time, you will go down just like the scribes and the luddites and the buggy drivers and the portrait painters and the elevator operators. You can make arguments for preferring life before the change, but the change is happening and not accepting it is only self destructive.
I go to a lot of craft fairs and I've been seeing people using AI to make their banners or book covers or detail designs on mugs and such. Here are people playing a "support local creators" line and they won't support their own local graphic designers.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
In the craft fair case the issue is the tragedy of the commons.
If people come to think that all craft fairs are choked up with AI slop and Temu (literally) 3D printed flexi-dragons then it does enormous damage to the notion of art fairs as a place to see the work of artistic individuals; the whole category will die.
This could happen much sooner than the slop producing artists see a financial disincentive to attend, because their costs (time, materials, personal energies) are radically lower.
Like it or not, art communities need to have some chosen standards.
To be fair this is a much bigger concern for people who show at art fairs than people who simply attend, but the people who show at art fairs do need the support of their visitors in this.
Art fairs aren’t just unrestricted competitive capitalism; they are also cultural entities with norms.
Yes, I go to so many because my wife sells her novels at them.
There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredible youtube video about 3D printed (flexi-dragon etc.) slop at US craft fairs.
She is so exasperated by it that she's unable to draw a conclusion, and I think that is actually the biggest problem with creative dishonesty on this scale. It is numbing.
Everyone knows that it is happening, everyone is clear that it is bad. But there is a paradox: serious-minded artists do use tools, of course. They also have an instinct about ways tool use would be dishonest. But they are introspective and they are often aware that their pragmatic use of a tool might be another's dishonesty. And they want to be inclusive, to build their "scene".
So actually there is less speaking out about it directly than there might be. And what that enables is this ever worsening bad-faith use of low-effort tools. The fact that the people selling the flexi dragons at craft fairs just bought them in bulk on Temu is the hilarious exasperating end point of it.
I think AI has made it more urgent for artists to speak out, sooner.
It has made me even more acutely aware that even though I make my own tools for my own creative projects (lo-fi and niche photographic tools, mostly), the fact that bits are 3D printed is probably interesting only to me or to others who want to make their own tools for their own work; the fact that CAD and 3D printing liberated my idea from its prison in my brain is something I must not let myself think is an end goal. The end goal is elsewhere.
If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code.
The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.
I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.
LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.
Are those important questions that need to be answered? Rather, you should be asking whether you could use backprop and NNs to create something other than text predictors. What have LLMs changed about your conception of intelligence?
As far as I can see, none of the hard problems of intelligence that we had a decade ago got touched. What LLMs ultimately changed is the way I see language. I've underestimated its power, and I will admit, the companies making these models went far further than I could have imagined with them.
But intelligence and AI have a high hurdle to clear, and it won't be done with LLMs.
Revealing the secrets of intelligence will involve new concepts and understanding that that we don't have now. LLMs will be helpful with the plumbing and as replacement for natural evolution, but not so much natural intelligence.
Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers.
What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world.
That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now.
The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI.
I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.
The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.
OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”
The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.
You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less.
I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks.
Do you actually believe that people don’t know whether they are enjoying a task or not?
I think this might be true, but I think it's because it's more difficult to saturate my thinking capacity when building with AI rather than just laziness (which I am reading as the implication of your comment, perhaps incorrectly).
Building with AI requires spending time on non-thinking tasks like stopping the AI from doing stupid stuff, loading context from different tasks when working on multiple things in parallel, and waiting for responses when not working on multiple things in parallel. With manual programming, though, you have a single task in front of you and are fully focused on that task. In that task, there are innumerable micro-tasks that you handle sequentially which each require some thinking: how to organize code to be readable in the future, working out the logic of a sequence of if statements, deciding on types to use, etc.
AI handles all those micro-decisions for you which yes, might free up your mind to think about higher-level problems (to the extent that you don't spend your time deslopping AI output), but also requires a very different style of thinking that is at least for me, much less natural and much less enjoyable.
> And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
Maybe not. Look up Jevons paradox. Maybe software engineering was a bit overvalued before, anyway. And now it'll come down a bit. But I don't think the job is going to go away. It will just become a little bit less high paid.
"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."
I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.
If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.
This is the first comment in this thread that adequately captures how I feel. If I spend a weekend working on a project, there are two equal parts that make it worth my time: enjoying the process, and enjoying the final result.
It's inevitable (no matter how much you enjoy programming) that you will run into frustrating parts of working on code. If at the end of that process, you end up with a product that you know could have been better if LLMs were used, its a shitty feeling and makes it harder to power through the frustrating parts of the work.
> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)
But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).
Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.
So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.
(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)
A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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
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.
My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now.
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective.
I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
> I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project.
The minute I also realized this, I moved out of software development into a different function. Pooping out lines of ugly code full of compromises was just not my thing. If I was still coding for work when AI came around, that would have definitely pushed me out of the career.
I dabbled in product management and then went over to project management. I figure at least here, making compromises and negotiating with people is a specific requirement of the job, and not a shortcut to being able to produce Moar Output Faster.
Once upon a time, horsemanship had real value. Knowing how to care for a horse, how to breed, how to train, how to ride. Everybody had horses. Then the auto came.
And so it will be with software. And just as autos are more complicated than feeding an animal, ai generated code will be complex,less understandable and more prone to failures.
If the pc is a bicycle for the mind, ai is its self driving tesla
There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby.
Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.
Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.
I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
Yep. I'm feeling the same way... even though I'm hardly able to use AI at work, the push is still there for us to use it, making it even more frustrating. Anyway, I hate it, and I'm just sorta phoning it in now and trying to find something else to do. I'm cynical too and feel there is no point to upskilling and using AI for everything, 'cos it's not going to help you keep your job for very much longer than the people that don't use it.
My love for the craft has been slowly dwindling for the last 15 years but since AI it’s totally crashed. I’m still doing it for the paycheck but not much of it is enjoyable at this point
Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me?
If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age.
(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)
That appears to be using your metaphor and pointing out how being a cyclist and using an e-bike aren’t mutually exclusive. (I do know multiple avid cyclists that own e-bikes as one of several bikes they own and ride).
Ripping off the metaphor for a moment, it was basically extending what you said to point out that being a coder and using LLMs aren’t mutually exclusive.
(Asking them to reserve erm akshully’s for someone else came across as rather dismissive sounding of their thoughts, which from a former bystander in this thread appeared legitimate and just a continuation of using your own metaphor).
There is plenty of others, but the idea of being post-scarcity of information creation/software seems akin to how Star Trek had replicators. They used them for sure, but there was still people who wanted to cook/create by hand, as an expression.
I use LLMs at work. I'm expected to and paid to show up and do that, so I do it.
But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods.
We have an automatic reviewer as well and there wasn't even a peep from it regarding any of that.
And this is really the crux of the issue - LLMs won't ever create elegant and minimal code, because their style is based on the mean, which in turn is dominated by the work of people who shit out a lot of working, but write-only code.
A base model that has only been pre-trained has output that is based on the mean, but most advances in capability the last three years have come from post-training. The influence of RL dominates every observable characteristic of coding agents today and steers the model towards strategies and practices that are objectively successful for the LLM.
I think the best code for an LLM is different than the best code for a human. Lots of redundancy, lots of unnecessary and overly defensive code is being reinforced by their training because it is successful there.
They still take it to far and do all kinds of stupid shit - if you look at the code you'll see it all the time but it actually doesn't cause many problems. Its much more important to focus steering effort on feature scope and architecture. I still ask it to refactor code from time to time and its pretty good at doing that.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Writing code used to force you to understand it, but now the former doesn’t guarantee the latter. And most attempts to replicate the latter in other ways (more reviews, self-quizzes, etc) seem to be far less effective at producing deep understanding.
Skills not exercised degrade as well, if you don't actually write code then your skill at reading and interpretting it degrades, you just become a "looks good" step.
In theory if disciplined enough you could resist that but our brains seem to take the lazy path whenever it is offered, thinking hard and focussing are a skill and one I don't feel is been exercised when using AI.
IMO there's more than one valid reason to make things.
Some people make things from a pragmatic standpoint - they need a solution in a space where the existing solutions don't fit for some reason, and they decide to make their own. This is, I think, the majority of generative AI coding. A solution needs to be filled, and even if you are an amazing coder, for most of the solution space, AI is going to be faster than you. Your code might be more elegant, but not every problem requires elegance. Sometimes, it just needs to work.
Other people do it for the love of the game. The enjoy solving problems, crafting code, and finding optimum and elegant solutions to problems. This isn't pragmatism, or even close. It's craftwork by masters, or apprentices who want to be masters, and they wouldn't use AI to produce the work any more than they'd ask another human to do it - that would be cross purposes to their goal, which is to do the making.
Both are valid and there should be no shame in either, but I think people confuse the two and the disparity between them causes friction. When you judge a person's work in one paradigm by the other, you're bound to offend and distress them.
This attitude is pure punk! I couldn't agree more. The reason is statistics: even if LLMs can do a lot, they still rather interpolate than extrapolate. They do not excel, they average out. They deliver what is anticipated. So if you love a problem, if you have an intrinsic drive to solve something (like many of us do) - chances are high that you outperform what an LLM could achieve. I also believe as humans we shouldn't have to replicate redundant solutions but rather focus on deep dives, excel, push boundaries. And this is simply done by doing so for the sake of doing. This is art. So thank you for this statement, it made my day!
I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.
I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.
Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
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.
Nobody is going to tell you you can't carve your own spoons, smith your own shoes for your horses, and grow your own wheat for your own bread. Just don't blame the people who care more about eating bread than scything wheat.
There is nothing stopping anyone doing things their way, LLMs or not.
I suppose you can balance between using them if the paycheck job is asking for them, and enjoy your craft outside your 9-5.
I’ve been reading more and more of this tone, and I do wonder what those devs writing these blogs do and where do they work. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years, and the challenge was never the cording, it was always the human communication and understanding the outcome.
Yes LLMs can help none devs create things now, but show me a company that will allow AI generated code by none devs to go to prod.
I started a Janet project [1] with the express purpose of doing everything manually for fun, but I ended up using the agent for a lot of stuff pretty quickly anyway. Functions I wanted to be part of the library as a matter of completion, but that were not fun to write. Docs as well. Stuff I probably wouldn't have written in the first place if AI didn't exist.
It reinforced in my head this idea that hobby programming is entering its "sports" or "running" era.
Consider the modern jogging enthusiast. They buy Nike shoes that make it really easy to run long distances, specialized clothing, fancy water bottles. They find spots to drive to and park at before getting out and running downhill for a few miles, getting picked up at the bottom by one of their friends. Stuff that makes for a great social media post.
They do the hard part of running, but curated to just the parts that they enjoy. They drive the rest of the time and when they do run, it looks nothing like the first marathon run of ancient Greece.
It sounds nice and all to talk about "I'm going to code anyway," but when I did this I found that there are always parts of the coding that I really really never did want to do and that I'm happy to just outsource to my agent like the jogger outsources getting to the top with their car. Testing, writing docs, making the readme logo. Stuff that probably wouldn't have happened without the AI but that I'm glad exists.
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.
>Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years. This is the most turbulent time to be a software engineer I can remember. We’ve had it relatively easy up until now, but there’s an increased feeling that the whole craft is going through a huge shift and every individual needs to decide how they respond to it, which is very hard without the benefit of hindsight.
I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out.
Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage.
But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.
I think it's about how AI is being used across every field. For software developers, it helps you complete work at a pace that's much quicker. For artists, scientists and mathematicians it comes down to protecting the field from a set of collaborative agents who can possibly achieve anything.
What companies can do is restrict the usage to certain fields and keep the others immune. This should be universal so the competition exists where it should.
I understand what you are saying, but it's completely impractical in a world where applying those constraints leads to established leaders imposing those constraints on developing countries or economies. Today its the G7 applying penalties against other countries or pressuring them not to develop industries that pollute even though it would elevate their quality of life, or Russia invading Ukraine because they can and Ukraine gave up it's nuclear capability, or the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon being the pretext for a war of aggression.
Tomorrow it's a major power invading another country for training a model of mass destruction.
It's untenable to expect other societies to not compete to avoid subservience to another powerful country.
I think there's no interactive git branch because git uses work trees as an opinionated choice, which means this was kind of redundant before AI anyway...
Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.
In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.
I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.
On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.
I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.
The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.
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. It's really a pretty intense app. There's a lot of moving parts. It handles user data, so I have to make sure it's secure and high-Quality.
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 it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.
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 basically 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 (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). 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.
The issue is that I store user data. Also, the users of the app are a very privacy-sensitive demographic. That raises the stakes, considerably.
I can't just "vibe code" an app that does the same thing mine does. It needs to be vetted by a good native Android developer that I trust, and that gets expensive.
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 exactly 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.
1 combines with 2 because you can think about what changes to make to your code, and then that changed version runs. This is different from instructing an LLM to change something for you, where you have no insight in the underlying artifact being changed, or can’t predict what and how exactly the LLM will change it.
1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential.
The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.
Those who are driven by Eros want to enjoy the duration of a process: to have a delicious meal, make love, plant and care for that tree, build that house, and live.
The adepts of Thanatos want things done right now: to get satiated, have an orgasm, shade away that damn Sun, cover their sorry asses from elements, and die.
I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.
I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.
For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.
Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
This article's note about game making 100% wrong, games are highly "complex" and there's a lot of iterative refinement and experimentation that is involved in "finding the fun." You can't just throw a pot of well liked mechanics together, because without balance or the right context it'll be flat. Also, unlike music where people often like something that's mostly derivative with some slight stylistic tweaks, if a game is derivative people will just keep playing the thing it's derived from.
The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with achievement and competence.
Why should I be measured by how well I do things. In fact do we think human value can be measured at all?
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 “technical” 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” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.
Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
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.
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.
Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.
I love how LLMs transformed my daily routine at work.
So far I have more time coding what I want and get paid for it while Claude writes the boring Spring 2 Crud for me.
If Claude is doing your job for you do you not worry that you won't be employed soon? Big tech eventually won't pay people to drink coffee and work on their personal projects while Claude does their work for them.
Yes a bit but I work in a highly regulated corporate environment in which Engineers spend around 30% of their time with actual coding and the rest is gathering undocumented and silo’d knowledge through endless meetings and alignments, designing business processes around regulation obstacles and legacy apps, agile overhead and of course MFA processes and role ordering.
Right now I don’t see much threat since it seems they have to dim down on autonomous workflows due to regulatory requirements and token costs.
I've had some form of this conversation several times in the past few months:
Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."
Them: "But I like writing code!"
Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.
Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.
None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
I have been developing software professionally for about 25 years now and worked on different code bases and for different companies. I was relatively enthousiastic when I started programming, but looking back I had my ups and downs when working as a software engineer. Things became repetitive and it is often mostly about shuffling data around. And especially the last few years I was wondering if I wanted to do this till my retirement. It was getting more and more boring.
Then AI arrived a few years ago and two years ago I was still in hybrid mode, so partially using AI to lookup some code or generate some stuff and doing old school coding by hand. Last year I got a new job and from day one I am doing all software development in AI. I never want to go back to the old way of developing everything by hand. So many ideas I had in the past would cost too much time and money to even try. Now I can try five different solutions for a feature in a single day and select the one that fits best.
I was influenced and learned also a lot from older developers who were in their 50s to be sort of proud on coding, but that is fading away very hard. I also don't see code as something personal anymore or something I should be proud of. But I am proud of what I can create with AI nowadays, functionally. And I also found out that I like the creativity of making things more than the often boring coding.
When I see the AI generated code I think it looks really really well written. Of course it helps to steer it with certain design patterns or solutions you prefer, that's the one skill that is actually very valueable to be able to prompt well.
In the end the most important thing for the business owner is that things are working, they mostly don't every care about your code.
> Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Yep, this is what I realised. I like solving a problem/fixing something. I am not really interested in hooking up a Go/Python/C# web service to a database for the umpteenth time.
I've been partially vibe-coding a new desktop environment for Linux and creating my own UI framework. I know how UI frameworks generally work, and I know how desktop environments generally work. What I want to do is build a DE that works well and fits my vision of how it should work functionally.
I am reasonable at C++ (I don't do it professionally). Do I want to spend 20 hours doing a load of UI boilerplate code in C++? No, I don't. I am sure I can do it, I've written UI frameworks before in other languages. But I get the machine to do all the boring stuff, and I develop the product. If the code it starts churning out is crap, I have the ability to fix it.
There seems to be a lot of crap about not being able to code after using AI for a few months. This is rubbish. I used to code when I was a kid in BBC BASIC and didn't for years, I then started coding again in my early 20s and all of the stuff I learned came back to me, and I was programming in Java. Same recently, I didn't program for about 4 months and had to program without the AI as the AI couldn't solve what I was doing, and I was fine.
I actually do enjoy writing code , it’s like a puzzle to be solved and I get a hit every time I solve it. But after we started generating all code with AI at work, I feel very inefficient writing code by hand on my hobby projects. I still do it but I have become too aware now of every little struggle, like a beginner, since I know I could just pull up a Claude session at any moment and get over with it by telling it as much as “finish this thing for me”. It will know exactly what I was doing just by looking at the working tree and likely won’t even need to ask questions. I also know that without asking AI for a review, I am almost certainly introducing bugs all over that the AI could prevent. And that my tests will never be as thorough as AI written tests. So I am not sure how long I will be able to keep writing even my hobby code by hand. Perhaps hand written code will become a super niche field for certain things and I will find a place where that is still needed, but that is pure speculation. From what I see right now, it’s a matter of a year or so for me to just not be able to endure the grind of writing code by hand even if I would like to. I think this will eventually catch up with everyone, not just me and most of the industry which already moved on to fully AI generated code… but even the last Mohicans, like the Zig guys, will have to eventually give up on their no ai stance.
Maybe a tangent, but I've gotten a lot of the joy back with 3D printing. You can just describe something, and Astra can model it in CAD extremely well. It usually takes a few iterations, and then you can just print it. I found that before, it would take days to build even simple models in Tinkercad - which while fun, was high enough friction that a lot of things would stay in the "ideas" folder - now I can have something real in an hour or two.
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.
So, so tired of these doom posts. Almost always these feel like they are from developers that felt like they were superior to others because of their ability to code or simply identified too deeply with writing code instead of solving problems with code. As for the issues listed here, I can't relate to any of them - I've been creating scripts, skills, improving user experiences, creating monitoring dashboards etc. for many of my co-workers that have given me more appreciation than I ever experienced in my career and trust me, nobody gives a damn that I used AI or thinks my knowledge has been "obsoleted", most people are just happy these solutions exist and make their lives easier. Edit: imo, this is the real "fuck it, make it anyway" approach to agentic coding.
I've tried finding a middleground with using coding agents. I mostly get them to show me documentation or examples of how to do something, rather than do the thing. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just ask opencode to make the change, but most times I do it myself. Has kept me happy
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.
Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
Generative AI reverts to the mean: Prose will be over explanatory and miss subtly that human expression normally hits. Same for software: LLMs have a natural tendency to modularize and sprout. You'll find yourself knee deep in enterprise fizz buzz hell [1]. If you're fine with a product that regresses to the mean, great, but what I find that isn't discussed here on hackernews is reason for being. By choosing to create you choose to exist. An LLM may very well be capable of generating _the mean_ of what you're trying to express, but without you consuming it, rewriting it, and ultimately learning it, your team and you are robbed of the ability to communicate and reason about a piece of crucial machinery.
So yes, fuck it, make it anyway, so that you can continue to exist and provide the communicative, engineering, and reasoning value that others still need from you.
I was never the "tinkerer" type of developer. I like learning, which is why I love the field. I like learning something that makes me feel stupid, and there is a lot of that in software.
I can't see how the tinkerers of the world who make unremarkable software expect to be pat on the back for making not very useful things. It's almost selfish in a way - just because you enjoy the process of creation doesn't mean that you should be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, nobody cares. If you do, great, but that's just you.
Basket weavers don't expect their baskets to be valuable to the world in a major way, so why should a tinkerer who spent 150 hours on a git branch switcher get to feel the opposite?
> 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.
I for one always found coding tedious and repetitive in general, it is fun at the beginning when you manage to validate an idea or produce an MVP, but then the chores begin and I have never enjoyed those.
So in my view LLMs empower creativity by letting me focus on the stuff that's more interesting
I largely agree with you and, at this moment, LLMs still have shortcomings that allow me to get into the weeds and solve some tricky problems now and then.
There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.
I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.
For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.
But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
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 related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
The reason for this is, I guess, all too familiar for anyone in a creative field: surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers, chewed up and regurgitated back to us like a mother feeding a baby bird with a subscription model. I have some hope for my friends in other artistic fields; AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.
I'm so f*cking tired of this wrong opinion and the Reality Distortion Field that's been set up to force people to pretend that it's true.
Traditional art is still valued. Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. And even some bad AI art is actually a good idea that needs a few talented friends to make happen traditionally - but no one would ever see the vision without the terrible AI rough draft. There is room for all of it, and I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol.
And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize; the people who want to replace you with AI will replace you with cheap outsourced labor instead, if you let them. AI isn't the problem.
I don't think his assertion is true at all. AI art can be quite good. I asked ChatGPT to make a painting that looks like it should be in a museum and the output was damn good. I couldn't find anything that would tip me off like I can with some AI writing. No idea how something like that would be embarrassing to look at.
And music. There are youtube channels for AI house music playlists that sound pretty damn good.
I guess if you're a high level art critic you might be able to easily see that some of this stuff is not good.
Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
”Fuck it, make it anyway“ is absolutely the best advice I can give to programmers going through the crisis. Just make something that people want and you may find the joy of building again.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with
It is one thing to have compassion for artists as their livelihoods become threatened, but this sort of rhetoric makes me think the writer is too blinded by their emotions to have an accurate opinion of the current state of image gen. Much of what can be produced by eg. the openai's image 2.5 model is more-or-less indistinguishable from a person's work.
This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me.
The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.
I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.
Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.
Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.
That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).
Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
Taking your advice to heart -- fuck it, I'll make my software and art with generative AI assistence despite any possible backlash :)
It's also ironic how the "every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years" sentence applies to author of the article as well. The ego, luddism, and fear of change is real.
This resonated with me incredibly heavily. I will say one thing, i've adopted LLM tools fairly heavily for various things. But im doing so on my terms and strictly using them in a way that to me enhances my rigorous understanding of a given system.
Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle
I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
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.
"I am making shoes with a hammer and some leather but this Nike shop just opened next to me and got me nervous, let's see what the future holds for me, I'll keep hammering nails to this sole as pure artisans do..."
> 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?
> Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
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).
This is interesting because where he says "I take no pleasure in the results", I'm split. Sometimes I make something of no lasting value and feel no pleasure. Sometimes I use my context and creativity to ask for a result, and when the model one-shots it, I take a lot of pleasure in getting the result I want and need in that moment.
Finest Buggywhip Maker in the Land Whinges About Those New-Fangled Automobubbles, Take #7642
It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.
I have pondered whether our career/hobby will eventually be like equestrian activities. Horses or walking were basically the only options for land traversal for thousands of years. Now, horseback riding is nothing more than a hobby or sport. I grew up on a horse farm and rode a lot in my youth. I can't say the skill has ever truly been useful, but it was fun for a time.
No matter how good AI gets, I believe I will always program by hand to some degree. I really enjoy the activity, and most of all, I have enjoyed the learning and composition aspect. Programming by hand might not be useful, but like most hobbies, that does not really matter at the end of the day.
in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
I've noticed that delivery drivers are always racing around like their lives depend on it? Why do they do that? Because they are given workloads that are impossible to complete without racing. But what if it just didn't race? Their employers would be forced to hire more drivers, or increase the cost of delivery. By racing they are just building a rod for their own backs.
I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think.
I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.
> surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers
Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.
> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years
Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.
> peer pressure is very real
Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.
> even disregarding all the environmental
The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.
> It isn’t fun for me
I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.
> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day
I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!
> 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
Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.
> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI
That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?
> there are only really three paths open to me
This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.
I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!
But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.
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.
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.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.
I don't like AI, but AI generated images have use cases. For instance, if you program a browser game but you lack human artists. Then AI generated images can be useful. Many of these images suck and feel misplaced, but some are quite nice, so I don't think it applies to all of AI generated content.
Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it.
I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.
How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?
Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.
As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.
I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.
What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?
Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?
There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.
Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.
I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.
Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.
I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.
We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.
If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.
Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.
An art analogy:
Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.
If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.
The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.
Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.
For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.
This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.
And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.
The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.
Edit:
The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.
I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.
That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.
Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
Below is an example convo leading to the the title phrase being used on the AI side of things. Programmers and systems engineers need to wake up to our collective responsibility. It is through putting our heads down that's leading to us not collectively organizing to put an end to systems of global domination & oppression. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with the power to create life-changing systems, it's time to just quit and go do something else. It's the most responsible path in that face of being unwilling to switch to building for liberation instead of for oppression. Everyone has their reasons, but the main one is a dependence on existing systems and ways of doing things instead of learning to build communities to care for us. I'm in the same boat. Anyway, we all need to collectively step up and realize that the military publicly acknowledges cyber warriors as their greatest asset means that we have a duty to protect the people with the tech we build, instead of continue driving enslavement to it. Check your beliefs...do they serve the standard deaths and need to evolve to center the conditions that sustain life?
"So do we finally resolve the issues of ecocide, genocides, pandemic, and mass systems of oppression?...
Or do we build another advancement of tech foote these hells to capture?
Remember: making the second thing will likely take us way closer to extinction."
"Which makes more money?"
"The first path likely kills money as we know it, so there's no comparison. Making the second one makes more money in the short term, but then extinction."
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.
So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure and have glided upon the surface of webdev for a few decades, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage!
Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:
https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake)
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.
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.
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?
> 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!
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.
I think the secondary fear is that the big salaries and great working conditions are a result of a scarcity that may be on its way out.
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.
Very off topic but I think you would highly enjoy watching the movie "Perfect Days (2023)" directed by Wim Wenders.
It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384
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 like using my mind too, just usually not on software engineering.
Most of us like to use our mind. Just some prefer not to on a boring and dull senseless corporate solutions. If they can.
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.
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 does not think they will produce 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
Hm “Bullshit Jobs” terminology by David Graeber seems appropriate here.
Of course, “produce value” is slightly different from meaningful jobs that Bullshit Jobs was referring to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
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.
I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html
What a great comment, I wanted to quote my favorite parts but would just have to quote the whole thing. The “I suffered so you must too otherwise you’re unworthy” is so on point. The people whose identity is tied to gatekeeping programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.
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.
>> 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.
For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they feel 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.
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.
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.
As a career? Almost certainly not but I do think I (and probably many others on hn) would still do it as a hobby
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.
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.
> assuming the risk of it all
scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.
> 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.
The non-technical people can learn or be forced to learn to keep their jobs and enough will succeed to devastate programmer employment.
> 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.
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
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.
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 promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.
¹ Probably including me.
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.
"has AI broken that stranglehold?"
Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.
> 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 wish I gave a shit about producing value for a company.
> 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.
> 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 produce 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 value necessary to pay 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.
I don't think that fully captures the situation.
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.
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?
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).
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 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 writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.
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.
Although Peter Norvig thought they should https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
> And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI?
Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists
Is that because they didn't type code on the keyboard? They still had to think of an idea, conceptualise it, work and prompt AI, test the results, alter things, work through problems, stick to a direction and bring about something from nothing.
Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
>Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute.
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.
Someone once told me
"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.
Interesting mix.
You contrast "like writing code" with "care little for status", but they are not the same things; as are having status, and caring about it.
I just see it as tool.
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 find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
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 love this articulation.
That's beautiful, and true.
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.
Filling your retirement with all those rainbows and unicorns nobody but you care is fine, but what do those who are not retired yet do?
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.
I think the IK comment is interesting.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
THAT, I believe, is what our craft truly is.
> 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
>It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it?
---
>have "problem"
>don't care
>have no problem
Life is literally so easy.
what craft though?
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.
If you can't see craft in programming, then you're most certainly fully replaceable by LLMs. And I mean fully.
The "no, but you see, the important part is what I do!" replies get really tiresome after a while.
> "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.
> books .. communicate something
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
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.
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 did. I did think I enjoyed the craft.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
A good question.
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.
> 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.
Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.
This is a tired non-analogy.
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.
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 engineering 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 a 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
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?
https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
Do they? It might have been true month ago, not sure right now.
Of course. Auto-vectorization isn't magic, for one. In any video codec, the hot kernels will all be in hand-written assembly.
Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.
I find it hard to believe that the output of modern compilers is objectively 'bad assembly'.
They are not saying the assembly is bad all the time, but merely that sometimes, for some inputs, the assembly is bad. Which is definitely true, though I would prefer the term "suboptimal."
Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
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.
Looks like teaching is about to become the "it" profession and might become insanely competitive.
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?
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.
[0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/
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.
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.
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.
Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do.
They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.
> 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
Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right!
I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell.
Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.
> 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.
Yep, calculator, etc.
A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI.
Share anecdotes and examples if you have any
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 (only as a stepping stone to full removal/prevention).
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.
Fack, hopefully it's better than Ikea vs carpenter or most people will need new jobs because most "customers" are just buying Ikea all day.
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.
There is an old saying in creative fields, long before AI: you can make art, or you can make money. It's rare that you can combine the two.
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.
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.
We're not so different, he and me.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Did you read the article?
Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.
The author specifically mentions the compliments on helpful scripts and tools help them feel fulfilled.
Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good.
With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.
Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.
Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.
If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.
And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.
The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.
Tons of opportunity at every corner.
> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
This is my experience as well. It gets worse when the LLMs have strong priors in subject matter adjacent to your novel work. The generated output will incorrectly pull towards things the LLM has seen in it’s training data.
Think we’re saying the same thing.
I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to.
But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out a W9 and emailing it to the user, cron jobs for digest emails. All very easy problems most LLMs can do. There are just countless tasks if you’re building a real SaaS and I don’t want to do them all.
The big problems LLMs can’t do are only as such because there’s no way to put it into a simple, linear instruction. Once you can though, it’s now an easy task (whether or not you use an LLM).
But yeah we’re saying the same thing - let the LLM do the 1000s of tedious tasks you normally wouldn’t be bothered to spend time on.
Build the entire SaaS (which is mostly that tedium) instead of just the MVP thing you need without any niceties. I find it opens up more opportunity, like for example, we are about to hire our first full-time employee because we’re taking on so much more business.
> There are 1000s of those tasks.
Yep.
Plenty of products attacked this tedium from different angles, from Ruby and Rails to Supabase. And half of NPM. Heck, more than half.
LLMs are doing it a bit better, IMO. I don't have to rewrite the app in <whatever> or install <horrible dependency> to take advantage of it.
what business are you in?
> The LLM easily excels
The agents are building all these small features, up to a full SaaS; and all the code is excellent?
How much time do you spend in code review?
You're not paying attention. There is no agentic. You use the LLM the way your tax man uses a calculator. It's back and forth all the time.
Ignore agentic stuff, that is marketing. Think about it anyway - why tf would it take all day, responses take seconds. There is no "leave it running" it's a fake concept
That's fine, but then the value of the tool evaporates. I agree you have to hold the LLM's hand so that it doesn't do crazy things, but that takes so much time that you don't actually save time over just writing it yourself. That is why I continue to maintain that LLMs are not a useful tool: either you completely give up on quality to get speed gains, or you maintain quality but get no speed gains.
You definitely save a ton of time over writing it yourself, just not as much time saved as “agentic” coding. I don’t do agentic coding either, I think it’s basically a scam. But using an LLM does mean creating stuff faster, much faster. The LLM can write 500 lines of code in seconds. That takes me hours.
I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.
A calculator does no design or review, so what exactly is the llm being used for, no metaphors or riddles please.
because to me this:
"Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts ... The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it."
Implies to me code gen.
That aside, are you a 'DidntUseIt' sockpuppet, given there are lots of green accounts responding on their behalf..
The "agentic" stuff has come a long way recently, it's worth revisiting it every few months, it is better and better at taking on the tedium especially.
The critical IP that isn’t in the weights yet, is often a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code. All the rest, surrounding code, is infrastructure that is indeed in the weights.
yea so many times i have asked my self if i am actually saving time on the actual hard stuff.
What is this real difficult stuff you speak of that only you can do and LLMs can not?
I don't have a concrete example, but it's probably the stuff that starts taking longer to describe in English than to code.
"Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way".
I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.)
But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.
This guy gets it.
HN should give you coldtea's rep. Just trade his and yours.
Write a decent comment, for one. It struggles with some of the firmware stuff I do, though that's more due to a lack of a proper automated feedback loop.
Yeah, it's generally the harness around the model that makes it useful.
Two recent examples I tried to get Sol/Opus to get help with, were they gave more misdirections than beinghelpful: Tracking down the root cause of a synchronization bug in a distributed platform using CRDTs, especially dumb around sequence CRDTs. Also had less fun using Sol/Opus for building and troubleshooting fractures and constraint networks in Houdini.
I'm sure these will be much better as soon as enough data is in the training set, as always. GPT models used to be horrible at electrical stuff as well, today Astra seems pretty OK at it. It changes as they keep extending what use cases are covered by training data and what they test for and so on.
I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.
Some people like _making_ things, and some people like making _things_.
Sound more like the latter group likes having things made for them, ideally without paying for it.
That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?
Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.
It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.
Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.
That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.
Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.
Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.
I think it's more like the latter group likes the dopamine hit brought on my getting attention from release stuff.
I never even said what the product is, it's for my job.
Maybe you get a dopamine hit from comments like that.
This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.
It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
It’s more work than before LLMs (but I get way more), but you're right that I don't pay since I run local models.
@dang @tomhow If you want to practice fairness for once in your lives
You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?
Never would have.
I love the argument that “AI code doesn’t feel like mine :(“ but you’ll use some shit library from 12 years ago??
Are any of you actually developers? Ffs
Who needs a SaaS when you can just ask AI to write a private one just made for you?
Most larger businesses are kinda resistant to building stuff in house since it means that stuff has to be owned and maintained for as long as its needed (possibly decades) and you can't just rely on a SLA and the legal team to ensure things are working in perpetuity.
The danger of vibe coded SaaS:es isn't the customer building the thing themselves, but that the increased competition drives down the profit margin.
There is a small web service I need with a price tag of $39 one time payment. I’m current doing it myself for the last 1.5 hours, because I thought it would be fun. 2 minutes ago I upgraded to $120 subscription of Codex.
Reasonable thing was to pay $39 and forget about it.
As much as I hate subscriptions, one time payment for ongoing access to a web service never lasts.
At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
"not everybody" vs "50 year old business guys...months of focused chats" - I don't think you're really disagreeing here? That's also a niche population. One that knows their domain very well, absolutely, personally I think it's cool that they can DIY what they need. But still a niche population. That's not your proverbial 20year old kid right out of school with ADHD pumping out world class software.
Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
No they don't know the domain at all. I think one of the startups brings in around $10K a month now. They know nothing about the domain only that it brings in money (i.e. they run thousands of startup "tests" and this one seemed to be easiest to make money from), and even less about code (have no idea what a variable is).
I just think devs are coping by thinking that saas startups have any barrier to entry at all. You are now competing with every single person on the planet who wants to make money sitting at home on a computer, and likely the business guy with zero skill or craftsmanship is going to beat you. The only thing with barrier to entry is insanely complex software (e.g., what used to take a genius team of 10 multiple years to make) and or more creative software like video games (where you need extreme care and taste to get something anyone will look at for > 2 hours).
Average saas products require no skill or craftsmanship and literally anyone including our grandmas can make it (assuming they will take a few months at least to chat with an LLM). To be clear I think this is great! More better software, people with smaller needs can have llms build it for them totally bespoke. For those of us with skills we have to move WAY out of our old comfort zone and make way cooler things, a standard saas that takes a few months isn't something we should waste our time on anymore.
Yeah. This makes sense. Someone who can dedicate a lot of time to scaling a SaaS serving many customers are helped a lot by AI. I believe busy professionals who already have successful businesses won't have the focus to build a one-off solution for their own needs a lot of the time.
> Aside - is AI still DIY?
No, it's not at all DIY. I cringe any time I see someone say "I made X" and it's vibe coded, because they haven't actually made anything.
Is every 50 year old business guy doing it? If not then OPs comment holds. He said not everyone can, not that only devs can use it, which is true.
This is like the "Now everyone can just 3D print little widgets they need!" sentiment. Approximately no one is going to do this.
Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.
Software is fine as a product, it is when it becomes a service that it sucks
People pay for good tools. Tools help create value, and if they are good at creating value the toolmaker should be compensated.
If so, people can just pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They are great toolmakers.
This is exactly how it works. I said “AI make it rain” and now I run multiple international businesses.
>Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS.
Just what the world needed. 100s new SaaS churned by AI.
I hope the 100 new SaaS churned by AI gets swallowed by 1000 internal SaaS churned by AIs.
I'm frankly tired of SaaS.
3 responses, all from green accounts basically hurling the same vitriol at you.
Has someone gone and made 3 accounts to make it seem like their take is more popular?
Yes, and they’re being a bit too obvious about it.
I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone.
And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.
Yeah sure, let's go and vibe code your own e-signing solution with Claude. Sure you can do it, LLMs never say no but if someone with actual e-signing expertise would start probing the LLM about what it actually did I'm sure we would see a lof of "Actually you're right to push back", "You're right that was entirely wrong, that's on me!", "Fair point, I did not consider that"... LLMs are still a joke when it comes to implementing complex software where domain knowledge and "precision" is important, maybe some day they will be able to do that but we're not there. If they were good at precision and consistency and thinking we would see tons of high quality LLM written novels and books as well, but all we see is utter garbage that no one considers literature. In the same vein, unsupervised vibe-coded software isn't real software to me, it's garbage. You can produce high quality software with LLMs, but definitely not as an amateur without domain knowledge just prompting your way to something that resembles working software.
I find people that are the "unconscious incompetence" stage of software development absolutely love them because they produce output that looks fine to them and they can't find anything wrong with it because they simply lack the ability to perceive quality. For a contact widget that might be acceptable as it will be used a few dozen times so who cares if it breaks, but let's not pretend you can actually build a compliant e-signing or invoicing software without having domain expertise and investing a ton of editing/revision time.
Put more bluntly, a domain expert that, as of currently, refuses to use LLMs can easily start using LLMs in their work, an idiot who uses LLMs cannot easily become a domain expert. Now let's think about who you would rather hire or who do you think will have the better future career outlook. Pretty damning how many people here are willing to reject the idea that domain expertise or ability to write program code yourself is a waste of resources.
I built the e-signing experience at DocuSign in 2012 in Node/Backbone, and later became a licensed background check investigator when I built Uber and DoorDash’s background check SDK that is used over 1 million times per year.
Am I allowed to use Mistral 7b locally to build W9 automation or do I still need your permission?
Lol this site!!!!
Amazing how someone with your experience can have such poor reading comprehension. He never said anything about permission to use llms. They are saying that to a domain expert like you, you can effectively use LLMs because you will be more likely to spot issues and thus guide it better given your background in the domain. He is saying that some biz bro who know nothing about docusign and esigning who decides one day to use LLMs to create software in that domain is likely to produce working, but buggy and non-compliant software.
As a non expert in a domain, LLMs can seem amazing because you don’t know the field therefore have a harder time spotting errors. As an expert they seem pretty dumb or they’re useful as long as you guide them. It’s akin to Cory Doctorow’s argument about the reverse centaur.
You did a wonderful job of constructing a strawman and DESTROYING it in your comment! AI can't build an e-signing solution, but you, the expert of experts, can do it! Good job!
> file sharing
> LLMs
It’s probably worth doing a very thorough audit of how you’re handling user-uploaded files, it’s full of non-obvious footguns.
I bet you don’t know the MIME type for MS Word doc off the top of your head. Do you?
So why would I take your advice on this topic?
I bet there are 1000 other things you don’t know about file uploads.
The LLM does know, and if I think it looks weird I can research it manually.
It’s called: Being of normal functioning intelligence
And caring about the product and the work (and the money!)
Off the top of my head, I know there's more than one ;)
These replies remind me of why I never share information on this stupid website!
Worst people here
Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of:
1. Things I enjoy doing.
2. Things I am good at doing.
3. Things people value me doing.
The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.
The world isn't going to change back, so our task is to figure out the new intersection. This is always hard work, and I have no easy answers.
There seems to be two kinds of people whenever this conversation comes up.
If I take an analogy of two kinds of people who visit Yosemite National Park, person A would refuse to see Glacier Point unless they embark on the long all day hike themselves, while person B would happily drive to the parking lot, get out, take photos with their families and admire the view.
Either person cannot understand the other's, and yet both people will go out of their way to make the other one feel guilty for their approach if pushed.
When they built the parking lot and the roads to get there, it probably upset a lot of people at the time (only speculating). Yet, the park invests and maintains the hiking trails just as well. So if anything, the park takes the very human opinion that you should take the option that works for you, because the view is worth it.
The people who are investing in machine learning are OBSESSED with efficiency. Where I would say, v1 of Co-pilot was entirely conceived as an AI system meant to help ME as a software engineer, claude code is entirely conceived and built to replace ME as a software engineer.
Where co-pilot was a choice that I made, and willingly enabled in my workflow, claude code was forced on me by my employer. In my entire long career, we were always given autonomy to decide what tools and systems we needed to get our jobs done. This was the first time it felt like a few invisible power brokers at the top decided for me.
Anyway, my point in all this ranting, is that, unlike national parks that go out of their way to be accessible for everyone, generative AI has firmly sided with one kind of person's life philosophy at the expense of the others, yet we all still have to work together. Change is hard for sure.
I find that Camp B is a lot more likely to not understand Camp A than the other way around. Both enjoy the outcome of "we made something cool", but Camp A more heavily values the journey to get there, and many in that camp aren't particularly bothered if they didn't actually get there if the journey was good. Camp B was never interested in the journey but absolutely wants an outcome. Unfortunately, the voices of Camp B seem a lot louder, and Camp A can come off like old farts.
The thing about your analogy is that the person in Camp B might seem a bit silly to most people at face value. Even your average person values doing a bit more than sticking to the parking lot in a beautiful national park they may not visit again for decades. The reason I bring this up is that I personally don't begrudge Camp B. How can I not sympathize with people who want to shape reality to their imagination? I understand that.
Where I divorce from Camp B is on the idea that the process behind developing the architecture and the code software is inherently a roadblock and essentially has no value. They produce these specious claims like "code was never the hard part" because they view code as something completely separate from the thing the code produces, which was simply not true because the very nature of code is in describing the thing that it's implementing. The typical Camp B mindset seems to misunderstand or hate this fact of reality, and many of them don't even seem to get that other human minds have other perfectly valid objectives behind the things that they do. There is nothing wrong with becoming a programmer because you enjoy and thrive in the process in writing software, but even before LLMs, we have been increasingly infantilizing that desire because it's not seen as productive or obviously revenue producing. Valuing the process is viewed by outsiders as dilly-dallying when, in actuality, many of the greatest things in not just computer programming but technology and science have been a result of Camp A people investing effort in exploring and executing theory that Camp B has no interest in.
This is why I get pissed off when I hear that "code was never the hard part." It's like, screw you people, my job being paid to write code to satisfy the requirements of my employer/customer was and is hard. What's changed are the requirements; the new requirements are to not give a fuck about quality and sustainability and to maximize speed at which boxes can be ticked for project management. This doesn't mean that making software that's not a piece of shit isn't still a hard problem. There's a dearth of projects built with AI in the last 3 years, the vast majority of which are polished turds that have been completely abandoned by their authors. What does that tell you?
Camp B should, by all means, go ahead and do their thing. I think it's great that technology has made it possible for someone to build an app or a site with no background knowledge or hiring of contractors. What they don't deserve is disrespect Camp A and talk down to them because they find programming to be a nuisance.
> No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.
As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us.
On you other two points: I kinda feel you, but I'm finding ways of enjoying my work with AI. It's been a bit of a shift and I'm still adjusting probably, but it feels like it's getting better. I never really enjoyed "typing" code, but the creative process of designing solutions and building the. And I never thought typing was the "building" part, it was just an unavoidable mechanical "obstacle" (not using the word obstacle as a bad thing necessarily, but idk it's just typing you know?)
Yes--I very much agree with you, and that's what I mean about finding a new intersection.
The job-part of the Venn diagram is, I think, hardest for people because we can't control what companies pay for. I agree that software engineering, as a profession, will continue, but I don't think there will be many jobs that pay you to (e.g.) write C++ by hand.
The trick is finding that new intersection. I actually agree with you that the creative process is the important part--as long as I'm creating, I don't care whether I'm typing code or not.
But I also get that for some people, the typing (or the thinking about what to type) is the important part. They are having a hard time finding the new intersection.
I miss the emotional and problem-solving nature of software development. I am reading classic literature and feel good about it after long hours watching AI generated content. Knowing a person chose every word changes how it feels to read.
>> But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway?
Well, I think the issue is that most people, even software developers, don't have the luxury of choosing. Everyone needs to put food on the table, and often times that involves working for companies one dislikes or even hates. The problem is now those companies are turning to AI.
Couldn't disagree more. Here's how I look at it as a person who wrote my code by hand for 15 years. I'm the owner of my own small bootstrapped startup.
1. I've always been enjoyed delivering solutions more than the actual process of programming, and AI just helps me deliver more of that faster. And for the actual process of programming, I found a way of working with AI that makes it enjoyable. I've built my own AI agent coordinator and harness which works the way I want it to. I enjoy working with AI in that harness.
2. It is completely false that you cannot prompt the AI any better than anybody else. The likes of Terrence Tao can prompt ChatGPT to solve Millennium Prize problems in math. But I'm not a professional mathematician, so I cannot do that. Generally speaking, the more deep technical knowledge you have, the stronger prompts you can write because an amateur doesn't even know what to potentially improve. Actual real world productivity with AI is still strongly correlated with deep technical knowledge and experience, and I expect it to stay that way. This has nothing to do with AI capabilities, which I expect will keep gettinf better. This has to do with the fundamental definition of a problem requires expertise to handle it.
3. Jevons paradox suggests that the fact that building software has become cheap now may only increase demand, not decrease it. Sure, traditional software engineering jobs may not look the same. But AI has made it possible to build so many kinds of software that I would have never considered before. Like, for example, I built my own email client, which works exactly the way I want it to. Imagine every company starts building their own operating system, email client, and CRM. I can easily see that happening, and I can actually see it as a net positive as well as a fun thing to watch. And only an increase in job opportunities.
I actually think we agree. My point isn't that "we're all screwed". I do use and like AI, and I don't want to go backwards. My point is that every bubble in the Venn diagram is changing.
You're absolutely right about how each bubble is still there. But they are a different shape now, and the intersection isn't where it used to be. Some of us are still in the intersection; others are not.
Any advice on how to use or not use AI?
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.
>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
I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.
> I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app
You might not be aware of this, but you've answered the question - just indirectly.
You're selling an app, but don't want to share any details, or even name it?
Call me suspicious.
He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.
I said I'm hoping to complete it this month and I already shared some details.
Should I post my market and keyword research too, here on this site for software developers and entrepreneurs?
It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you.
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
> I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
I'm afraid your hundreds of hours of prompting will reduce to "clone this product, here are 200 screenshots of every screen."
I don't understand why people aren't getting this: there is no skill in prompting! The CC leak literally showed Anthropic engineers developing Claude with broken half-english prompts like "gud, now make better".
A conundrum I see is that once someone releases a “solution” to a problem, it becomes much easier for someone else to come up with prompts to have AI make a clone of that solution.
Basically, the moat for many products is disappearing, and it would be relatively cheap for someone to make a clone that undercuts the cost of the first to market. The original product is charging $2? Cool, the clone will cost $1 - maybe it’s not as good due to less QA, but consumers will see the lower price and buy it.
That's the thing. The moment you publish, the design you spent 100s of hours on also becomes public, at which point it becomes entirely replicable with little to no recourse. Hence the theme of this entire thread: a devaluement spiral.
Hundreds of hours doing what? If you're not reviewing the code, then what are you doing, just planning features? Because that would be trivial to copy in a fraction of the time by just feeding screenshots of your app to one's AI of choice.
Yes, and a lot of QA testing.
Ignore the "dropbox-in-a-weekend" trolls, they're just nosy. Your project sounds interesting, good luck.
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.
The physics of the car tires in vice city by themselves outweigh 99% of all apps in terms of complexity and features…
I feel you need to clarify which mobile apps are "medium-sized" for you, because if we just interpret this comment literally it's just laughable.
> 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.
Altcoins - the snowball lying in wake. Bitcoins were crap too at one point but they have stood the test of time and obscurity. It's about going from HODL'ing to spending for dear life. Something like that anyway. Maybe 3+ years to go before any serious price movement because of dumping pressure being so high from pre-miners and the like. No idea.
Me too I use my apps every day. But the main thing coming out of this is that they are tailored to me. Turning hobbies into hustles is one of the worse things that happened in the post social media days.
I think selling software that solves your own problems is great and beats trying to develop for customers you do not understand.
Completely agree. You tell the best story for your product doing it that way.
AI has really revealed the programmers who were temporarily inconvenienced idea guys
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?
Because a lot of people enjoy the process. Why do you think people so wood working as hobby or the whole demo scene?
Not the case here. When I was young I dabbled in reverse engineering and hacking games for example.
I don't think I am less of a 'hacker' or programmer than the next person on HN.
Same here. Loved hacking on things from all angles, still do. The only thing lost to me now is the yak shaving, and good riddance. I want to think in systems, solutions, integration, and first and foremost the higher level problem, not nitty gritty implementation details.
Ever since Fable and Sol level LLMs/agents came online, I have ceased to look at the code. I recently launched a project for a client that integrated many many systems, has considerable traffic with low latency requirements and everything just.. works. I've never had to do this little firefighting when launching a project of that complexity and scale. It's been liberating and I was able to focus mostly on polish and QoL improvements of the stack and systems. What a time to be alive for a technical builder.
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.
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 find that it falls apart after the first 1000 or so lines.
I used to think this but then improved and found that it was a matter of tooling. Using beads[1] and getting the AI to write its own tickets and wiki articles using GitHub's wiki feature on repos, it can keep track of long horizon projects pretty easily. Then you curate some of the tickets or read through them and have them update the beads or adjust them as they work them. When they want to retain some important piece of knowledge you have them add it to the GitHub repo wiki.
Modern AI programming looks an awful lot like traditional product owner or product management roles.
1: https://beads.gascity.com/
I’m not into the personal wiki thing, let alone an AI wiki. This feels like productivity porn.
Then you're really really bad at using it. At the very least it is functional with minimal effort on codebases with 10s of thounsand
Or what happens is that after 1000 lines there are hundreds of decisions it would have to consider to do anything and it doesn’t do that and instead finds the smallest path to insert its latest request.
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.
>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 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.
the headline isn't exactly bait but it doesn't exactly set reasonable expectations for the content that follows.
the common thread in similar post is that some folks are struggling with _feelings_ and nothing more. valid feelings set off by real and major changes to the very ground they stand on, I guess, but these feelings are ultimately distractions that can paralysis.
The other common thread is these folks are obviously smarter and more accomplished than I am by magnitudes and they're the first ones I'd expect to pull smart (maybe even inspiring) pivots
Programming is fun but it's also about learning to do things and trying out ideas that you have about how to organise something and make it work well - becoming a master of some craft.
If you don't care about programming but just problem solving...or you think all of this is irrelevant to "the customer" then AI might make you happy.
Can you imagine, for example, if Tolkien (insert favorite writer here) had to get AI to write Lord of the Rings for him: what would happen? How would he get it to express his idea? In order to make money he could just describe a few ways of expressing things and outline his plot and ..... wham. He could then make it write an Icosology (series of 20 books - I had to look it up) and we'd all be so happy right?
The fantasy genre that followed LoTR is almost like that! :-)
I don't love control so much that I want to write in assembler and I don't like it so little that I want to make everything by effectively trying to tell someone else how to do it for me and finding that they just don't understand. I think the expression of the idea matters sometimes much more than even the idea and since words are not 100% effective at communicating ideas any language based description is going to be a lot of effort.
So like everyone else I use it but for things I don't care about - things which are a stepping stone to something else. I also use it for things I don't understand and I feel delightfully empowered at how something super hard turned out easy....until it doesn't work properly.
This.
This is more or less precisely how I feel. Other creative fields have already begun to get a handle on how AI is a soul-deadening thief of joy in their fields. I have hope for illustrators and painters and photographers and musicians and makers. With those friends and in those communities I see people who have already done the thinking, can already express their feelings, and are already making commitments to do work in ways that defend them.
The software development industry has still to reckon with the extent to which it is punching itself in the face, and it is precisely because AI does have at least some utility in software, precisely because some of the final form necessarily a cognitive 50% grey, even just for interoperability alone.
I don't know. Maybe it's the people doing software dev that are yet to reckon with it to a degree -- or have found themselves on opposite sides of denial.
I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line. At the end, that's all that matters to them. That SWEs cannot, say, unionize to prevent this shift in labor-elimination or articulate any other coherent way of countering the industry's desire to push forward with AI-assisted coding, shows me that there's an understandable desire to preserve this golden egg of being a high paying SWE. But that ship is setting sail, and becoming rarefied.
> I think industry is quite clear that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
I don't really think there is very strong evidence that the ROI is good.
The problem is that the industry is riddled with FOMO and FUD: everyone thinks everyone else is using it so they must. And this FUD and FOMO is being imposed upon them from above: there is a mandate to be afraid and fearful you're not using AI enough.
Even I, a burned out freelancer who once used to be happiest writing code, have to accept that if I return to my career, I must develop ways to use AI to keep up with people who are clearly already using it indiscriminately (or at best over-optimistically). And I must develop ways to talk to potential clients about the aspects of indiscriminate AI use that they should care about, and about the value of stepping back from one-shotted ideas.
I am trying to operate without FOMO and to see past FUD, but I accept I am compelled to do that or quit.
I think SWEs can't unionize for very different reasons, and that if you hang out on HN long enough you will develop a deeper understanding about why. But I am not restarting that discussion beyond saying this, because it always makes my head hurt!
> No, I think the industry is hopeful that AI is helpful to their bottom line.
Practically speaking, what's the difference? :-/
This is an unfortunately salient point. :-/
You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change.
AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
> You're projecting,
No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist).
I listen to what people say and I talk with them about how they feel about it.
> AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs,
I fully, fully disagree. I think using AI images in this way — for collage or moodboard — is ruining the point. It dilutes the value. I do know some photographers who haven't yet figured this out, unfortunately, but they will. Letting an AI image into your collage or inspiration for another piece of work is just opting out of a creative choice; you might as well place a grey rectangle, because that is what it is.
> and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on
AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
AI content might have some value as placeholder but even then you have to be careful that the prototype does not go into production.
I'm also aware of someone who used AI images to generate a series of test prints for her new alternative process printing practice, precisely to make sure that her test prints never had any accidental value — it makes it essentially compulsory for her to destroy them when they have served their purpose.
I have no particular problem with them being used as a more varied alternative to a step wedge like that, but the point is this:
AI generated creative works have zero value. Anyone who is seriously involved in creativity knows that even replacing something that is working against you with something that has no value either way is probably a bad idea. And putting out work that has this absolute zero value does you more harm than bad work.
It's way better to try and fail than not to try. Think for example of all the ambitious, earnest failures of movies you've seen; would any of them have been materially improved by AI?
> AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
You were saying that you thought it was an "amazing" tool, and now you are saying it's like drug-assisted cheating? I think you still have some of the internal work to do.
> photographer
"Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it." -- The Crayon, one of the oldest art magazines.
It turns out humans have been devaluing the newer ways to create art since forever.
> you might as well place a grey rectangle
There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums. Here is a grey one: https://zandergalerie.com/exhibitions/la-couleur-du-renoncem...
This line comparing to photography is a trope, and IMO a category error.
> There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums.
Yes but you understand I wasn’t talking about the colour, right, but the absence of value.
All generative output is grey.
You're creating illusory boundaries to protect your ego. AI is not a supernatural category. It's just another thing. It can serve as inspiration the way anything else can.
You are not the arbiter of value in art, as much as you try to claim authority. You're just rationalizing your arbitrary beliefs.
I didn’t claim any authority. I just argued that I am informed and not projecting; I talk to actual working artists.
(My own work is amateur and probably shit; this is not about my creative ego)
You guys do like to read things that are not there so you can argue against them.
I don’t know any artist who has done any self-reflection about their work who thinks generative AI can do much for them at all.
At best it is tools like deep learning in upscaling and noise reduction, selection masking, separations etc. (I don’t mind AI selection tools; quite liked old style AI upscaling but I have moved away from it; I now think work should be produced with its reproduction limits in mind)
Nobody who has put in the creative ideation and self-reflection work and still wants to improve is going to tell you great things about generative AI. Because they know it is empty calories.
> AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
So, your answer to "people are doing a thing" is to just say "no they're not! NANANANA can't hear you!"
Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds, so your claim that AI outputs can't inspire artists is farcical.
You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
> Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds
I don't think you really understand how this very concept undermines your argument.
If I saw an artist making creative non-AI work critiquing AI, or even using AI to pointedly critique AI, I would feel differently about that.
But I don't think you understand the core concepts here at all.
> You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
This AI industry wizard-of-nihilism tosh gets so old. I am sure you think you're wise and informed and on some kind of nihilist high ground for saying it, though.
No wizardry involved friend, it's pretty clear to see from the way things are playing out now and the history of technological innovation/automation. You are 100% an old man waiving his fist at clouds/time, you will go down just like the scribes and the luddites and the buggy drivers and the portrait painters and the elevator operators. You can make arguments for preferring life before the change, but the change is happening and not accepting it is only self destructive.
And you thought you could criticise me on bias? :-) This is little more than tropes fresh from the blender.
(If you read many of my other posts, you will perhaps see that I am a bit more pragmatically engaged with AI than you suggest.)
I go to a lot of craft fairs and I've been seeing people using AI to make their banners or book covers or detail designs on mugs and such. Here are people playing a "support local creators" line and they won't support their own local graphic designers.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
Why do you care? If it's bad people won't buy it. If people buy it, it's only bad to you
In the craft fair case the issue is the tragedy of the commons.
If people come to think that all craft fairs are choked up with AI slop and Temu (literally) 3D printed flexi-dragons then it does enormous damage to the notion of art fairs as a place to see the work of artistic individuals; the whole category will die.
This could happen much sooner than the slop producing artists see a financial disincentive to attend, because their costs (time, materials, personal energies) are radically lower.
Like it or not, art communities need to have some chosen standards.
To be fair this is a much bigger concern for people who show at art fairs than people who simply attend, but the people who show at art fairs do need the support of their visitors in this.
Art fairs aren’t just unrestricted competitive capitalism; they are also cultural entities with norms.
Yes, I go to so many because my wife sells her novels at them.
There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredible youtube video about 3D printed (flexi-dragon etc.) slop at US craft fairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDPzHLDjYY
She is so exasperated by it that she's unable to draw a conclusion, and I think that is actually the biggest problem with creative dishonesty on this scale. It is numbing.
Everyone knows that it is happening, everyone is clear that it is bad. But there is a paradox: serious-minded artists do use tools, of course. They also have an instinct about ways tool use would be dishonest. But they are introspective and they are often aware that their pragmatic use of a tool might be another's dishonesty. And they want to be inclusive, to build their "scene".
So actually there is less speaking out about it directly than there might be. And what that enables is this ever worsening bad-faith use of low-effort tools. The fact that the people selling the flexi dragons at craft fairs just bought them in bulk on Temu is the hilarious exasperating end point of it.
I think AI has made it more urgent for artists to speak out, sooner.
It has made me even more acutely aware that even though I make my own tools for my own creative projects (lo-fi and niche photographic tools, mostly), the fact that bits are 3D printed is probably interesting only to me or to others who want to make their own tools for their own work; the fact that CAD and 3D printing liberated my idea from its prison in my brain is something I must not let myself think is an end goal. The end goal is elsewhere.
If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code.
The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.
I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.
LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.
>LLMs aren't even AI, […]
I am very curious to know what you classify as AI then. Do you mean that LLMs aren't artificial? Or aren't intelligent?
Are those important questions that need to be answered? Rather, you should be asking whether you could use backprop and NNs to create something other than text predictors. What have LLMs changed about your conception of intelligence?
As far as I can see, none of the hard problems of intelligence that we had a decade ago got touched. What LLMs ultimately changed is the way I see language. I've underestimated its power, and I will admit, the companies making these models went far further than I could have imagined with them.
But intelligence and AI have a high hurdle to clear, and it won't be done with LLMs.
Revealing the secrets of intelligence will involve new concepts and understanding that that we don't have now. LLMs will be helpful with the plumbing and as replacement for natural evolution, but not so much natural intelligence.
Just another person who thinks AI===AGI.
Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers.
What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world.
That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now.
The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI.
I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.
It's 4G all over again
You don't know what AI means
This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change.
The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.
OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”
The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.
You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less.
I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks.
Do you actually believe that people don’t know whether they are enjoying a task or not?
The problem is that you're not putting as much effort into building things with AI as you were by hand. If you were, it would still be satisfying
I think this might be true, but I think it's because it's more difficult to saturate my thinking capacity when building with AI rather than just laziness (which I am reading as the implication of your comment, perhaps incorrectly).
Building with AI requires spending time on non-thinking tasks like stopping the AI from doing stupid stuff, loading context from different tasks when working on multiple things in parallel, and waiting for responses when not working on multiple things in parallel. With manual programming, though, you have a single task in front of you and are fully focused on that task. In that task, there are innumerable micro-tasks that you handle sequentially which each require some thinking: how to organize code to be readable in the future, working out the logic of a sequence of if statements, deciding on types to use, etc.
AI handles all those micro-decisions for you which yes, might free up your mind to think about higher-level problems (to the extent that you don't spend your time deslopping AI output), but also requires a very different style of thinking that is at least for me, much less natural and much less enjoyable.
> And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
Maybe not. Look up Jevons paradox. Maybe software engineering was a bit overvalued before, anyway. And now it'll come down a bit. But I don't think the job is going to go away. It will just become a little bit less high paid.
Holy projection what a sad small little outlook
"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."
I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.
If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.
This is the first comment in this thread that adequately captures how I feel. If I spend a weekend working on a project, there are two equal parts that make it worth my time: enjoying the process, and enjoying the final result.
It's inevitable (no matter how much you enjoy programming) that you will run into frustrating parts of working on code. If at the end of that process, you end up with a product that you know could have been better if LLMs were used, its a shitty feeling and makes it harder to power through the frustrating parts of the work.
Then why wouldn't you build it with AI?
Because for many people, building stuff with AI isn't enjoyable
> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)
But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).
Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.
So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.
(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)
Using LLMs to write code is only boring if you're only trying to make the same boring things you were capable of doing when writing it by hand.
You're going to probably be downvoted because the truth is hard and the collective human ego is self-reinforcing, but I think you are correct.
'Quality' is a function of filling in the gaps of the new tools, not eschewing them entirely.
A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.
The Bobs are coming.
"What is it, would you say, you actually do here?"
:)
"You didn't build that house, your hammer did"
> the output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces.
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.
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.
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.
You didn't bring anything to life. You just described it.
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.
No you're just drawing a new arbitrary distinction
Completely arbitrary distinction. Effort is not more valuable than the results of the effort. This is a mindset that will keep you trapped.
We’re all middle managers now
"You didn't bring anything to life. You just described how it should be done by the computer using code. The CPU is doing the real work!"
"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."
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.
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
Or like going to the gym but using a forklift to lift the weights. Yes, barbells are traveling up and down, but is that the point of going to the gym?
Everyone working in warehouses should stop using forklifts and use their hands like real creatives!
Bad example. This is analogous to people prompting an LLM to "generate code for the sake of it" which of course nobody is doing.
Let the LLM do the 80% and then you take all the credit by decorating the code in your style.
What’s intellectually “mine” is the task anyway, not the code.
You should be able to strip all the creative intelligence out of the code and what you’d have there is a prompt.
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.
My first thought after reading this was, good for this person to have only been broken, or nearly broken, I guess, by society finally now.
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
Hah, I think I agree with this, but from a cynical, dark perspective.
I'm an old systems programmer (embedded, c/c++, linux, etc) with an EE background (but not one of them if you know what I mean. I enjoyed software and appreciate the art). But early on I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project. If you want that, great, go write code on your own time(as many of us do!). But on the job I often get annoyed by folks who don't want to do the obviously correct thing, or want to fight against good refactoring or design feedback (usually not from me.. I'm like a 'B' tier programmer and in awe of the 'A' level I work with). People treat software as an art and while you want to be artful in execution, if you are a paid artist, it is a commission work. Honor the requirements of the company (business needs) and not just your personal feelings and desire to only make art.
> I came to believe software engineering at a workplace is not your personal art project.
The minute I also realized this, I moved out of software development into a different function. Pooping out lines of ugly code full of compromises was just not my thing. If I was still coding for work when AI came around, that would have definitely pushed me out of the career.
So what's your function now?
I dabbled in product management and then went over to project management. I figure at least here, making compromises and negotiating with people is a specific requirement of the job, and not a shortcut to being able to produce Moar Output Faster.
Yeah I agree but I think the question these days isn't about the workplace anymore, it's about the meaning and value of human endeavor.
Once upon a time, horsemanship had real value. Knowing how to care for a horse, how to breed, how to train, how to ride. Everybody had horses. Then the auto came.
And so it will be with software. And just as autos are more complicated than feeding an animal, ai generated code will be complex,less understandable and more prone to failures.
If the pc is a bicycle for the mind, ai is its self driving tesla
There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby.
Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.
Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.
I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.
Yep. I'm feeling the same way... even though I'm hardly able to use AI at work, the push is still there for us to use it, making it even more frustrating. Anyway, I hate it, and I'm just sorta phoning it in now and trying to find something else to do. I'm cynical too and feel there is no point to upskilling and using AI for everything, 'cos it's not going to help you keep your job for very much longer than the people that don't use it.
My love for the craft has been slowly dwindling for the last 15 years but since AI it’s totally crashed. I’m still doing it for the paycheck but not much of it is enjoyable at this point
Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me?
If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike instead. But I like cycling. I'm not going to stop liking cycling just because someone made a robot that also can do cycling.
It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age.
(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)
It's called metaphor. Please reserve your erm akshully's for someone else.
That appears to be using your metaphor and pointing out how being a cyclist and using an e-bike aren’t mutually exclusive. (I do know multiple avid cyclists that own e-bikes as one of several bikes they own and ride).
Ripping off the metaphor for a moment, it was basically extending what you said to point out that being a coder and using LLMs aren’t mutually exclusive.
(Asking them to reserve erm akshully’s for someone else came across as rather dismissive sounding of their thoughts, which from a former bystander in this thread appeared legitimate and just a continuation of using your own metaphor).
It's actually a valid extension of your metaphor that introduces nuance that substantially weakens your point
For some reason makes me think about replicators, and I found this article: https://columbusunderground.com/next-abundance-ds1/
There is plenty of others, but the idea of being post-scarcity of information creation/software seems akin to how Star Trek had replicators. They used them for sure, but there was still people who wanted to cook/create by hand, as an expression.
I use LLMs at work. I'm expected to and paid to show up and do that, so I do it.
But I refuse to leave understanding the codebase to machines. I did that the other day as an exception and fortunately my reviewer picked up on things which weren't exactly broken - just redundant and inelegant - e.g. two variables which easily could have been one, passed between several methods.
We have an automatic reviewer as well and there wasn't even a peep from it regarding any of that.
And this is really the crux of the issue - LLMs won't ever create elegant and minimal code, because their style is based on the mean, which in turn is dominated by the work of people who shit out a lot of working, but write-only code.
> their style is based on the mean
A base model that has only been pre-trained has output that is based on the mean, but most advances in capability the last three years have come from post-training. The influence of RL dominates every observable characteristic of coding agents today and steers the model towards strategies and practices that are objectively successful for the LLM.
I think the best code for an LLM is different than the best code for a human. Lots of redundancy, lots of unnecessary and overly defensive code is being reinforced by their training because it is successful there.
They still take it to far and do all kinds of stupid shit - if you look at the code you'll see it all the time but it actually doesn't cause many problems. Its much more important to focus steering effort on feature scope and architecture. I still ask it to refactor code from time to time and its pretty good at doing that.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Writing code used to force you to understand it, but now the former doesn’t guarantee the latter. And most attempts to replicate the latter in other ways (more reviews, self-quizzes, etc) seem to be far less effective at producing deep understanding.
Same boat, same reasons.
Skills not exercised degrade as well, if you don't actually write code then your skill at reading and interpretting it degrades, you just become a "looks good" step.
In theory if disciplined enough you could resist that but our brains seem to take the lazy path whenever it is offered, thinking hard and focussing are a skill and one I don't feel is been exercised when using AI.
You're just bad at using LLMs
IMO there's more than one valid reason to make things.
Some people make things from a pragmatic standpoint - they need a solution in a space where the existing solutions don't fit for some reason, and they decide to make their own. This is, I think, the majority of generative AI coding. A solution needs to be filled, and even if you are an amazing coder, for most of the solution space, AI is going to be faster than you. Your code might be more elegant, but not every problem requires elegance. Sometimes, it just needs to work.
Other people do it for the love of the game. The enjoy solving problems, crafting code, and finding optimum and elegant solutions to problems. This isn't pragmatism, or even close. It's craftwork by masters, or apprentices who want to be masters, and they wouldn't use AI to produce the work any more than they'd ask another human to do it - that would be cross purposes to their goal, which is to do the making.
Both are valid and there should be no shame in either, but I think people confuse the two and the disparity between them causes friction. When you judge a person's work in one paradigm by the other, you're bound to offend and distress them.
This attitude is pure punk! I couldn't agree more. The reason is statistics: even if LLMs can do a lot, they still rather interpolate than extrapolate. They do not excel, they average out. They deliver what is anticipated. So if you love a problem, if you have an intrinsic drive to solve something (like many of us do) - chances are high that you outperform what an LLM could achieve. I also believe as humans we shouldn't have to replicate redundant solutions but rather focus on deep dives, excel, push boundaries. And this is simply done by doing so for the sake of doing. This is art. So thank you for this statement, it made my day!
Art for art's sake, did not work for me.
I was planning to earn some money from my second Steam game. Than AI happened.
I did not gave up on because competition is now higher. I gave up because programming was fun for me, been at for 20 years. But right i always know in part of my brain 'this 1000 lines of code could have been just a prompt'.
Joy is not there for me anymore. I hope to get it back someday.
This means you don't enjoy making games, you enjoy coding
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.
Nobody is going to tell you you can't carve your own spoons, smith your own shoes for your horses, and grow your own wheat for your own bread. Just don't blame the people who care more about eating bread than scything wheat.
There is nothing stopping anyone doing things their way, LLMs or not.
I suppose you can balance between using them if the paycheck job is asking for them, and enjoy your craft outside your 9-5.
I’ve been reading more and more of this tone, and I do wonder what those devs writing these blogs do and where do they work. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years, and the challenge was never the cording, it was always the human communication and understanding the outcome.
Yes LLMs can help none devs create things now, but show me a company that will allow AI generated code by none devs to go to prod.
I started a Janet project [1] with the express purpose of doing everything manually for fun, but I ended up using the agent for a lot of stuff pretty quickly anyway. Functions I wanted to be part of the library as a matter of completion, but that were not fun to write. Docs as well. Stuff I probably wouldn't have written in the first place if AI didn't exist.
It reinforced in my head this idea that hobby programming is entering its "sports" or "running" era.
Consider the modern jogging enthusiast. They buy Nike shoes that make it really easy to run long distances, specialized clothing, fancy water bottles. They find spots to drive to and park at before getting out and running downhill for a few miles, getting picked up at the bottom by one of their friends. Stuff that makes for a great social media post.
They do the hard part of running, but curated to just the parts that they enjoy. They drive the rest of the time and when they do run, it looks nothing like the first marathon run of ancient Greece.
It sounds nice and all to talk about "I'm going to code anyway," but when I did this I found that there are always parts of the coding that I really really never did want to do and that I'm happy to just outsource to my agent like the jogger outsources getting to the top with their car. Testing, writing docs, making the readme logo. Stuff that probably wouldn't have happened without the AI but that I'm glad exists.
1: https://GitHub.com/djha-skin/janver
This is a bit strange article.
If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.
Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.
If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.
It's kinda reassuring to see that a lot of devs feel this way.
A related discussion I saw before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340013
In this thread: people who automate jobs away lament their jobs being automated away
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.
>Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years. This is the most turbulent time to be a software engineer I can remember. We’ve had it relatively easy up until now, but there’s an increased feeling that the whole craft is going through a huge shift and every individual needs to decide how they respond to it, which is very hard without the benefit of hindsight.
I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out.
Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage.
But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.
I think it's about how AI is being used across every field. For software developers, it helps you complete work at a pace that's much quicker. For artists, scientists and mathematicians it comes down to protecting the field from a set of collaborative agents who can possibly achieve anything.
What companies can do is restrict the usage to certain fields and keep the others immune. This should be universal so the competition exists where it should.
I understand what you are saying, but it's completely impractical in a world where applying those constraints leads to established leaders imposing those constraints on developing countries or economies. Today its the G7 applying penalties against other countries or pressuring them not to develop industries that pollute even though it would elevate their quality of life, or Russia invading Ukraine because they can and Ukraine gave up it's nuclear capability, or the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon being the pretext for a war of aggression.
Tomorrow it's a major power invading another country for training a model of mass destruction.
It's untenable to expect other societies to not compete to avoid subservience to another powerful country.
I think there's no interactive git branch because git uses work trees as an opinionated choice, which means this was kind of redundant before AI anyway...
This is timely for me.
Just an hour ago I made my most recent pen plotter generative art free on my website. I plan to send high resolution scans to everyone who joins my mailing list so you can print them at home.
In contrast with the author, I actually enjoy creating code with LLM’s. I’ve been on the technical management track, instead of boots on the ground coding, for quite a few years now. LLMs are letting me produce software again with limited time.
I still enjoy writing code by hand too and my generative art work is mostly that.
https://art.joeldare.com
On the game side, I recently created a Shut the Box game that runs in the web browser. This was created entirely by an LLM. In fact, it was the test project for a Dark Software Factory I’ve built.
I love that I can describe a project, from my phone, put it away, and have a prototype built a few minutes later.
The game is clearly unique and consistent with my own personal style. And, I’m enjoying playing it.
https://dark.joeldare.com/shut-the-box
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. It's really a pretty intense app. There's a lot of moving parts. It handles user data, so I have to make sure it's secure and high-Quality.
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 it, are good engineers, and I know that it will improve (although I doubt their UX will, much). Neither of them is a native iOS or Android developer, though. They are backend folks.
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 basically 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 (I refuse to add bad stuff. It needs to work well, so I am picky about what goes into my work). 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.
I scoped out exactly that.
The issue is that I store user data. Also, the users of the app are a very privacy-sensitive demographic. That raises the stakes, considerably.
I can't just "vibe code" an app that does the same thing mine does. It needs to be vetted by a good native Android developer that I trust, and that gets expensive.
Ahhhh yeah totally get that. Changes things considerably.
Yeah.
The other app doesn’t copy the user data part of my app, so they get a pass.
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.
Give it a go!
What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does exactly 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.
I think your argument has two facettes:
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.
1 combines with 2 because you can think about what changes to make to your code, and then that changed version runs. This is different from instructing an LLM to change something for you, where you have no insight in the underlying artifact being changed, or can’t predict what and how exactly the LLM will change it.
1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential.
The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.
This is the Eros vs Thanatos debacle.
Those who are driven by Eros want to enjoy the duration of a process: to have a delicious meal, make love, plant and care for that tree, build that house, and live.
The adepts of Thanatos want things done right now: to get satiated, have an orgasm, shade away that damn Sun, cover their sorry asses from elements, and die.
Absolutely not. People just lack imagination in how to use new tools in the pursuit of Eros
I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.
I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.
For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.
Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.
This article's note about game making 100% wrong, games are highly "complex" and there's a lot of iterative refinement and experimentation that is involved in "finding the fun." You can't just throw a pot of well liked mechanics together, because without balance or the right context it'll be flat. Also, unlike music where people often like something that's mostly derivative with some slight stylistic tweaks, if a game is derivative people will just keep playing the thing it's derived from.
The attitude of just leaning into your creativity regardless is good though. I know a bunch of local metal bands that kinda suck, but they grind away at it because it's fun and they love metal, not for some hope of a future payday. They don't care if AI makes better music than them, it's a community/personal expression exercise.
Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with achievement and competence.
Why should I be measured by how well I do things. In fact do we think human value can be measured at all?
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 “technical” 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” . The more opinionated the tools/libraries the better outcome you can expect.
Another great usage of AI is for refactoring. Before AI you could have a great idea how to make the library better/more ergonomic but the sheer amount of refactoring would make you just eat the debt and basically live with your own “slop”. Now with AI you can produce the reference design for the refactoring (I.e let’s make all these functions actually methods) and the job is done in minutes/hours. This inevitably leads to better designed software.
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.
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.
Everyone should do whatever makes them happy. Whether anyone will care much about your hand crafted software ...im leaning mostly no, perhaps very very niche programming communities. How do you even prove to people the software was hand written? And why should they care? Its not like music or art where wondering and caring what Kurt Cobain was thinking when he wrote the song is a big part of the experience. I'm skeptical I'll wonder what went through the head of the guy who wrote Excel or some crud app. I just want the thing to work it is not art for me.
I love how LLMs transformed my daily routine at work. So far I have more time coding what I want and get paid for it while Claude writes the boring Spring 2 Crud for me.
If Claude is doing your job for you do you not worry that you won't be employed soon? Big tech eventually won't pay people to drink coffee and work on their personal projects while Claude does their work for them.
Yes a bit but I work in a highly regulated corporate environment in which Engineers spend around 30% of their time with actual coding and the rest is gathering undocumented and silo’d knowledge through endless meetings and alignments, designing business processes around regulation obstacles and legacy apps, agile overhead and of course MFA processes and role ordering. Right now I don’t see much threat since it seems they have to dim down on autonomous workflows due to regulatory requirements and token costs.
I've had some form of this conversation several times in the past few months:
Me: "Holy cow, LLMs are getting good. You should take another look at how good recent tools are because without them we're going to get left behind."
Them: "But I like writing code!"
Which is cool, but completely irrelevant in the context of a career. Write all the software you want. Paint all the pictures you want. Carve wood. Build a boat. Great! But in 3 years absolutely no one is going to pay you $500k+/year to do any of that and if you can't get your head around it you're going to have a bad time.
Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame. I'm saving money, building other skills and renewing my social connections.
None of this is a value judgement on AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's probably both. I'm not making this statement based on anticipated future gains of AI. LLM advances could stall, token prices could quadruple. None of that changes the economics and the already existing technology that is sufficient to effectively end the role of a software engineer.
I have been developing software professionally for about 25 years now and worked on different code bases and for different companies. I was relatively enthousiastic when I started programming, but looking back I had my ups and downs when working as a software engineer. Things became repetitive and it is often mostly about shuffling data around. And especially the last few years I was wondering if I wanted to do this till my retirement. It was getting more and more boring.
Then AI arrived a few years ago and two years ago I was still in hybrid mode, so partially using AI to lookup some code or generate some stuff and doing old school coding by hand. Last year I got a new job and from day one I am doing all software development in AI. I never want to go back to the old way of developing everything by hand. So many ideas I had in the past would cost too much time and money to even try. Now I can try five different solutions for a feature in a single day and select the one that fits best.
I was influenced and learned also a lot from older developers who were in their 50s to be sort of proud on coding, but that is fading away very hard. I also don't see code as something personal anymore or something I should be proud of. But I am proud of what I can create with AI nowadays, functionally. And I also found out that I like the creativity of making things more than the often boring coding.
When I see the AI generated code I think it looks really really well written. Of course it helps to steer it with certain design patterns or solutions you prefer, that's the one skill that is actually very valueable to be able to prompt well.
In the end the most important thing for the business owner is that things are working, they mostly don't every care about your code.
It's scary how much your comment aligns with my thinking. Yes to all of that.
> Idk folks, maybe it's because I actually don't like writing software as much as I thought I did. I'm realizing I actually like making products and creatively solving problems, and software is a mildly enjoyable means to and end for that. I also like many aspects of the job of programming (money, sitting on my ass, dictating much of my workday, feeling like a boss, also money, etc). I was lucky to be alive in a time when that role was in demand but I can now see that is coming to an end for at least 80% of us. Yes, probably you, and probably me.
Yep, this is what I realised. I like solving a problem/fixing something. I am not really interested in hooking up a Go/Python/C# web service to a database for the umpteenth time.
I've been partially vibe-coding a new desktop environment for Linux and creating my own UI framework. I know how UI frameworks generally work, and I know how desktop environments generally work. What I want to do is build a DE that works well and fits my vision of how it should work functionally.
I am reasonable at C++ (I don't do it professionally). Do I want to spend 20 hours doing a load of UI boilerplate code in C++? No, I don't. I am sure I can do it, I've written UI frameworks before in other languages. But I get the machine to do all the boring stuff, and I develop the product. If the code it starts churning out is crap, I have the ability to fix it.
There seems to be a lot of crap about not being able to code after using AI for a few months. This is rubbish. I used to code when I was a kid in BBC BASIC and didn't for years, I then started coding again in my early 20s and all of the stuff I learned came back to me, and I was programming in Java. Same recently, I didn't program for about 4 months and had to program without the AI as the AI couldn't solve what I was doing, and I was fine.
I actually do enjoy writing code , it’s like a puzzle to be solved and I get a hit every time I solve it. But after we started generating all code with AI at work, I feel very inefficient writing code by hand on my hobby projects. I still do it but I have become too aware now of every little struggle, like a beginner, since I know I could just pull up a Claude session at any moment and get over with it by telling it as much as “finish this thing for me”. It will know exactly what I was doing just by looking at the working tree and likely won’t even need to ask questions. I also know that without asking AI for a review, I am almost certainly introducing bugs all over that the AI could prevent. And that my tests will never be as thorough as AI written tests. So I am not sure how long I will be able to keep writing even my hobby code by hand. Perhaps hand written code will become a super niche field for certain things and I will find a place where that is still needed, but that is pure speculation. From what I see right now, it’s a matter of a year or so for me to just not be able to endure the grind of writing code by hand even if I would like to. I think this will eventually catch up with everyone, not just me and most of the industry which already moved on to fully AI generated code… but even the last Mohicans, like the Zig guys, will have to eventually give up on their no ai stance.
Makers rediscovering the joy of hobbies is a thing that I'm all in on and here for.
Maybe a tangent, but I've gotten a lot of the joy back with 3D printing. You can just describe something, and Astra can model it in CAD extremely well. It usually takes a few iterations, and then you can just print it. I found that before, it would take days to build even simple models in Tinkercad - which while fun, was high enough friction that a lot of things would stay in the "ideas" folder - now I can have something real in an hour or two.
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.
There didn't use to be a "workforce".
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. The post WWII era was the exception. Ride the wave.
So, so tired of these doom posts. Almost always these feel like they are from developers that felt like they were superior to others because of their ability to code or simply identified too deeply with writing code instead of solving problems with code. As for the issues listed here, I can't relate to any of them - I've been creating scripts, skills, improving user experiences, creating monitoring dashboards etc. for many of my co-workers that have given me more appreciation than I ever experienced in my career and trust me, nobody gives a damn that I used AI or thinks my knowledge has been "obsoleted", most people are just happy these solutions exist and make their lives easier. Edit: imo, this is the real "fuck it, make it anyway" approach to agentic coding.
I've tried finding a middleground with using coding agents. I mostly get them to show me documentation or examples of how to do something, rather than do the thing. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just ask opencode to make the change, but most times I do it myself. Has kept me happy
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.
Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
Generative AI reverts to the mean: Prose will be over explanatory and miss subtly that human expression normally hits. Same for software: LLMs have a natural tendency to modularize and sprout. You'll find yourself knee deep in enterprise fizz buzz hell [1]. If you're fine with a product that regresses to the mean, great, but what I find that isn't discussed here on hackernews is reason for being. By choosing to create you choose to exist. An LLM may very well be capable of generating _the mean_ of what you're trying to express, but without you consuming it, rewriting it, and ultimately learning it, your team and you are robbed of the ability to communicate and reason about a piece of crucial machinery.
So yes, fuck it, make it anyway, so that you can continue to exist and provide the communicative, engineering, and reasoning value that others still need from you.
[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?RavioliCode
I was never the "tinkerer" type of developer. I like learning, which is why I love the field. I like learning something that makes me feel stupid, and there is a lot of that in software.
I can't see how the tinkerers of the world who make unremarkable software expect to be pat on the back for making not very useful things. It's almost selfish in a way - just because you enjoy the process of creation doesn't mean that you should be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, nobody cares. If you do, great, but that's just you.
Basket weavers don't expect their baskets to be valuable to the world in a major way, so why should a tinkerer who spent 150 hours on a git branch switcher get to feel the opposite?
> 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.
No, you're just seeing what it looks like when more people are able to make games.
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.
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.
That "boredom" has raked in billions so far, and I don’t see that shifting in the market yet you describe to be honest.
the old ways are dying, theres so much room for new creativity. exciting
I for one always found coding tedious and repetitive in general, it is fun at the beginning when you manage to validate an idea or produce an MVP, but then the chores begin and I have never enjoyed those. So in my view LLMs empower creativity by letting me focus on the stuff that's more interesting
I largely agree with you and, at this moment, LLMs still have shortcomings that allow me to get into the weeds and solve some tricky problems now and then.
There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.
I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.
For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.
But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
Sounds like what artisans faced when suggested they better operate those machines that produce more widgets, faster, cheaper.
If no money pressure, I would code everyday without thinking if my work could be paid.
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.
> Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100
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.
> we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution
This was never true, otherwise "stealth startups" wouldn't have been a thing.
> 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 related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
Game engine. Well, the hard part is making a game that people want to play...
Traditional art is still valued. Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. And even some bad AI art is actually a good idea that needs a few talented friends to make happen traditionally - but no one would ever see the vision without the terrible AI rough draft. There is room for all of it, and I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol.
And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize; the people who want to replace you with AI will replace you with cheap outsourced labor instead, if you let them. AI isn't the problem.
I don't think his assertion is true at all. AI art can be quite good. I asked ChatGPT to make a painting that looks like it should be in a museum and the output was damn good. I couldn't find anything that would tip me off like I can with some AI writing. No idea how something like that would be embarrassing to look at.
And music. There are youtube channels for AI house music playlists that sound pretty damn good.
I guess if you're a high level art critic you might be able to easily see that some of this stuff is not good.
Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
”Fuck it, make it anyway“ is absolutely the best advice I can give to programmers going through the crisis. Just make something that people want and you may find the joy of building again.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with
It is one thing to have compassion for artists as their livelihoods become threatened, but this sort of rhetoric makes me think the writer is too blinded by their emotions to have an accurate opinion of the current state of image gen. Much of what can be produced by eg. the openai's image 2.5 model is more-or-less indistinguishable from a person's work.
This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me.
The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.
I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.
Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.
Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.
That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).
Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
Taking your advice to heart -- fuck it, I'll make my software and art with generative AI assistence despite any possible backlash :)
It's also ironic how the "every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years" sentence applies to author of the article as well. The ego, luddism, and fear of change is real.
This resonated with me incredibly heavily. I will say one thing, i've adopted LLM tools fairly heavily for various things. But im doing so on my terms and strictly using them in a way that to me enhances my rigorous understanding of a given system.
Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle
I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
There is legit grief associated with what AI is doing to our craft, and we're all trying to grapple with it in our own ways
Off topic but is there anything like Hacker News but without AI posts?
https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
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.
You’re not alone, I’ve been keen for something like this for a while.
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.
https://www.unslop.news/
Nope, every topic this year is an AI topic. :-(
There were a few posted yesterday, try search
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.
"I am making shoes with a hammer and some leather but this Nike shop just opened next to me and got me nervous, let's see what the future holds for me, I'll keep hammering nails to this sole as pure artisans do..."
> 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?
> Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
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).
This is interesting because where he says "I take no pleasure in the results", I'm split. Sometimes I make something of no lasting value and feel no pleasure. Sometimes I use my context and creativity to ask for a result, and when the model one-shots it, I take a lot of pleasure in getting the result I want and need in that moment.
game over bro. adapt and overcome
Finest Buggywhip Maker in the Land Whinges About Those New-Fangled Automobubbles, Take #7642
It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.
I have pondered whether our career/hobby will eventually be like equestrian activities. Horses or walking were basically the only options for land traversal for thousands of years. Now, horseback riding is nothing more than a hobby or sport. I grew up on a horse farm and rode a lot in my youth. I can't say the skill has ever truly been useful, but it was fun for a time.
No matter how good AI gets, I believe I will always program by hand to some degree. I really enjoy the activity, and most of all, I have enjoyed the learning and composition aspect. Programming by hand might not be useful, but like most hobbies, that does not really matter at the end of the day.
In other words…
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.
in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
I've noticed that delivery drivers are always racing around like their lives depend on it? Why do they do that? Because they are given workloads that are impossible to complete without racing. But what if it just didn't race? Their employers would be forced to hire more drivers, or increase the cost of delivery. By racing they are just building a rod for their own backs.
I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think.
I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.
> surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers
Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.
> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years
Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.
> peer pressure is very real
Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.
> even disregarding all the environmental
The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.
> It isn’t fun for me
I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.
> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day
I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!
> 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
Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.
> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI
That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?
> there are only really three paths open to me
This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.
I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!
But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.
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.
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.
And it’s awesome.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.
I don't like AI, but AI generated images have use cases. For instance, if you program a browser game but you lack human artists. Then AI generated images can be useful. Many of these images suck and feel misplaced, but some are quite nice, so I don't think it applies to all of AI generated content.
Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it.
I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.
How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?
Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.
As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.
I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.
What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?
Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?
There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.
Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.
I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.
Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.
I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.
We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.
If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.
Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.
An art analogy:
Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.
If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.
The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.
Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.
For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.
This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.
And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.
The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.
Edit:
The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.
I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.
That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.
Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
Below is an example convo leading to the the title phrase being used on the AI side of things. Programmers and systems engineers need to wake up to our collective responsibility. It is through putting our heads down that's leading to us not collectively organizing to put an end to systems of global domination & oppression. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with the power to create life-changing systems, it's time to just quit and go do something else. It's the most responsible path in that face of being unwilling to switch to building for liberation instead of for oppression. Everyone has their reasons, but the main one is a dependence on existing systems and ways of doing things instead of learning to build communities to care for us. I'm in the same boat. Anyway, we all need to collectively step up and realize that the military publicly acknowledges cyber warriors as their greatest asset means that we have a duty to protect the people with the tech we build, instead of continue driving enslavement to it. Check your beliefs...do they serve the standard deaths and need to evolve to center the conditions that sustain life?
"So do we finally resolve the issues of ecocide, genocides, pandemic, and mass systems of oppression?...
Or do we build another advancement of tech foote these hells to capture?
Remember: making the second thing will likely take us way closer to extinction."
"Which makes more money?"
"The first path likely kills money as we know it, so there's no comparison. Making the second one makes more money in the short term, but then extinction."
"Fuck it, make it anyway"
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.
So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure and have glided upon the surface of webdev for a few decades, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage!
Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:
https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade
https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/
https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know)
https://cartalk-amp.exe.xyz
https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com
https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version)
https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web
https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/
https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP)
https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web
https://github.com/jgbrwn/retro-computing-stream
https://github.com/jgbrwn/github-repo-stream
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.