It's still ok to enjoy programming (chriskiehl.com)
341 points by goostavos 2 days ago
etra0 17 minutes ago
Even if work is not life, hobby programming also has been affected.
I worked hard a couple of years ago to reverse engineer a game to produce a very specific tool. Recently, the game was updated, so I worked on my free time to do a free contribution to the community, and then, a few hours later a tool that does the same thing appeared entirely vibecoded.
Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.
Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.
searls 5 hours ago
I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.
Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.
I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.
happytoexplain 3 hours ago
>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
20k an hour ago
I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code
The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering
asanineassasin 26 minutes ago
goosejuice 8 minutes ago
There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.
snohobro 3 hours ago
I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.
However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.
It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.
I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.
But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.
jackb4040 an hour ago
rubikscube09 5 hours ago
Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?
searls 4 hours ago
Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.
ryandrake an hour ago
Verdex 4 hours ago
Speaking for myself. Not really. The problem that I had with enjoying programming was that many of my coworkers who didn't enjoy programming have some opinions that were frustrating to need to entertain.
Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.
In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago
If they haven't worked a day in their life before, then who has built all the software products we use today and from which LLMs are endlessly benefitting?
rubikscube09 2 hours ago
cptroot 4 hours ago
I don't think your comment is very well thought out. It seems to me your conclusion argues against your topic sentence.
stephc_int13 6 minutes ago
My prediction is that it will take a while for the processes and habits to changes, but programming manually or at least reviewing code will become a niche activity, pretty much like building or maintaining mechanical clocks or old-school woodworking with hand tools.
Building software is hard for humans, managing the complexity of large projects has been at the frontier of our intellectual capabilities for a while, leading to well known issues in cyber security and exploding costs. At some point machines are simply better suited to the task.
hollowturtle 4 hours ago
> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
orangedog 3 hours ago
I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.
hollowturtle 2 hours ago
> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture
strken 21 minutes ago
...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?
For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.
It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.
ryandvm 2 hours ago
This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.
I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.
christophilus 3 hours ago
It depends on your definition of better. Some businesses value speed above almost all else. Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount. I think in those cases, LLMs are better than probably any human.
On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.
hollowturtle an hour ago
> Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount
To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?
strbean 7 minutes ago
christophilus 38 minutes ago
jackb4040 32 minutes ago
uv-depression 2 hours ago
The industry is in a desperate race to throw away what little quality it had (could you imagine if other fields of engineering had catastrophic failures at the rate software does?) in favour of "look at all the lines of code I generated today but don't actually read them please". It's always been a fad-heavy field, but this time it's really gone fully off the deep end. The whole "it's better than me" is just re-asserted endlessly. Nobody even pretends to care about evidence. I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now. The zone has never been more flooded, I think.
bigfishrunning 29 minutes ago
> I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now.
I completely agree. The fact that the software from places that are very vocally pro-AI (microsoft, salesforce, etc...) is still so full of bugs is really contrary evidence.
jackb4040 39 minutes ago
Thank you! It's made me lose a lot of respect for my field how credulous everyone is to any argument that starts out with a fig leaf of pretending to be on your side.
"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"
"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"
"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"
There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.
gamblor956 2 hours ago
I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.
ryandrake 44 minutes ago
Exactly. Someone on HN put it really succinctly earlier in the year: "LLMs look like they are good at things you are not good at."
I think this goes a long way to explain why there is such a huge difference in opinion about the quality of AI-written code: Some people say LLMs write code far better than they could, and others say the code is always terrible and requires a great deal of fixing before it's acceptable. How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?
It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think your LLM is producing better code than you could produce... well, I might have some bad news for you about your own skills.
SirYandi 37 minutes ago
austin-cheney 2 hours ago
Programming is still fun, at least if you are solving real problems and building real products.
The part of programming that sucks the most is untangling ambiguity. In my current app I had an ultra simple proxy convention, but it sucks. I have since settled on a different single convention to cover 6 different scenarios of traffic redirection, but it was a challenge to distill simplicity from chaos of the wilds and write all the various tests. It’s moving forward faster now but it was like starting over to get this rolling.
What I find is fun is building things that solve real problems I have. Then my problem is solved, I am paying nothing for it, and I can extend it however I want for any reason without downstream restrictions.
There is so much AI still cannot do in software. If you ask AI to build a faster WebSocket solution, for example, you will get more of what’s already there. I have a WebSocket library I wrote myself 4 or 5 years ago. I thought it was fast, turns out it wasn’t. I wrote my own perf tool for it and had a defect in the perf tool that spit out wrong results, but that defect showed me where the performance bottleneck was. Now my library is 40x-100x faster than other WebSocket libraries. I did use Claude to analyze my earlier perf bug, and it made the same mistakes I was making. If you want to go faster than popular battle tested solutions you have to be original and AI just isn’t quite there.
nickmonad 26 minutes ago
> The part of programming that sucks the most is untangling ambiguity.
I think it could be argued this is exactly what programming _is_.
freedomben a minute ago
I very much agree. I've been describing programming to non-programmers as variations of "taking a problem and describing a solution to it in extremely literal step by step directions" for the last 20 years. Of course things like UI and API design are super important to good code, but IME a good interface requires untangling the ambiguity too.
rglover 4 hours ago
The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.
I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.
dleslie 6 hours ago
I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.
And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
rubikscube09 5 hours ago
It's just tough to hear a mainstream "impactful" line of work be compared to knitting and sewing. Say what you want but people thought that their work was necessary to the advancement of society, or at least something bigger than themselves. Whether you agree with them or not, reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.
slowin 3 hours ago
I feel like this belittles knitters and sewers!
There's also a tension in your comment. Are we prioritizing "advancing society" or programmer feelings? If it's the former, then it doesn't matter if AI is better than humans, whatever moves us forward faster is better. If it's the latter, then we're talking about holding back progress for the sake of a programmer's feelings.
For the record, I'm a lifelong programmer who loves AI because now I can experiment with new ideas at a scale I could not before. I feel zero loss. In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.
schiem 2 hours ago
rubikscube09 2 hours ago
wuliwong 5 hours ago
Sewing had been a relevant skill for 10s of thousands of years. Programming has been relevant for 10s of years.
rubikscube09 4 hours ago
rbtprograms 2 hours ago
interstingly i think what you are talking about is pretty apt, but not the way you are framing it. knitting and sewing were impactful things in their time; clothing has been something humans need for a long time and more skilled craftsmen were able to produce hgiher quality garments. new techniques increased durability, wearability, comfort, etc. machines commoditized that and made it mich faster to produce garments, so turned these into hobbies and the odd artisan fpcused and made new improvements, but not as often as before.
programming will likely be the same. fewer people who care to be craftsmen, more hobbyist, a few artisans who really dig deep and make new patterns (we still dont see AI sampling out of distribution).
>reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.
this is your personal feeling. they never had anything in the first place, just that the market was valuing a certain skill for what it could output. the perspective you are posting is purely a construct.
rubikscube09 2 hours ago
dleslie 2 hours ago
I think you're undervaluing the skill and technology behind clothing, as well as the impact of clothing. But that's probably a reflection of how technology has allowed us to take it for granted.
rubikscube09 2 hours ago
gaiagraphia 3 hours ago
>impactful
Programming is the art of automation, and is being taken to new levels. It'd be quite damming to the field if a substantial % of the world's output over many decade hadn't brought us here, tbh.
Were builders crying when the Hagia Sophia was built? Projects come and go, nothing is forever.
sashank_1509 5 hours ago
At that point it’s probably worth taking a more mainstream hobby like music or dancing, you’ll have a much bigger community of passionate folks. I suspect that will happen to programmers as a hobby folks too, they might discover they like playing music instruments instead.
s08148692 5 hours ago
Actually laughed out loud at the idea of a bunch of stereotypical programmers going to a dance class
tatjam 4 hours ago
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
Not to mention your friends still enjoy receiving custom made knitted stuff as presents, or your neighbors if you see someone struggling. Or donate it somewhere, or put it in a display shelf to be reminded what you can actually do. Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)
nilamo 20 minutes ago
> Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)
One step closer to the matrix. Send the white rabbit over, I've got your floppies ready to go. No ai, and developed without an active internet connection, so you can listen to music safe in the knowledge that your music isn't listening to you.
thayne 3 hours ago
> Work is not life.
Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.
Hamuko 14 minutes ago
Yeah, it's kinda hard to separate "work" from "life" when even in saner working conditions you spend a third of your day at it. And if you're anything like me, you spend the other third trying to mentally recover from the misery it's causing you.
kazinator 4 hours ago
Anyhone who tells you things like, "what, you are still looking at code and care what it looks like?" just exposes themselves as a supreme twit.
eikenberry 37 minutes ago
For whatever a single anecdote is worth, there do still seem to be at least some jobs that require a decent amount hand-coding still. I just landed a new role and when I asked about AI usage policies, etc. they told me you can use whatever you want but don't count on it working well as the AIs are not that good at writing the code we work on. They suggested using it more as a explainer and for targeted tasks vs. agentic development.
hushhushnow 18 minutes ago
I am in a super oldschool small dev shop completely sealed off from the world. We are starting to experiment with Git now, on the side to stay up to date.
I think someone here occasionally opens ChatGPT web, free version of course, and copy-pastes some fragments. They claim it is still very, very far off from being useful. At first I was feeling sorry, but now I feel awesome.
It’s amazing. It’s like living in a museum and the pay is great too. I always wanted to leave tbh but now I’m heavily reconsidering riding this one out..
tdrz 36 minutes ago
Are there any other job openings there?
zabriel_goss 36 minutes ago
What domain is the work in?
ryandvm 6 hours ago
I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.
My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
jvanderbot 5 hours ago
Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.
This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.
It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.
You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.
I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.
Reach out if you want to chat.
tkel an hour ago
This comes off as patronizing , as if there is only one perspective outcome that you must adjust to
jvanderbot 13 minutes ago
embedding-shape an hour ago
BigHatLogan 3 hours ago
Really wonderful comment. Thanks for sharing. I've noticed myself spiraling into doom-and-gloom scenarios about the future of this job (and therefore my future), and I've found it really unhelpful and really unproductive, in the sense that it sort of narrows my mind into a tunnel vision of decreasing possibilities.
teekert 3 hours ago
This is wisdom thanx.
I too have lost something I loved, I gained it after years of relentlessly focusing on maximizing what I loved and minimizing what cost me energy. And now the world flips on me.
The good news? I got pretty good at consciously finding the energy givers and drainers and optimizing for the givers, so I'll just keep doing that. I'll either start enjoying micro-managing LLMs, or find something else entirely. Or find that the LLMs need less and less micromanaging, or start enjoying whatever they need next year. (Point an army of agents in a direction?)
I came from the molecular biolab with Linux as a hobby, then when to software dev and infra. What's next ? Idk, I still love biology, keeping eyes and ears open...
rogerrogerr 5 hours ago
You sound like you're processing this well. I think I'm in the group of people you're talking about who aren't processing it well. What kind of conclusions have you come to regarding that list (what you work on and how, finances, kids, etc.)?
jvanderbot 5 hours ago
tripleee 2 hours ago
The job description fundamentally changed to the point where we're expected to do something very different.
No amount of processing will move someone from ordering a steak to just enjoying their given peanut butter sandwich instead. They ordered the steak, and now the restaurant is telling us all too bad there's no steak anymore - eat your damn sandwich.
fasterik an hour ago
fasterik 2 hours ago
I think this is basically the right attitude. The focus should be on what you really value intrinsically, and what changes you want to see in the world. Those determine the goals you set, which determine how you choose what to learn, what to work on, and what tools to use. The metaphor of a "career path" was always questionable, but even more so now. The most important skills are dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity and being able to adapt to new circumstances.
nearlyepic an hour ago
Am I insane? I could never imagine speaking to somebody like this in real life. I'm not saying this was ill-intentioned but there's something about this comment that comes off as REALLY weird to me. It's like religious/cult-speak.
CodeMage 24 minutes ago
demilicious an hour ago
kentm 5 hours ago
Thank you for a great, empathetic comment.
ranger_danger 5 hours ago
A non-zero amount of people are preparing (or have already) to leave the industry entirely.
Even if one were to continue doing everything by hand, it will still be harder compared to others who aren't. As in, companies will come to expect more/faster work than you are capable of, so it still affects us old farts that don't want to change.
We'll find something else, sure, or just retire... but not everyone is/was ready to.
I'm not sad on a personal level per se, I can still be positive and look to the future, but I lament what we increasingly no longer have.
kaffekaka 4 hours ago
Very well written, thank you.
awesome_dude 3 hours ago
> You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.
I've always taken the view that it was luck - lucky that my interests aligned with the market, lucky the market put value in what I am interested in doing, and lucky that I was given the chance.
I was never in it for the money, I was always in it for the enjoyment, and I will remain in it for the same thing.
The market for my knowledge and skills might come and go, there might have been a brief moment in history when someone like me could make a living off these skills, but like so many other creative careers that time was always going to be fleeting
dleslie 6 hours ago
Writing code was the "downtime" for me, it existed between boughts of intense problem solving. With AI agents my time is shifting heavily towards solving problems and I have less downtime as a result.
I worry about burnout.
edukite 5 hours ago
With LLM and current economic situation my job is doing 5 things at once and after 7:30h my brain is just in panic mode. On remote this isn't a huge issue but in the office (which I'm obligated to be twice a week) I just don't know what to do so I eat 3 meal 5min each pretending this is normal.
Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.
Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.
Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.
So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible
craftkiller 2 hours ago
saulpw 4 hours ago
bee_rider 4 hours ago
tehjoker 3 hours ago
parpfish 5 hours ago
invent new downtime. that's what i'm doing by writing this comment.
ghm2180 5 hours ago
Music is an excellent downtime.
amelius an hour ago
kazinator 3 hours ago
zabriel_goss 3 hours ago
Aurornis 5 hours ago
> I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.
Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.
Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.
It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.
The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.
I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.
psunavy03 3 hours ago
Part of the problem is that senior management in many organizations is so damn bad at, well, organizing the organization. Both the people and the software architecture. There really is something to an approach like everyone credits to Amazon: small team with a discrete product and proper architectural boundaries, communicating to other applications in known predictable ways with a proper process on both ends for making changes.
When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.
You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.
alphanumeric0 28 minutes ago
> excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)
AI excelling beyond a human at writing code is not an objective truth.
I would say even without AI, a manager telling a developer what to code or how to code, will never be better than that engineer themselves being the driver and the developer.
For me personally, quality code has a strong human component. Only I know what's best for the code, based on:
1. my deep understanding of the long history of the organization and of its mission and concepts 2. my intricate personal relationships with the users and the other developers 3. all of my hundreds of unique, personal experiences troubleshooting problems, which are always a combination of code and interpersonal relationships, the open source community, and opposing stakeholders.
Until AI becomes AGI (and that's a big if) and you can train it on 43 years of experience, it will just be an approximation of a true person's holistic engineering pedigree. It will always be asymptotic to true competence. It will always be second-best, even with a human driver.
prmph 3 hours ago
I'm not sure what this is all about.
If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.
Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, or a knowledge management system for agents, or ... the possibilities are endless.
Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.
dolebirchwood 3 hours ago
> Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference.
That is 100% the difference. Most people working as employees aren't passionate about the company as an entity. They won't love your baby like you do. What they did love was taking your baby for walks; now they're left with just changing dirty diapers.
pizza234 6 hours ago
How strange.
Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.
At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.
Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.
kentm 5 hours ago
> How strange.
People enjoy different things. Its not strange. Treating it as strange is kinda insulting, so I'd recommend that you rethink how you phrase this.
sevg 5 hours ago
orangecat 2 hours ago
sashank_1509 5 hours ago
> At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks
Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.
hparadiz 18 minutes ago
Apocryphon 5 hours ago
adamddev1 5 hours ago
> "I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that."
That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.
But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.
j_heffe 5 hours ago
I've always enjoyed hacking on random projects and AI does that really well. Every crazy idea I've ever had can be iterated on, and takes way less time now. Sure it's awesome that I don't have to spend hours throwing together a bunch of python and bash scripts, but it just happens instantly now. That's why I actually like Copilot autocompletion for side projects, because I can build something and still save a massive amount of time tinkering with limited blockers. I wish there was a better middle ground between "one shot this" and writing everything yourself.
fluoridation 3 hours ago
wmedrano an hour ago
I've enjoyed the tinkering and building projects as well. Unfortunately that and some cozy coding are relegated to hobbies instead of my job.
caaqil 5 hours ago
> I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks
> AI is a "solution" to that
Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?
user43928 5 hours ago
parpfish 5 hours ago
i'm the same way, and my personal projects are being created in a similar way.
i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.
it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.
for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.
Nition an hour ago
I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.
I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.
And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).
And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!
Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:
"Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
around the starship shell.
"Why, of course!" she laughed.
"Then why do you do it?"
"It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
I helped build that.
The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
that it was you who actually did it."
"Hmm," he said.
"Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
where a few other construction workers were standing,
pointing inside the model and talking.
"But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
"Yes," he agreed.
The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
He smiled. "I suppose not."
"You suppose correctly," the woman said.
"And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."variadix 4 hours ago
I’m in a similar boat, though I’ve found some solace in that AI development (for me at least) has also made other kinds of work more enjoyable. Previously, since I enjoyed programming, problem solving, and learning more than the end product, I tried to work on projects where I would learn as much as possible which had interesting problems to solve that would make me a better software engineer.
Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.
Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.
I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.
f055 5 hours ago
It really depends, it seems. Through my coding career I always had interesting, and maybe a bit too big ideas for consumer software, bogged down by the fact that I like to code interesting algorithms but not business processes and interfaces. And in that sense AI is really a miracle for me - I no longer need to get bogged down by tedious work, I can focus on architecting the software and interesting algos (nothing seem too big nowadays) and have AI code it, debug it, and deploy it in a fraction of time it would take me if I had to code it entirely! Also, I no longer need to learn all these modern frameworks that keep spurring like mushrooms. In fact, frameworks are not a necessity when AI can vanilla JS everything anyway.
It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)
1PlayerOne 5 hours ago
Good to hear opinion like yours, I am of the same opinion. I use AI in the same way as you describe.
Now I understand the meaning of the famous opening sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
vadansky 6 hours ago
I am surprised how many people like the actual writing part, it always felt to me like doing micro in an RTS game. I know a lot of people love that too but I always played RTS games to feel like a general. But I'm still in the camp of reading every single change the LLM does, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds, but maybe that will end up being a waste of time soon. Like if the job ends up being just writing and reviewing MD files for the agent to digest I'll hate it too.
Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?
sashank_1509 5 hours ago
You probably micromanage the LLMs architectural choices. Thats actually a bad idea, you will probably get better results if you let the LLM decide the architecture and just tweak it where its assumptions are wrong. It has much more context than you in its codebase anyway. Then you won’t feel like a general more, but you’ll be much more productive :)
vadansky 5 hours ago
wtetzner 4 hours ago
ModernMech 5 hours ago
wtetzner 4 hours ago
It's funny how differently people see things. I find reading/reviewing LLM generated code to be much more difficult and tedious that writing it myself.
vadansky 4 hours ago
kazinator 4 hours ago
Yes; there are actually people out there who make disparaging remarks about looking at code and caring what it looks like.
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)
My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.
Isamu 5 hours ago
I agree it’s very mixed, it strongly depends on what you are developing, how big and established your codebase is, how opinionated you are about simple vs overdone, how many subtle and nonlocal interactions your codebase has, etc. Plus the more experienced you are the more you are likely to reject the AI solution as not well considered, whereas to someone new may think it looks plausible and confident.
strange_quark 2 hours ago
Yes, they're very good at writing code now. The problem is that we (or at least I am) drowning in code that runs and does something that resembles the problem you asked it to solve, but that something is frequently semantically incorrect.
Something has to give; the constant onslaught of slop and workflows changing every few months just isn't sustainable. Either we slow the fuck down and figure out what we're even doing here, or the AI improves so much that we're all out of a job.
user43928 5 hours ago
They're great and you don't have to review everything.
From what you're always commenting, I could believe that you were exclusively using Haiku 4.5, which would explain how the tool produces only garbage while the rest of the world pretends AI was great.
Just out of curiosity, do you use like Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and you still find the results inadequate?
demilicious an hour ago
fock 5 hours ago
greenowl 2 hours ago
Why not write the code yourself and use AI for everything you don't like to do? See what happens.
thesdev 2 hours ago
Not everyone has the luxury of having that choice. Cough cough AI mandates.
greenowl 2 hours ago
giancarlostoro an hour ago
Theres still companies that dont touch AI at all.
rnd0 4 hours ago
The suggestion I encounter the most is that AI makes it redundant to take up programming as a hobby. or art. or music.
JohnMakin 3 hours ago
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).
I have always been the opposite, despite mostly having IC roles in my career. Still, I don't enjoy the change, mostly because the UX of this tooling is absolutely miserable when you need to do anything serious with it. I am past the point where I thought it was user error and think it's just fundamentally baked into the ecosystem to be annoying to work with. At least in most management situations, the employee isn't going to gaslight you, question every tiny decision you make (or worse, subvert ones it finds more 'favorable' for itself) or just make up wild, easily disprovable bullshit in a constant stream of verbal fecal matter. I've worked with maybe one person that came remotely close to that and they were easily ignored. This stuff's persistent and unavoidable.
I am getting a lot more done, but I am a lot more tired.
fithisux 5 hours ago
Yes, because you were silently fired as a developer and rehired as an AI manager. You can't compare apples and oranges.
tirumaraiselvan 4 hours ago
It also leaves the part of reviewing the code (which I have realised is really quite different skillset from writing code - it needs a sense of something is fishy here or why is this even here or can't this look better).
It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.
XorNot 2 hours ago
Conversely for me AI is letting me focus on the part I actually enjoyed: organizing and planning systems, and powers through the parts which were just a grind to get there.
By far my biggest use at the moment is just getting all the software I use to function as I want it too.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).
I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.
Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.
What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.
rubikscube09 5 hours ago
I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.
kentm 4 hours ago
card_zero 5 hours ago
embedding-shape an hour ago
kentm 4 hours ago
Well, I can't speak for the person above, but in my case typing out the code is part of solving the problem. Plenty of times I've thought I had a great idea in my head, and then in the process of writing it out found better understanding and an even better approach. Some of that can still be emulated with LLMs -- you can read the output and have it tweak things where you find oddities, but its still not really the same, and I miss having that process of discovery and improvement.
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never really clicked with a "plan everything upfront, and then all that's left is writing the code" process
I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming
So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"
So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.
Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being
I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless
And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.
If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
encyclopedism 4 hours ago
kentm 4 hours ago
jdw64 5 minutes ago
mkozlows 3 hours ago
kaffekaka 4 hours ago
ranger_danger 5 hours ago
> it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).
Who is forcing you to use AI?
grey-area 5 hours ago
Are you forced to use AI by your company? If so why?
anishgupta 16 minutes ago
+1 to this, the end gratification is what it matters. More rewarding experience
mr7uca 10 minutes ago
It's just so sad to see the loudest people (who usually have a vested interest in AI taking jobs) always have un-nuanced takes that ai tools are always the best tools for the job.
Anyone who can speak with any nuance on where humans (the only actual intelligence on earth) can vastly outperform the best models has their voices buried.
Algo feeds are a plague brainwashing people with news/info about only on the extreme views thanks to it optimizing for engagement to serve the most ads. Your favorite really really smart but boring professor's thoughts from University would never get shared online in todays world for example.
fooqux an hour ago
> It doesn't bother me that Claude could one-shot it, because that's not the point.
What do you say to someone that is bothered though? I don't know why it effects my enjoyment so, but it does.
vvzz an hour ago
I love creating fun things and solving challenging problems no-one has solved. I do not really "enjoy" actual programming. Andnever did, since starting it 30 years ago when I was 9.
"Enjoying programming" for me as an engineer/computer scientist is akin to mathematician studying topology, enjoying idk, arithmetic or solving quadratic equations". Whether someone actua, lly gets dopamine from it strictly personal but in the grand scheme of things those are trivial things below me.
Sadly lots of "programmers" are really just "technicians" that happened to pick up skills in some niche and didn't approach computational problems from first principles.
tjeerdnet 3 hours ago
I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.
Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.
Last year I started at a new job and was at first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.
Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.
Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.
I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.
thr1owaway9621 3 hours ago
> AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself
How do you know that? Do you read AI code? I heard (DHH, Uncle Bob, my own co-workers) that reading the code is no longer an economically viable activity. And if you are not reading the code, how would you know what it looks like.
tjeerdnet an hour ago
Personally I still try to read or scan the generated code and look at the implementation and many design patterns are recognizable and are almost always exactly as how it should be done. I must admit that there are sometimes small parts of implementations that look inefficient or 'weird'. I remember that one time it wanted to store data in some sort of array type in a database instead of a separate table. Asking why AI did that it also agreed that it was a what tricky/shaky implementation. I didn't trust it and with a single prompt the code is rewritten into a perfectly fine separate table implementation.
That's the reason why I still try to inspect the generated code to see how my problem was solved and if it reads plausible. There are also moments that I am surprised by the implemented solutions which look very elegant and "smarter" than what I could have come up. These are also the moments I learn from AI. I can even ask AI why it did things certain ways and it gives a nice summary of arguments. But I am often also critical towards AI if I am in doubt, resulting sometimes in a sort of discussion and sometimes I can convince AI (with more context) that the solution it created should take another route. It really feels like working with a really fast co-worker. And on top of that, I am better in writing up my thoughts to discuss things instead of talking with someone. Doesn't mean I don't discuss in real life with co-workers, but it is so easy to use AI for it too.
tasuki 2 hours ago
> reading the code is no longer an economically viable activity.
Yes of course. But sometimes, when no one is watching, you can quickly sneak a peek at the code changes. It's ok!
mbsa7 4 hours ago
I wish there was I way I could forget this site existed so I would never go back here.
hollowturtle 3 hours ago
Same not sure for the same reasons, to me it all sounds like a big marketing campaign for AI coding. Everywhere I read I see comments bragging about that the quality of these products output is better than us or it is usually taken for granted. Not my experience so far and I'm on the edge of AI usage
red_candle_wax an hour ago
There was a comment I saw in a thread today. In this thread someone expressed concern over blackboxes and people not understanding them.
A reply I saw bluntly stated their opinion which could be summed up as "Good, ignorance is bliss".
Whatever your thoufhts are on LLMs, it has never been more apparent that HN is not a place for hackers.
I'm sure some SV tech fag who was little more than a CRUD monkey a couple years ago will show up any moment now with their own definition of "hacker" as tends to be the case on GrifterNews.
yesitcan 3 hours ago
Same. It also has a heavy liberal bias like Reddit.
pona-a an hour ago
Does anyone know any place of refuge?
tripleee 2 hours ago
> Work is not life.
When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.
dwoldrich 3 hours ago
I have a long term goal of establishing a workflow or framework wherein AI operates at my pace. I suspect much of the angst I experience when working with AI is driven by its independent working that I will be held accountable for.
One simple change that has really helped me is to take the git tool access away from the AI. This has made me quite critical of AI excesses in the design of the code and I feel free to rollback its changes and to request redos. I grok the changesets better as a result.
sirpilade 3 hours ago
I’ve been thinking for a while that these tools should be slower. This doesn’t mean lower quality, they could still think (ah wait, overthink) at same speed. I’d just like them to output text at the same speed I can read and understand. This would make it more like a conversation, where you hear the flow of concepts coming and at the same time think about it and get involved in the conversation. For some reason I enjoy more running a local LLM at 4 t/s than a faster than thought change to my whole codebase by Opus
dwoldrich 2 hours ago
'Slower' is not how I would characterize it because with the AI I am faster at producing code than without.
I rather think of it as 'controlled', and I am (hopefully, crossed fingers) getting more maintainable and better-designed results out of it long-term compared with my peers' results.
Ultcyber 3 hours ago
Those types of articles make me wonder - is it specific to current US-based software companies culture to be so much involved in AI? I work for in central-eastern Europe and AI has changed the way I code, but not to an extent that I don't ever manually write code anymore. I don't want to sound patronizing, just a genuine question, cause I have a disconnect with what I'm reading on HN and what I see on a daily basis.
stuxnet79 3 hours ago
It is a reflection of Bay Area tech culture, which dominates internet conversation and somewhat unfairly 'represents' US or global tech culture as a whole.
For companies in this bubble creative destruction is the order of the day and this manifests in me-too behavior from executives coupled with breathless enthusiasm for new technologies. It can often be excessive from the POV of an outsider looking in but not embracing the new thing fast enough could be the difference between filing Chapter 11 or having a trillion dollar market cap for these firms. All of this could occur within the span of 6 months.
Companies/Organizations outside this bubble don't face the same pressures (at least in a compressed timeframe) so they lag a little bit in responding to trends. But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming.
Ultcyber 3 hours ago
"But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming." - could you explain what do you mean by it?
stuxnet79 2 hours ago
0c3ca83 6 hours ago
(as a hobby. God forbid you enjoy it for money.)
This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.
The future sucks.
cbarrick 5 hours ago
This is exactly my problem.
I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.
It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.
eatsyourtacos an hour ago
Same.. and now everything can be done SO FAST it's just stupid.
I used to love taking the time to whiteboard my project, write the code in peace (with maybe a background show). Go through the steps of structuring, debugging, testing.
Now I can write a prompt to basically do what I do instantly, and now I'm the manager and tester of something I didn't truly even make.
So sure the upside is I can do more, and I basically have to use it because I can't even keep up with what people want me to do without it. And it also seems so silly to go back.
Everything fun is just gone.
closeparen 3 hours ago
>Programming is something you can't get paid for.
That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.
0c3ca83 3 hours ago
That's true too: AI currently doesn't live up to the promises that were made to the execs, so there's also more pressure for human slop and outsourcing to fill the gaps.
It sucks on that end too.
rileymat2 5 hours ago
I disagree, understanding systems and problem solving, understand technical capabilities, requirements and delivering a product is what always paid for by consumers. Paying programming labor was just a means to an end, removing that expensive and time consuming part creates a world with so many more possibilities.
A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.
Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.
It's a great future.
0c3ca83 5 hours ago
Cool, I don't care about any of the stuff you just said you shipped. I've got enough trash software in my life, and I'd pay to have it reduced. The things you listed are more stuff that I don't want to interact with.
rileymat2 5 hours ago
jplusequalt 5 hours ago
>Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
rileymat2 5 hours ago
rubikscube09 5 hours ago
Apocryphon 5 hours ago
I don’t deny that there’s more slop than ever, but I would argue that this is a quantitative issue not a qualitative one, because frankly, the Internet has been drowned in slop for over a decade now. Those creative industries have had to deal with a lot of low quality content (some bot-generated even before LLMs!) for a while now.
So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.
0c3ca83 5 hours ago
The shit that sucks is amplified, and the benefit is that a narrow slice of people can make money out of amplifying the shit that sucks.
simianwords 4 hours ago
fasterik 2 hours ago
I'm curious if there are specific examples of the kind of thing that motivated this post. What comments or articles are suggesting that it's not ok to enjoy programming?
m4rtink an hour ago
I'm not sure I need you to tell me...
darepublic 3 hours ago
I've been practicing leet code recently because.. reasons. But I actually have been enjoying it a lot more than in the past because I get that now scarce hands on experience
keithnz 2 hours ago
yes, but it's a hobby now. If you enjoy historical re-enactment of old software development practices, feel free!
hmokiguess 4 hours ago
Most of the times someone writes something like that I find they are mostly talking to themselves.
Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.
aftergibson 3 hours ago
And here I was trying so hard to hate the thing I've loved doing.
Thanks blog!
Rochus 4 hours ago
> I still program on the weekends because it is fun
Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?
rskeens 5 hours ago
Some of us enjoy mentally modelling everything to see opportunities to iterate as each cog turns in their head. Often without being in front of a device, letting sub conscious figuring out difficult problems. AI has its place but so does that process.
If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.
mrboatshoepants 2 hours ago
I like getting stuff done, and AI lets me get more done, more quickly.
mycocola 5 hours ago
It's like meat was invented.
Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".
vconnor 3 hours ago
There’s fitting metaphors, and there’s… whatever your comment is trying to convey.
We get it, you’re vegan, but your agenda is extremely off-topic in this case, to the point of being flamebait.
mycocola 2 minutes ago
The metaphor is clear, but not engaging with it does not require you to write a reply of accusation.
simianwords 4 hours ago
Its a bit interesting how the very fact that some technology has different grades of performance can escape people.
Its something I've noticed in many folks. You'd say something like "well sure, did you try using a different model" and you will be met with screeching. Its almost as if they've shut off facts and made up their minds.
An example: a year back I wanted to show that AI doesn't hallucinate that much.
Here's like a 20 comment long conversation with a person who believed that ChatGPT hallucinates easily. It took them a long time to prove it - they used toy examples and it did't work because they'd never used the thinking version. Then they had to resort to esoteric examples in the benchmark which still didn't work.
IshKebab 4 hours ago
It's really not like that. Sorry to disappoint you but it's more like cars were invented, and someone says "have you tried the Ford Model T, it's much better than a steam carriage".
Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".
mycocola 4 hours ago
That's right, exactly like that!
xiaoyu2006 2 hours ago
I feel obligated to quote a comment I saw under 3b1b video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc&lc=Ugyrq4aZqNPa6Ol28...:
I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
I just hate this existence.
hexasquid 4 hours ago
For a second I didnt see where it says "made by my own two hands", but it's down the bottom.
Phew!
sha201 2 hours ago
It's becoming a hobby I guess
micromacrofoot 5 hours ago
Yeah but I want to get paid for it.
cute_boi 6 hours ago
The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
stackedinserter 3 hours ago
Gosh, programming was never that enjoyable.
I finally freed from typewriting mundane stuff like yet another API endpoint or subscribing to rabbitmq, and can focus of creative work and really building useful things.
crystaln 3 hours ago
It’s ok to enjoy knitting too.
ur-whale 3 hours ago
> It's still ok to enjoy programming
It is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.
Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.
Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.
Apocryphon 5 hours ago
NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...)
1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.
IshKebab 4 hours ago
Not really. Even with left-pad there was still some skilled work required. At this point my wife could vibe code an app or a website and it would be actually quite good - not the slop of 6 months ago.
Apocryphon 2 hours ago
Writing left-pad isn't the issue, the issue is that projects were importing a one-liner package and blindly using it, which requires no skill.
> Second, even if the package’s logic is correct, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that developers are taking on dependencies for single line functions that they should be able to write with their eyes closed. In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code. Hell, any of these would make a great code screening interview question to determine whether or not a candidate can code.
> Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming. It’s some crazy form of dependency hacking that involves the cloud, over-engineering things, and complexity far beyond what’s actually needed.
Obviously LLMs make the situation even more dire, but I think people are overlooking that the industry was automating itself out of programming as a craft even before them. It's just the automation involved reuse of the work of other humans.
IshKebab 2 hours ago
esafak 6 hours ago
So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.
0xfffafaCrash 6 hours ago
Yes. There is also reason to believe that the ecosystem is on the path to migrating to one where human developers are an afterthought at best. In the current phase we have lots of more stuff in markdown and other human readable formats and programming languages for sure but there’s little reason to believe that they will stay that way as humans get further from the code in general and the primary consumers and producers are AI. It would be strange if it remains optimized for English-speaking humans for very long.
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
jjulius 3 hours ago
>People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.
And that's OK.
CodingJeebus 5 hours ago
I remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
0c3ca83 5 hours ago
Probably most of them. Software has been very bad for a very long time. AI lets us flood people with trash a lost faster. In the past, I'd have said the software industry was producing mixed benefits, some improvements and some regressions, but on the whole probably a net positive.
Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
I always wondered why since the introduction of EHR systems do I have to fill out 5+ pages of personal information and medical history every time I visit a doctor, as if they have absolutely no records about me at all?
sashank_1509 4 hours ago
Interesting article. Another solution would be to try to reverse this trend, even the doctor in the article isn’t sure if things actually got better functionally by the end of it.
How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.
Apocryphon 6 hours ago
Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
kentm 4 hours ago
Work always comes with bullshit. Its the nature of the thing. I don't think anyone was really getting code golf-style experiences at work, but they likely had enough positives that they outweighed the negatives, which resulted in net "enjoying" work. For a lot of people, AI removed a lot of the positives and left a lot of negatives, and some are still coping with that in one way or another.
parpfish 6 hours ago
if you're code-golfing on a prod repo, i do not want you as my coworker. please add comments. make things readable.
fugalfervor 6 hours ago
It's almost as if this problem was forseeable.
radial_symmetry 5 hours ago
I can now freely admin that I never enjoyed programming. It was just a means to an end for creating.
hollowturtle 3 hours ago
Then you're just a stranger in a land of nerds, only knowing about the history of computing you would know that coding isn't only a means to create something but it is everything. Would the Michelangelo statue have been 3D printed hold the same value? The problem is that programming got popular because it paid good salaries
wuliwong 4 hours ago
I'm a little in the middle, I was always really good at programming, it just clicked for me. As a physicist, I could see that I was OK at the math and physics but excelled at the programming piece. At the same time, I never really cared much about the art of programming itself. It still was a means to an end. I know that does make it so I can't totally empathize with engineers who just love the art of programming and the existential fear they might be feeling with the looming AI takeover.
IshKebab 4 hours ago
It's definitely amazing being able to just make things with so little effort. I'm finishing so many unfinished side projects.
But I would prefer to have a job.
128317836 6 hours ago
HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
The dumbest people always win temporarily.
arcticbull 6 hours ago
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...
jvanderbot 6 hours ago
The listed technologies impacted me none whatsoever. AI has fundamentally changed my relationship with my work, my hobbies, my co-workers, likely permanently.
Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.
100% now discuss AI.
No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.
Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.
Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.
QuadmasterXLII 5 hours ago
besterman23 6 hours ago
I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.
Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.
Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.
lackoftactics 2 hours ago
underrated analogy to claiming Santa Claus being real by nephew. lmao
it's hard to be swayed into skeptic camp if you see how it works and it really solves those hard problems that took hours. Genie is out of the bottle
rafterydj 2 hours ago
vegnus 5 hours ago
I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?
In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.
Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?
rafterydj 3 hours ago
How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??
You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.
You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?
vegnus 3 hours ago
ducktective 5 hours ago
Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.
If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"
seanw444 4 hours ago
I'm a perfect example. I'm nearing the first functional release of my entirely handwritten Linux-native mod manager, and I'm not sure if I want to open source it or not. I love the concept of FOSS software, and it's nearly the only kind I use when possible, and I would love to give back to other humans. However, I'm not interesting in doing free work for megacorps that simply want to see me out of a job for their benefit, and open source is currently looking more and more like that.
Humans are so lazy and obsessed with cost-cutting, efficiency, and "line go up" that we'll willingly walk ourselves into such a bleak inhuman future.
markmstruct 5 hours ago
I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.
They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??
lbrito 6 hours ago
I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.
anonymous_sorry 6 hours ago
The policy part is already in place
> Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself—HN is for sharing between humans. For the same reason, please don't automate posting.
nemomarx 5 hours ago
if you have a good enforcement method you wanna see definitely email them about it please. down voting the obvious ones won't work forever
parpfish 6 hours ago
> HN is 70% AI propagandists
really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.
besterman23 5 hours ago
I wonder what the ratio of poster sentiment to comment sentiment is. I figure the sentiment of a post is seen broadly as much more authoritative than the sentiment of comments.
lackoftactics 2 hours ago
for a long time, I was roasted on HN for seeing any capabilities in programing ai. Recently tables turned and more people see that ai is not leaving and will stay with us
simianwords 4 hours ago
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
If you had to larp as an anti AI person just to say the stupidest thing possible, this is what you would say.
23812 4 hours ago
Oh look, the Simian bot is also here.
croes 2 hours ago
You don’t realize the difference between joy at work and joy on the weekend vs. only joy on the weekend?
d_tr an hour ago
I wish I could upvote this more than once.