Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.
From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.
My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
For me it's just making stuff for my family and kids and seeing if it sticks. LLM's have given me a way to easily get something off the ground whereas it used to be a few months now is a few evenings.
I've made a wealth of cute things for me and my kids to do (shameless self promotion)
https://drawesome.art - multiple people drawing/painting/coloring on the same canvas my kids love this. The architecture took forever for me to get write. Basically server side authoritative state of pixels and blending between two points. How to realistically manage and store it.
https://www.catchmemeow.com - random where's waldo-esque game where you find a cat or dog wearing a silly hat I made this for my daughter and me to help the shelter she wants to volunteer at.
https://www.cluestep.com - this one is weird I've actually tried to productize it but i made this because I had the HARDEST time helping my oldest with her calculus/algebra II homework. Basically I constantly made her cry. I just wish I could make it not look so "Made with AI"
I think LLM's analogy are prefab with nailguns did for carpentry. It's very complicated to prompt it (at least for me) to try and make it do something novel and net new. It always falls back on node/typescript/fastAPI/python. It's not terrible at using more obscure languages but I have the hardest time describing what I want or thinking without starting something more by hand and then letting it take the wheel and seeing where it drives me.
I should mention too at work I'm practically forced, measured even on the amount of AI I use. The expectation feels like use AI for any and everything. So i'm more worried one day I'll be laid off once I'm found to hit the 'enter' key much anymore. Anyways for me I'd say embrace it, use it and you'll find your output is much higher with the caveat that when a bug occurs it's incredibly hard sometimes to fix if it's with LLM generated code.
> The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.
I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
It's not hard to use a drill or a hammer but learning how to use them as tools to make things was always the real challenge. Using LLMs in a useful way I would argue is a much more important skill than programming as was learning how to make programming useful was always the more important skill, but it depends on if you view programming as a means to an end or the end in and of itself.
>You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it
It's not that simple, you have to remember at the end of the day these things are just doing next token prediction. If you don't give it the proper tokens to attend to, then your outputs won't be satisfactory.
You can get stellar outputs from LLMs, but it really is a function of how well you manage your input tokens.
>I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
As someone who's used more and more software made this way—either for hobby stuff or because I've had to for work—I just don't get it. You don't always get exactly what you ask for, and you often ask for something that is really sub-optimal in many ways.
The problem with waterfall wasn't ever solely "it takes a long time to write the code."
> I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
No, it just works after a few iterations.
And you'd know this if you would use AI instead of working in a text editor with markup.
To each their own, and I understand if working by hand is more fun for you.
But in my opinion you guys don't get to make strong claims about the quality of works that make heavy use of AI.
You don't have the experience, and I bet neither does the guy who wrote the article about it being essential to handwrite all the code after planning. The arguments about the environment and sustainability do not seem relevant.
One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
5 minutes... what about 5 hours, or 5 days? Imagine spending 5 hours with a pen and paper sketching solutions. Unthinkable to spend that amount of time "unproductively" today. I feel like there's just so much pressure to make visible progress, and with these tools available it's getting harder to convince yourself to take the time to think.
It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’
I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.
I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)
Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?
Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.
If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
It’s not just that, punting something to an LLM is its own skill that will push out the other skills you were using to do everything on your own. It’s like going from an IC to a tech lead manager, you go from doing things on your own to figuring out how to get a team (of agents) to do it instead.
This is why I like to come up with my own solution(s) for a problem first, and then ask AI what it recommends to see if we match up. Makes it a fun exercise, and usually ends up helping creating one ideal, combined idea.
My jobs made me hate programming long before LLMs. If anything I enjoy programming more now that I can tell the LLM to do the bullshit I don’t want to do, saving my energy for interesting problems…usually ones found outside of my 9-5.
All pros and cons of LLM coding aside, something has really shifted for me with the latest agentic coding. I’ve found my motivation to work slowly slipping away. No matter what role I had I always found something to keep me engaged with the job. Now though there’s no motivation. Every week it feels like my skills, talents, even ideas themselves are less and less relevant. I’m just meat shuffling data and permissions between bots
I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.
Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code
I've had bad experiences with gpt 6 luna, but 5.6 luna worked real nicely with e.g React, you can do a back n forth and it'll work like a teammate vs just a "done!" where you then have to clean everything up afterwards
I’ve also found that fast cheap models are more sustainable because they make it easier to keep technical debt under control. Partially because I’m keeping sustained attention in one place. And partially because small fast models with low reasoning don’t seem to love technical debt either and will (unintentionally) start to give you negative feedback signals when you’re letting things get messy.
That's a great idea, I will try that too. The LLMs are so capable, but the slowness annoys me. I always end up working on a few things at once and always doing rounds of reading its output, giving new orders, and going back to Reddit/HN/YouTube while it's doing its thing for the next 5 minutes.
I've avoided using LLMs. You might not have the option of doing this in paid employment, but you certainly can in your spare time, and if you don't you'll gradually lose the ability to think in a programming language. This applies similarly to any other cognitive skill too: writing music or playing a musical instrument, speaking and reading a foreign language, doing cryptic crosswords, playing chess or go, etc. You wouldn't stop playing chess just because computers are now much better at it. The point is learn, understand, and do those things yourself.
Here's my advice, based on what I have done: implement a programming language yourself, from scratch, without using an LLM, and then program in that. Don't release your implementation, or any code you've written in it.
Most (almost all) of my programming at home has been done in a Lisp dialect I designed and wrote myself, which is superficially similar to Common Lisp, but with subtle differences, including some deficiencies that I have to work around. And in my Lisp dialect, I implemented a visual dataflow language. Code samples are on my web site, but they're PNG images, so are safe from LLMs (I think). The language was designed to run on MIMD hardware, which doesn't exist in the real world. I've also implemented a Prolog which doesn't use Edinburgh syntax, which I use for type checking, and for parsing a controlled English implementation. So the temptation, and also the option, of using an LLM was never there.
In the course of doing all this, I've learned a lot along the way, which I wouldn't have if I'd used an LLM.
this is awesome, but also code samples being in PNG images does not make them safe from LLMs anymore unfortunately, LLMs are really good at reading text from images now
I miss having a canvas. I miss having a place where I created something that is a reflection of my understanding.
The code used to be my canvas. But I suppose it never was an ideal canvas, because the code's primary purpose is to achieve a business objective, or make something work.
I want a really polished literate programming environment where I can slice up the code and add drawings and annotations, and it is all automatically kept in sync with the actual code. I could use this to record my own understanding. Teams could use this to collaborate and create documentation.
The code still matters, but the time for human hand crafted code seems to have ended. Humans still want and need to craft something though. We need to create something to solidify and record our understanding.
Humans need a place to write as a tool for thought, and if the code is no longer that place, we need something else--and if done well it can be better than the actual code.
And, again, I'm not talking about just a really great note taking app here. It needs to be interleaved with the code and kept in sync with the code.
I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.
What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
> We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
Same here...
We commit bad decision, then in the next PR, workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it), then in the next PR we have to workaround (aka deal with) the initial bad decision + work around...so on and so forth...
And at any point, manually reviewing the changes becomes impossible because you have to reason about the changes keeping all the workarounds and special cases in your mind...
> workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it)
I'm convinced that LLM-generated comments accelerate this problem, because they embed twists that a human didn't choose, and then those affect what gets generated next.
Much the same way LLM-characters don't do so well at answering "I don't know", there's a problem of them failing to cull context.
No, it's not a bias. If I vet every line of code still, but my coworker ships thousands of lines they don't understand, we're actually using it differently.
Yeah same here. I feel like I’ve been promoted and not get to manage my own very efficient team that needs a lot of micromanaging. I’ve seen what other people have made without any experience, but I personally feel like I can get my vision done much, much faster, and like I’m not so encumbered by how long it might take to implement some small feature.
In fairness though I never really enjoyed programming for the sake of it, I was always about what you’re getting at the end.
> It's like half the people have turned off their brain.
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:
"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things;
I am ashamed to use them."
This is great for personal projects, but at work chances are someone will have completely rewritten/refactored/rearchitected everything I'd built up a good mental model of next time I blinked.
Wow, I had never considered it, but it really seems like a huge benefit that all implementations in the company codebase are now perpetually refactored.
I’ve been experimenting with this idea that I can implement features faster and more accurately than the big model + agent swarm paradigm. I also have been trying this because of what the post brings up when it comes to AI burnout.
For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.
When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.
Early copilot was exactly what I wanted for a long time. A smarter autocomplete. Then they started taking it too far with just filling in the entire file.
I remember enjoying myself more as an intern in a fullstack capacity than I did
when I was given the job full time about three months later. But that was 7 years ago.
I also remembered the sheer joy of forking enterprise codebases like that of cal.com and highlight.io - just to study and try to understand how large teams worked. I followed issues, I read through PRs and related comments, looked at how some of the comments were resolved. I studied the various moving parts of the app - highlight especially being effectively a log ingestion and aggregation platform, had some rather large infrastructure requirements - kafka, redis, postgresql, clickhouse. It was hard to run with infrastructure directly on your computer. You had to use their docker containers.
I also remembered reading through a tutorial for an sqlite clone in C. It was interesting. I particularly enjoyed typing out the C code and even trying alternate implementation of b-tree operations.
I remember back in 2022 - after I was unemployed for a while - I discovered open source bounties on algora.io (LLMs have since made this platform go bust). I was able to earn roughly $300 per month for a while working on open source issues ranging from $50 to $350. Now most $50 bounties can be one-shot with frontier models. So of course, no one posts open source bounties anymore. If you do, you may just end up with 50 slopped PRs.
I don't understand what's difficult about enjoying programming now that LLMs are everywhere. It's akin to musicians who still play their instruments despite having the ability to stream any music they'd like. Nothing's stopping them from playing their instrument. Why is programming any different?
> I don't understand what's difficult about enjoying programming now that LLMs are everywhere. It's akin to musicians who still play their instruments despite having the ability to stream any music they'd like. Nothing's stopping them from playing their instrument. Why is programming any different?
Because a great majority of our colleagues and compatriots – people we believed viewed the art somewhat similarly to how we do – have shown themselves willing to replace their cellos with CDs, their tubas with tapes and their vocal chords with voice-overs!
We find ourselves in an orchestra in which it seems the loud majority will happily proclaim that they're proud to just press play! It's heartbreaking.
I can understand pressing play to put food on the table. That wouldn't make me sad and angry. Seeing so many so proud and happy about it, and doing it also when the stakes are zero, does.
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP.
We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months.
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
OpenAI/Anthropic's marketing here reminds me of the way colonizers will exalt criminal groups in the regions they wish to dominate. Similarly, these AI firms have exalted a caste of lower-performing engineers who have been wreaking havoc with AI spam for the last few years. I'm not worried about losing my job and these people will become scapegoats when the bottom falls out.
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
People are comparing this to tech automating wood work, knitting, baking etc. That comparison is fundamentally flawed.
You still needed to know how to operate those machines. Where to begin, when to do what. Know what’s right and what’s wrong. They are just tools.
Something like claude desktop can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform contrary to popular opinion. These harnesses are getting that good.
Only reason people don’t do that is because they are intimidated. Regular people don’t even understand file systems. As soon as an Apple-like version of claude code exists that intimidation will be gone.
I have been writing code for 14 years now and everything I learned from my failures and successes someone else can get for free. Even newer paradigms these LLM’s can dream up.
Its the democratisation, of that foundation people put so much effort building is what pissed off everyone here. Including myself I’ll admit.
Results of all these years of hard earned knowledge are accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.
I use claude code at work, even for architectural decisions it can iterate small prototypes to validate. I still read code because I am old school but it can replace most people.
That’s why I added “Results of” that knowledge in front of it. :)
But to be honest, an llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher who can conjure multiple examples if they ask it what was just written. I have seen people out of my field use terms only someone actively working in it would know.
Most people live without knowing how their cars, fuels, medicine, phones work anyways.
I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code
Me? I enjoy that stuff for what it is. Reviewing code is definitely not the truly enjoyable thing. Writing code, expressing my logic in code. That is enjoyable to me.
And I'm sure elevator operators stood pressing buttons long after they didn't need to...
We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.
There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.
It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.
It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.
The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.
I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.
But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
/yes I know a coding language is 100% better at expressing algorithmical logic, but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate. machines do that way better/
No, it's actually much, much harder unless you are ignoring any of the details, which are the things that actually matter ultimately. When you were first learning did they not do the "tell me how to make a PB+J sandwich" or whatever to show you the imprecision of plain human words? You may comprehend the LLM I/O easily, but you don't know that that matches what's actually happening.
It's like saying who likes to ride a bicycle in the world of cars, you can do it much easier with a plain steering wheel.
Well... sure it's more efficient (although in some cities and certain routes it's not; same with coding and LLMs). But some of us just love riding the bicycle and enjoying the nature, you know. Perhaps even strengthening our muscles as we do it, as a healthy side effect.
I definitely comprehend coding language better/faster when I want to fully understand a program. I usually skip docs and go to the sources when possible. I think it's deeper than just the code though, the biggest thing I haven't seen in using natural language is good organization to express the program.
> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code then you're not a programmer, you're a middle manager. So maybe you never actually wanted to be a programmer but instead you liked having things built?
That's great for you, but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts. For many, many people, the things that are left are not the enjoyable ones. People have built hobbies and careers around doing something they love and its relevance is evaporating at an unprecedented rate.
Not commenting on the first “who likes” of whether typing out code is enjoyable (because I think that’s inherently personal preference [0]), but I think the second category is to be understood as “things LLMs enable you to do more of”, not things the author is unwilling to do. So actually, you’d agree with them there.
[0] Okay, I am going to comment on it some more: For me, it also depends on whether I’m “forced” to do the code writing (or reading) because I just want the resulting output or need to modify the program to my wishes; or whether I want to do it because it fulfills me, is interesting, teaches me something new, etc. Both can be true for one person at different times/in different contexts.
Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.
I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.
What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.
>I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level.
And these will be gone, too, a couple months later. Or possibly even at the same time.
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I love these parts. But in my experience, LLMs break much of that.
Planning/architecting? Great. So far, I haven't found any agent that actually follows the plans set out, though. They get something wrong, and it snowballs from here.
Directing a team, steering and giving advice? Absolutely. Some of my greatest achievements involve mentoring. But human teams learn from their mistakes, grow up and contribute insights. Agents don't.
Reviewing code? Well, maybe not so much fun, but it's usually a good way to understand what's going on, and to share experience. Except with agents, you need to spend most of your brainpower seeing through the misleading comments and documentation and choices and sycophancy, and the agent never learns from its mistakes.
Designing interfaces and APIs? Absolutely. Yet every time I look at code modified by my agent, I see that the contracts (internal or public) have been broken by the latest edits.
In my experience, LLMs can be very useful, for refactorings and as learning and review assistants, and sometimes as replacement for missing documentation. But codegen is the worst way to use them.
People other than you, I guess. I think your first chunk is a bit of an unfavorable perspective, but still I would take that over the second every time.
I'm with you. During most of my career, I was considered very technical and a good coder, but I never really loved the slowness of it. I enjoyed designing solutions but found "putting them into code" tiresome because for me the fun is in actually solving the problem.
But it's clear that many people feel otherwise. Software engineering has many classes of tasks and the difference in opinions about AI seem to exist because different people like different aspects of it.
Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.
It's not that clear and still involves coding. But as I start coding and modules/APIs/classes take shape, it gets to a point where I say "ok, from here on it's just filling in the blanks".
But filling in the blanks can still involve a lot of grindy, time consuming work where you iterate through collections, build parameters for other APIs, check invariants etc. All of that stuff is boring to me.
What I'm trying to say is that most coding tasks require "senior level thinking" and "intern level thinking". The latter can sometimes be the majority of the work and I don't want to do that anymore.
I’m not sure which group you consider worst but LLMs already does both. I can only vouch for Opus 5.5. It just needs someone to tell it to do it that’s all. And I am the most anti AI person this post is targeted to.
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
Me! I do!
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I'd rather eat rusty barbed wire. I'd avoid your middle manager hellscape even if if doubled my salary, I swear!
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
I, for one, liked it. I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer because, for all the downsides, I actually enjoyed working with code so closely. It really allowed me to learn and know the code that I wrote.
Whenever I'm using LLMs for code generation, the one huge downside I notice, is that even if I review everything line by line, I don't get the same "I know precisely how it works, because I wrote it" feeling.
I really wonder what the implications of this will be. For instance, if the young devs who are just entering the field will actually be able to write code on their own? Or maybe it will truly not be needed a few years from now?
I think there will be a divide. The SaaS of the future can probably absorb much more LLM use with less knowledgeable devs, because the product not being trash was never critical; it just has to be good enough that Sales can keep convincing people who won't use it to buy it for their orgs. But for things that actually need to be right, there will always be a need for devs who can understand and write code. There has already been some pullback among a few of my colleagues who were riding high earlier this year because what we're working on is more of the second type.
Coding is solving puzzles creatively. When trying to achieve an overall goal, I get some easy problems that remind me how much I've improved since I started out, and some hard problems that are intellectually stimulating. Debugging, reading documentation or source code feels a bit like being a fictional detective running an investigation; plus I'm not just improving my understanding of the system but connecting with other humans through understanding their intent. And finally, I get to choose which solution to implement and how, therefore expressing myself and my own taste.
I come out of it intellectually stimulated, with a sense of achievement and improvement and increased understanding; with also a bit of human connection, and creativity. And of course I also get a working program, so I feel productive too.
If you don't understand this you never enjoyed programming per se. It's fine, people like different things. But I think you might be mistaken calling whatever your job is "coding" or "the trade" because I get the impression it just isn't.
> I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Based on your post, you never liked programming in the first place. You liked having software. Typing the code in, reading the documentation, all that stuff is programming.
I was with you on your second list until this part. It feels like a poison pill rider that's added to a bill in Congress, because I've always found code review to be the single most soul-sucking aspect of the job.
I'll grant that may be at least partially due to poor practices at the places I've worked, but semi-regularly having large PRs that take hours to comb through and where you either rubber-stamp it or look like the bad guy (because you're retarding release velocity) has never been particularly fulfilling.
I had great discussions in PRs, debates we would never have in real life conversations. In these times review is maybe the last holdout to think teams have control over the code. AI made also this nicer by making summaries and answering the stupid questions without shame before turning to the author with confident criticism.
Sounds dreamy. Let's plug in and "write" code without interacting with anyone ever. That way you can further abstract yourself from all meaningful connections to become more efficient. Seriously cannot get inside the head of people like you.
After programming for 40 years, my brain has many language parsers. But languages and interfaces and classes evolve and it been a huge productivity boost the use LLMs for coding.
I use AI like StackOverflow on steroids. And like using stackoverflow, I do it in a browser and I don't let the LLM touch my code.
Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.
Its a false premise so often repeated. I am really tired. Compilers are ruleset: If you pass it one statement it'll produce the same output all the time. Its easy to verify it works. And if enough people have used it before and found no problems, there probably aren't many. Spoiler: People always find niche bugs.
But an LLM will generate you two completely different things today and tomorrow. Heck, even if you stash its changes and redo the same prompt.
Even though I disagree with (when I worked on CUDA at nvidia if I ran the TOT compiler on the same shaders one day and the next they could often change), the point is not to compare the two things side by side. It's just to say there are lots of times in life where for whatever reason we can give up old jobs.
Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).
In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.
I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.
I find mostly what I do is think about how to improve the product, what the user wants, and what information the LLM needs and how to get it into the context window.
Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!
Even with web projects, the issues of LLM coding tendencies and its lack of product 'taste' or whatever you want to call it are apparent. Janky UX, poor information transmission, bloated modules... it's just easier to sell web-based AI output because it's visual and interactive, and we are easily impressed by bright colours smooth animations.
I won't argue that the web is more 'capturable' by LLMs, though. It was maybe slightly out of reach by a large cohort of developers who wouldn't have considered themselves "UI people" (or who scoffed at it for various reasons), but now is well within vibe-territory.
Of course they are, but the quote "LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours" is more true there than in other domains. "Any concept" is the most laughable.
Indeed, the OP's point seems very focused on programmers enjoying programming. And that's a perfectly laudable goal, but obviously this then means that the goal is programmer enjoyment, satisfaction, etc. If the goal is code that allows the user to benefit while also being correct and secure, then that drastically changes the economics and hence potential solutions of what parts of the work should be done by a LLM agent and what parts of the work should be done by a human agent. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants; so what you want from code determines a great deal of how to get there with the greatest benefit and the least cost.
This comment highly resonates with me. I strongly believe coding by hand (defined as an act of writing computer code in some programming language) is moreless obsolete. I.e. my skill to implement dijkstra or quicksort in 10 minutes at 1am in 10 different languages while being hangover/drunk is absolutely worthless now.
Software Engineering itself is more than just coding, the creative (and well engineering) part is still there.
> Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.
If LLMs could be relied upon to produce a good result every time, then they would be like power tools. But they can't, so they aren't. Nobody would use a cordless drill that has a 10% chance of the drill bit suddenly moving several inches to the left of where you were aiming.
it can not not? moreover, it can totally ruin existing invariants, introduce dead code, falsify tests and sabotage further work by poisoning comments and documentation in a few hours.
So what are people like me, who fall into "some values of no one" supposed to do?
I guess just blow my brains out? Just.. Thanks for trying man, but you picked the wrong thing to specialize in, now you're completely redundant and worthless to society. Here's your cyanide pill?
God damn I'm so bitter about all of this. I was doing so well for a bit now I feel like I've completely wasted my life.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.
This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.
LLMs can produce some incredible bloated and convoluted pieces of code if one isn't careful. Even to the point LLMs become useless. Blindly using these 'powertools' is a recipe for disaster.
We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.
Assuming the code is produced to serve human needs there will be humans in the loop somewhere. Not nearly as many as before and not in the same roles but they will be there
The advent of the Spinning Jenny, water frame and power loom (etc.) changed textile manufacturing for good and made the end result so cheap that it is now seen as disposable. There are still some people in the loop controlling the machines but not nearly as many as before and also not really the same people since it takes a different skill set to keep a textile production line running than it takes to spin and weave.
The same is true for the advent of the phototypesetting machine (Linotype etc.) and the offset press which irreversibly changed print production. There are still people in the loop but not nearly as many and with a different skill set.
Now what about the "Coding Johnny"?
Generative models are now doing the same to coders, irreversibly changing the software production process. There will be far fewer people involved and those people will have a different skill set. Software will become disposable, more like RNA then DNA, if the specifications change the Coding Johnny will churn out a new version.
> Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software
The difference is scale. Letting LLMs go out of hand is like the movie Fantasia. Sure people can make a mess on their own but with LLMs can do so much worse in such a short amount of time.
> Generative models are now doing the same to coders
Programming involves quite a bit more than just typing. However, typing the code does help with understanding. Once we stop understanding code because it's just generated AI slop good luck fixing the mess.
Now that even Anthropic and OpenAI called for slowing down. It's obvious that we're past peak hype and realization of the cost of LLMs will set in.
I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
People just like to spill out their justifications on how they interact with ai and generally try to be agreeable in their comfort zones until they get bamboozled by actual market demands. No competitive structure is willing to pay more (to you) that could be replaced by lower cost means to maximize profits. This is basic economy 101. This article seems a huge cope to me IMHO regarding the advice it gives. Programming is mostly solved, although in a very anti-humane way IMHO. Hobbyist means could justify it in the remaining time...
I just pray open weight wins at the end and people actually utilize their ai and own their ai.
Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.
I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.
[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.
I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.
Valued by whom? The market? Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing. They do it for the love of it. If something's only worth doing when someone pays a premium for it, boy, you're in for a hard time.
No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.
It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.
> Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing
Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.
I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.
> I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.
Yet. But I doubt you'll find that appreciation here on Hacker News, or on GitHub. You'll probably have to find a community of like-minded people who enjoy tinkering with software by hand, and those already exist, e.g. parts of the IndieWeb, or Lobsters. Posting your hand-crafted software here is a bit like a knitting enthusiast showing off their sweater at a textile industry trade fair.
You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.
Look, I love code. I have laser cut code snippets framed on my walls. I functions that I have shared online proudly multiple times. I have projects I have lovingly tended to for years just for the joy of making a computer do something strange.
But what’s far far more important is making people happy by producing good software. Ever since my very first SWE internship I’ve cared most about the user. I’m extremely bummed if the user isn’t happy with my work. I’m ecstatic if my work can improve their day. LLMs change how my work gets done and what it is that my effort goes towards. But the core reason to be here instructing computers hasn’t changed.
It doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. Programming can still be a challenge with LLM's, but everyone is panicking and skipping the research portion.
Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.
I have been programming for 25+ years and the last year has been the most fun because every single useless-for-everyone-but-me idea ... I could spend a few hours on and get it working. Did 30-40 different small projects this year.[1] Mostly used by me (and some by a couple of friends).
I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.
Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.
I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.
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[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.
That's been my experience too. 7+ years in industry and lot more before, and I now finally feel like I have more time to do fun side projects. Some may say it is all about the journey, but i rather build for whoever is going to use it, even though it might only be for myself.
I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.
Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.
All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.
I can just have the bot do that crap now.
If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.
But there might be reasons you don’t want to be, e.g. you actually need to bring some real productiveness gain to the table, or you don’t want to be left behind while the rest of your team, your company, your industry, is moving towards heavy LLM adoption.
Oh sure, you are not an LLM bro! Honest!
The amount of new LLM articles that try to feed them like vegetables to a child is amusing and tragic at the same time.
It’s very clear AI writes great code and will even review it for bugs much better and faster than a human can. With cloud agents like Devin, you can spawn an army of these agents at a moments notice. Teams who figure out how to do this will simply out compete any teams who don’t.
Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.
Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.
From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.
My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
For me it's just making stuff for my family and kids and seeing if it sticks. LLM's have given me a way to easily get something off the ground whereas it used to be a few months now is a few evenings.
I've made a wealth of cute things for me and my kids to do (shameless self promotion) https://drawesome.art - multiple people drawing/painting/coloring on the same canvas my kids love this. The architecture took forever for me to get write. Basically server side authoritative state of pixels and blending between two points. How to realistically manage and store it. https://www.catchmemeow.com - random where's waldo-esque game where you find a cat or dog wearing a silly hat I made this for my daughter and me to help the shelter she wants to volunteer at. https://www.cluestep.com - this one is weird I've actually tried to productize it but i made this because I had the HARDEST time helping my oldest with her calculus/algebra II homework. Basically I constantly made her cry. I just wish I could make it not look so "Made with AI"
I think LLM's analogy are prefab with nailguns did for carpentry. It's very complicated to prompt it (at least for me) to try and make it do something novel and net new. It always falls back on node/typescript/fastAPI/python. It's not terrible at using more obscure languages but I have the hardest time describing what I want or thinking without starting something more by hand and then letting it take the wheel and seeing where it drives me.
I should mention too at work I'm practically forced, measured even on the amount of AI I use. The expectation feels like use AI for any and everything. So i'm more worried one day I'll be laid off once I'm found to hit the 'enter' key much anymore. Anyways for me I'd say embrace it, use it and you'll find your output is much higher with the caveat that when a bug occurs it's incredibly hard sometimes to fix if it's with LLM generated code.
I'm hardly AI-pilled but these are lovely parent/child apps. Kudos
It might be that you're just working on projects where LLMs don't provide much benefit.
The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.
> The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.
I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
It's not hard to use a drill or a hammer but learning how to use them as tools to make things was always the real challenge. Using LLMs in a useful way I would argue is a much more important skill than programming as was learning how to make programming useful was always the more important skill, but it depends on if you view programming as a means to an end or the end in and of itself.
>You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it
It's not that simple, you have to remember at the end of the day these things are just doing next token prediction. If you don't give it the proper tokens to attend to, then your outputs won't be satisfactory.
You can get stellar outputs from LLMs, but it really is a function of how well you manage your input tokens.
>I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
As someone who's used more and more software made this way—either for hobby stuff or because I've had to for work—I just don't get it. You don't always get exactly what you ask for, and you often ask for something that is really sub-optimal in many ways.
The problem with waterfall wasn't ever solely "it takes a long time to write the code."
Forgoing the ide is quite a choice
> I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
No, it just works after a few iterations.
And you'd know this if you would use AI instead of working in a text editor with markup.
To each their own, and I understand if working by hand is more fun for you.
But in my opinion you guys don't get to make strong claims about the quality of works that make heavy use of AI.
You don't have the experience, and I bet neither does the guy who wrote the article about it being essential to handwrite all the code after planning. The arguments about the environment and sustainability do not seem relevant.
One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
Just be careful how you use it.
5 minutes... what about 5 hours, or 5 days? Imagine spending 5 hours with a pen and paper sketching solutions. Unthinkable to spend that amount of time "unproductively" today. I feel like there's just so much pressure to make visible progress, and with these tools available it's getting harder to convince yourself to take the time to think.
It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’
I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.
I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)
Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?
I completely agree with you, but being "better off mentally" is really not valued very highly today.
Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.
Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.
If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.
It’s not just that, punting something to an LLM is its own skill that will push out the other skills you were using to do everything on your own. It’s like going from an IC to a tech lead manager, you go from doing things on your own to figuring out how to get a team (of agents) to do it instead.
This is why I like to come up with my own solution(s) for a problem first, and then ask AI what it recommends to see if we match up. Makes it a fun exercise, and usually ends up helping creating one ideal, combined idea.
My jobs made me hate programming long before LLMs. If anything I enjoy programming more now that I can tell the LLM to do the bullshit I don’t want to do, saving my energy for interesting problems…usually ones found outside of my 9-5.
If your job makes you hate programming, why do you stay there? Sounds miserable.
If you think that is bad, you should sample poverty.
If only we could all snap our fingers and have our dream jobs.
All pros and cons of LLM coding aside, something has really shifted for me with the latest agentic coding. I’ve found my motivation to work slowly slipping away. No matter what role I had I always found something to keep me engaged with the job. Now though there’s no motivation. Every week it feels like my skills, talents, even ideas themselves are less and less relevant. I’m just meat shuffling data and permissions between bots
I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.
Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code
I've had bad experiences with gpt 6 luna, but 5.6 luna worked real nicely with e.g React, you can do a back n forth and it'll work like a teammate vs just a "done!" where you then have to clean everything up afterwards
Oh yeah. I discovered this back in February. Faster and cheaper is better, because faster means you can focus.
Frenetic multitasking is for suckers.
I’ve also found that fast cheap models are more sustainable because they make it easier to keep technical debt under control. Partially because I’m keeping sustained attention in one place. And partially because small fast models with low reasoning don’t seem to love technical debt either and will (unintentionally) start to give you negative feedback signals when you’re letting things get messy.
Yeah, I've come to this realization as well. It's like the inverse of that classic interruption comic. The waiting makes me lose the context.
That's a great idea, I will try that too. The LLMs are so capable, but the slowness annoys me. I always end up working on a few things at once and always doing rounds of reading its output, giving new orders, and going back to Reddit/HN/YouTube while it's doing its thing for the next 5 minutes.
I've avoided using LLMs. You might not have the option of doing this in paid employment, but you certainly can in your spare time, and if you don't you'll gradually lose the ability to think in a programming language. This applies similarly to any other cognitive skill too: writing music or playing a musical instrument, speaking and reading a foreign language, doing cryptic crosswords, playing chess or go, etc. You wouldn't stop playing chess just because computers are now much better at it. The point is learn, understand, and do those things yourself.
Here's my advice, based on what I have done: implement a programming language yourself, from scratch, without using an LLM, and then program in that. Don't release your implementation, or any code you've written in it.
Most (almost all) of my programming at home has been done in a Lisp dialect I designed and wrote myself, which is superficially similar to Common Lisp, but with subtle differences, including some deficiencies that I have to work around. And in my Lisp dialect, I implemented a visual dataflow language. Code samples are on my web site, but they're PNG images, so are safe from LLMs (I think). The language was designed to run on MIMD hardware, which doesn't exist in the real world. I've also implemented a Prolog which doesn't use Edinburgh syntax, which I use for type checking, and for parsing a controlled English implementation. So the temptation, and also the option, of using an LLM was never there.
In the course of doing all this, I've learned a lot along the way, which I wouldn't have if I'd used an LLM.
this is awesome, but also code samples being in PNG images does not make them safe from LLMs anymore unfortunately, LLMs are really good at reading text from images now
Thanks. The code (here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html) isn't text, it's directed graphs.
I miss having a canvas. I miss having a place where I created something that is a reflection of my understanding.
The code used to be my canvas. But I suppose it never was an ideal canvas, because the code's primary purpose is to achieve a business objective, or make something work.
I want a really polished literate programming environment where I can slice up the code and add drawings and annotations, and it is all automatically kept in sync with the actual code. I could use this to record my own understanding. Teams could use this to collaborate and create documentation.
The code still matters, but the time for human hand crafted code seems to have ended. Humans still want and need to craft something though. We need to create something to solidify and record our understanding.
Humans need a place to write as a tool for thought, and if the code is no longer that place, we need something else--and if done well it can be better than the actual code.
And, again, I'm not talking about just a really great note taking app here. It needs to be interleaved with the code and kept in sync with the code.
Are you looking for org-babel?
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.
What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
> We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.
Same here...
We commit bad decision, then in the next PR, workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it), then in the next PR we have to workaround (aka deal with) the initial bad decision + work around...so on and so forth...
And at any point, manually reviewing the changes becomes impossible because you have to reason about the changes keeping all the workarounds and special cases in your mind...
> workaround the bad decision (instead of undoing it)
I'm convinced that LLM-generated comments accelerate this problem, because they embed twists that a human didn't choose, and then those affect what gets generated next.
Much the same way LLM-characters don't do so well at answering "I don't know", there's a problem of them failing to cull context.
> At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.
> What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_effect
No, it's not a bias. If I vet every line of code still, but my coworker ships thousands of lines they don't understand, we're actually using it differently.
Yeah same here. I feel like I’ve been promoted and not get to manage my own very efficient team that needs a lot of micromanaging. I’ve seen what other people have made without any experience, but I personally feel like I can get my vision done much, much faster, and like I’m not so encumbered by how long it might take to implement some small feature.
In fairness though I never really enjoyed programming for the sake of it, I was always about what you’re getting at the end.
> I feel like I’ve been promoted
The correct response to "I feel I have been promoted (without a corresponding title or pay change)" is to be pissed off, not excited
Why would you want to be pissed off when you could be excited?
Excitement is for when good things happen.
A promotion is only a good thing if you actually benefit from it
> It's like half the people have turned off their brain.
LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.
While reading "The Nemesis of Creativity"
It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:
"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."
It resonates with me similarly as the post.
> he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity.
A lot of these AI guys seem pretty simple to me...
"hold on, let me ask Claude what I should think about this topic."
This is great for personal projects, but at work chances are someone will have completely rewritten/refactored/rearchitected everything I'd built up a good mental model of next time I blinked.
Yeah, further reducing emotional attachment to code at work is a yet another benefit of LLMs.
Wow, I had never considered it, but it really seems like a huge benefit that all implementations in the company codebase are now perpetually refactored.
> are now perpetually refactored.
Sounds more like a fantasy than reality...
I’ve been experimenting with this idea that I can implement features faster and more accurately than the big model + agent swarm paradigm. I also have been trying this because of what the post brings up when it comes to AI burnout.
For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.
When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.
Sounds like you could just use an autocomplete model for the exact same benefit.
And that's not a criticism, that's what I've come back to myself.
Early copilot was exactly what I wanted for a long time. A smarter autocomplete. Then they started taking it too far with just filling in the entire file.
I remember enjoying myself more as an intern in a fullstack capacity than I did when I was given the job full time about three months later. But that was 7 years ago.
I also remembered the sheer joy of forking enterprise codebases like that of cal.com and highlight.io - just to study and try to understand how large teams worked. I followed issues, I read through PRs and related comments, looked at how some of the comments were resolved. I studied the various moving parts of the app - highlight especially being effectively a log ingestion and aggregation platform, had some rather large infrastructure requirements - kafka, redis, postgresql, clickhouse. It was hard to run with infrastructure directly on your computer. You had to use their docker containers.
I also remembered reading through a tutorial for an sqlite clone in C. It was interesting. I particularly enjoyed typing out the C code and even trying alternate implementation of b-tree operations.
I remember back in 2022 - after I was unemployed for a while - I discovered open source bounties on algora.io (LLMs have since made this platform go bust). I was able to earn roughly $300 per month for a while working on open source issues ranging from $50 to $350. Now most $50 bounties can be one-shot with frontier models. So of course, no one posts open source bounties anymore. If you do, you may just end up with 50 slopped PRs.
Just random thoughts.
I don't understand what's difficult about enjoying programming now that LLMs are everywhere. It's akin to musicians who still play their instruments despite having the ability to stream any music they'd like. Nothing's stopping them from playing their instrument. Why is programming any different?
> I don't understand what's difficult about enjoying programming now that LLMs are everywhere. It's akin to musicians who still play their instruments despite having the ability to stream any music they'd like. Nothing's stopping them from playing their instrument. Why is programming any different?
Because a great majority of our colleagues and compatriots – people we believed viewed the art somewhat similarly to how we do – have shown themselves willing to replace their cellos with CDs, their tubas with tapes and their vocal chords with voice-overs!
We find ourselves in an orchestra in which it seems the loud majority will happily proclaim that they're proud to just press play! It's heartbreaking.
I can understand pressing play to put food on the table. That wouldn't make me sad and angry. Seeing so many so proud and happy about it, and doing it also when the stakes are zero, does.
One thing I've been doing is to use it for:
1. Compare the code against production data with MCP. We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers.
2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to datadog (where we store the logs), checks the history of the commits, and many times suggest fixes. These are for low-medium impact like validations that didn't need to go through, or a step check that it was missing
3. Creating tickets on the board (we use linear). Now PRs are more detailed and can be understood.
And for coding? I've been spending the last 4 weeks scrutinizing EVERY output and decision from frontier models, and pushed back in many decisions.
For tasks you don't want to do (such as work-related ones), use an LLM.
For tasks you enjoy, write them yourself.
I just realized that the last time I wrote a for loop was in November 2025, so it’s been ten months.
The previous time I had this kind of break from hands-on imperative programming was in… 1987.
I was seven years old when I started doing BASIC, and though interests came and went (at one point I went to film school), I never stopped coding entirely. Until now.
The amount of code I’m producing today is higher than before. I’m now also middle-managing a team and doing what’s effectively customer-facing product management, a combination that has become bearable thanks to AI. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is permanently gone from my life.
This sums up well the current zeitgeist, wow
OpenAI/Anthropic's marketing here reminds me of the way colonizers will exalt criminal groups in the regions they wish to dominate. Similarly, these AI firms have exalted a caste of lower-performing engineers who have been wreaking havoc with AI spam for the last few years. I'm not worried about losing my job and these people will become scapegoats when the bottom falls out.
I've lately been using LLMs to do a lot of testing and verification.
An LLM can go and pull files off NFS, and write and run verification scripts in less time than I can even think of a testing strategy or locate the files.
Sometimes they'll do it unprompted
For writing unit tests, which are often repetative and verbose, they are another godsend.
Overall they're freeing up a lot more time for nice things like thoughtful API design, refactoring, system architecture and design work etc.
For exploring massive codebases they are another godsend
People are comparing this to tech automating wood work, knitting, baking etc. That comparison is fundamentally flawed.
You still needed to know how to operate those machines. Where to begin, when to do what. Know what’s right and what’s wrong. They are just tools.
Something like claude desktop can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform contrary to popular opinion. These harnesses are getting that good.
Only reason people don’t do that is because they are intimidated. Regular people don’t even understand file systems. As soon as an Apple-like version of claude code exists that intimidation will be gone.
I have been writing code for 14 years now and everything I learned from my failures and successes someone else can get for free. Even newer paradigms these LLM’s can dream up.
Its the democratisation, of that foundation people put so much effort building is what pissed off everyone here. Including myself I’ll admit.
Results of all these years of hard earned knowledge are accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.
I use claude code at work, even for architectural decisions it can iterate small prototypes to validate. I still read code because I am old school but it can replace most people.
> years of hard earned knowledge is accessible to any random person off the street without any effort.
Isn't this like saying "any one can paint now because every one have a camera?"..
That’s why I added “Results of” that knowledge in front of it. :)
But to be honest, an llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher who can conjure multiple examples if they ask it what was just written. I have seen people out of my field use terms only someone actively working in it would know.
Most people live without knowing how their cars, fuels, medicine, phones work anyways.
> llm can also be the world’s most patient teacher...
It won't throw a hissy fit. True. But what it does instead is that it will take you in circles instead, until your patience runs out..
I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code
Me? I enjoy that stuff for what it is. Reviewing code is definitely not the truly enjoyable thing. Writing code, expressing my logic in code. That is enjoyable to me.
And I'm sure elevator operators stood pressing buttons long after they didn't need to...
We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.
There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.
It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.
It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.
The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.
I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.
Says the pro-Elon shill who is just here to boost xAI and demoralize people.
But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
/yes I know a coding language is 100% better at expressing algorithmical logic, but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate. machines do that way better/
No, it's actually much, much harder unless you are ignoring any of the details, which are the things that actually matter ultimately. When you were first learning did they not do the "tell me how to make a PB+J sandwich" or whatever to show you the imprecision of plain human words? You may comprehend the LLM I/O easily, but you don't know that that matches what's actually happening.
It's like saying who likes to ride a bicycle in the world of cars, you can do it much easier with a plain steering wheel.
Well... sure it's more efficient (although in some cities and certain routes it's not; same with coding and LLMs). But some of us just love riding the bicycle and enjoying the nature, you know. Perhaps even strengthening our muscles as we do it, as a healthy side effect.
> but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate
Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.
I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.
I definitely comprehend coding language better/faster when I want to fully understand a program. I usually skip docs and go to the sources when possible. I think it's deeper than just the code though, the biggest thing I haven't seen in using natural language is good organization to express the program.
I think the premise is that yes, you can do that. However many don’t and many in larger corps are pushed expressly to not work that way.
> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.
> And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten
1. Review what it writes as it writes it
2. Give it a smaller, more focused, scope to make changes
Or, keep vibing but then don't get mad about it.
Oh, if I had the ability to do these things, agents would be much nicer to use.
Sadly, at my current company, this doesn't seem to be acceptable practice.
What do you mean? Because management says it makes you too slow? Or is it unacceptable for some other reason?
> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.
Skill issue.
Luck issue..
If you are lucky, your question have a good representation in the training material and the randomness is on your side..
But the LLM won't tell you that, so until you test your luck by taking the answer from LLM and using it, you never know..
But then, the AI company would have run off with your token payments...
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code then you're not a programmer, you're a middle manager. So maybe you never actually wanted to be a programmer but instead you liked having things built?
That's great for you, but you're completely devoid of empathy if you can't understand these posts. For many, many people, the things that are left are not the enjoyable ones. People have built hobbies and careers around doing something they love and its relevance is evaporating at an unprecedented rate.
> Who likes typing code
It really does seem like the target audience of LLM users are people who never learned to use Vim.
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs.
Why would anyone pay you to work for them if you aren't willing to do these things? This is the entire job.
Not commenting on the first “who likes” of whether typing out code is enjoyable (because I think that’s inherently personal preference [0]), but I think the second category is to be understood as “things LLMs enable you to do more of”, not things the author is unwilling to do. So actually, you’d agree with them there.
[0] Okay, I am going to comment on it some more: For me, it also depends on whether I’m “forced” to do the code writing (or reading) because I just want the resulting output or need to modify the program to my wishes; or whether I want to do it because it fulfills me, is interesting, teaches me something new, etc. Both can be true for one person at different times/in different contexts.
Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.
I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.
What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.
>I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level.
And these will be gone, too, a couple months later. Or possibly even at the same time.
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I love these parts. But in my experience, LLMs break much of that.
Planning/architecting? Great. So far, I haven't found any agent that actually follows the plans set out, though. They get something wrong, and it snowballs from here.
Directing a team, steering and giving advice? Absolutely. Some of my greatest achievements involve mentoring. But human teams learn from their mistakes, grow up and contribute insights. Agents don't.
Reviewing code? Well, maybe not so much fun, but it's usually a good way to understand what's going on, and to share experience. Except with agents, you need to spend most of your brainpower seeing through the misleading comments and documentation and choices and sycophancy, and the agent never learns from its mistakes.
Designing interfaces and APIs? Absolutely. Yet every time I look at code modified by my agent, I see that the contracts (internal or public) have been broken by the latest edits.
In my experience, LLMs can be very useful, for refactorings and as learning and review assistants, and sometimes as replacement for missing documentation. But codegen is the worst way to use them.
>Who likes...
People other than you, I guess. I think your first chunk is a bit of an unfavorable perspective, but still I would take that over the second every time.
I'm with you. During most of my career, I was considered very technical and a good coder, but I never really loved the slowness of it. I enjoyed designing solutions but found "putting them into code" tiresome because for me the fun is in actually solving the problem.
But it's clear that many people feel otherwise. Software engineering has many classes of tasks and the difference in opinions about AI seem to exist because different people like different aspects of it.
Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.
It's not that clear and still involves coding. But as I start coding and modules/APIs/classes take shape, it gets to a point where I say "ok, from here on it's just filling in the blanks".
But filling in the blanks can still involve a lot of grindy, time consuming work where you iterate through collections, build parameters for other APIs, check invariants etc. All of that stuff is boring to me.
What I'm trying to say is that most coding tasks require "senior level thinking" and "intern level thinking". The latter can sometimes be the majority of the work and I don't want to do that anymore.
I’m not sure which group you consider worst but LLMs already does both. I can only vouch for Opus 5.5. It just needs someone to tell it to do it that’s all. And I am the most anti AI person this post is targeted to.
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
Me! I do!
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I'd rather eat rusty barbed wire. I'd avoid your middle manager hellscape even if if doubled my salary, I swear!
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
I, for one, liked it. I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer because, for all the downsides, I actually enjoyed working with code so closely. It really allowed me to learn and know the code that I wrote.
Whenever I'm using LLMs for code generation, the one huge downside I notice, is that even if I review everything line by line, I don't get the same "I know precisely how it works, because I wrote it" feeling.
I really wonder what the implications of this will be. For instance, if the young devs who are just entering the field will actually be able to write code on their own? Or maybe it will truly not be needed a few years from now?
I think there will be a divide. The SaaS of the future can probably absorb much more LLM use with less knowledgeable devs, because the product not being trash was never critical; it just has to be good enough that Sales can keep convincing people who won't use it to buy it for their orgs. But for things that actually need to be right, there will always be a need for devs who can understand and write code. There has already been some pullback among a few of my colleagues who were riding high earlier this year because what we're working on is more of the second type.
>Who likes typing code...
Mmm..almost everyone who loves programming. If I hated typing code, I would not been a programmer, because it used to involve a lot of typing.
Or else you did it for $$$. But then don't assume every one who programs hates typing code.
Or maybe you did it because you had ideas for things computers ought to be able to do, and needed to get those ideas into the computer?
Coding is solving puzzles creatively. When trying to achieve an overall goal, I get some easy problems that remind me how much I've improved since I started out, and some hard problems that are intellectually stimulating. Debugging, reading documentation or source code feels a bit like being a fictional detective running an investigation; plus I'm not just improving my understanding of the system but connecting with other humans through understanding their intent. And finally, I get to choose which solution to implement and how, therefore expressing myself and my own taste.
I come out of it intellectually stimulated, with a sense of achievement and improvement and increased understanding; with also a bit of human connection, and creativity. And of course I also get a working program, so I feel productive too.
If you don't understand this you never enjoyed programming per se. It's fine, people like different things. But I think you might be mistaken calling whatever your job is "coding" or "the trade" because I get the impression it just isn't.
> I don't understand these posts. I've never been more excited to program. Everything that I disliked about it disappeared overnight.
Based on your post, you never liked programming in the first place. You liked having software. Typing the code in, reading the documentation, all that stuff is programming.
You should check out HandWaveLang.
It doesn't exist yet, but you could easily create it.
> Who likes typing code
Hackers.
> And who likes ... reviewing code
I was with you on your second list until this part. It feels like a poison pill rider that's added to a bill in Congress, because I've always found code review to be the single most soul-sucking aspect of the job.
I'll grant that may be at least partially due to poor practices at the places I've worked, but semi-regularly having large PRs that take hours to comb through and where you either rubber-stamp it or look like the bad guy (because you're retarding release velocity) has never been particularly fulfilling.
I had great discussions in PRs, debates we would never have in real life conversations. In these times review is maybe the last holdout to think teams have control over the code. AI made also this nicer by making summaries and answering the stupid questions without shame before turning to the author with confident criticism.
It sounds like this message isn’t for you then?
Spoke like a true manager.
Sounds dreamy. Let's plug in and "write" code without interacting with anyone ever. That way you can further abstract yourself from all meaningful connections to become more efficient. Seriously cannot get inside the head of people like you.
that's because you are not programming
You keep doing it regardless of LLMs, use them to your advantage
After programming for 40 years, my brain has many language parsers. But languages and interfaces and classes evolve and it been a huge productivity boost the use LLMs for coding.
I use AI like StackOverflow on steroids. And like using stackoverflow, I do it in a browser and I don't let the LLM touch my code.
I, personally, love programming more than ever!
Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.
I dont have bandwidth to check ai made code
that's okay! nobody had the bandwidth to check compiler generated machine code either so we just stopped doing it
Its a false premise so often repeated. I am really tired. Compilers are ruleset: If you pass it one statement it'll produce the same output all the time. Its easy to verify it works. And if enough people have used it before and found no problems, there probably aren't many. Spoiler: People always find niche bugs.
But an LLM will generate you two completely different things today and tomorrow. Heck, even if you stash its changes and redo the same prompt.
They are NOT comparable at all.
Even though I disagree with (when I worked on CUDA at nvidia if I ran the TOT compiler on the same shaders one day and the next they could often change), the point is not to compare the two things side by side. It's just to say there are lots of times in life where for whatever reason we can give up old jobs.
Oh I dont disagree that it does replace some jobs. Why use junior developers when AI generates the same quality?
Just that comparing LLM to a compiler is nonsense. Because one is deterministic and the more using it, the better the quality will get.
Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).
In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.
I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.
Yeah, but compilers actually work reliably. LLMs do not.
Programmers don't work reliably too.
I find mostly what I do is think about how to improve the product, what the user wants, and what information the LLM needs and how to get it into the context window.
Sure. Ultimately it's still you who is responsible for the code you ship I assume, no matter how it came about.
Appreciate the read, even if the workflow's not for me personally. I've found that I'm just not that interested in writing the code by hand now that the option to not do so is available - but I totally understand people who still want to!
It's over. LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours.
Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.
I repeat for the millionth time, not everything is web dev.
Even with web projects, the issues of LLM coding tendencies and its lack of product 'taste' or whatever you want to call it are apparent. Janky UX, poor information transmission, bloated modules... it's just easier to sell web-based AI output because it's visual and interactive, and we are easily impressed by bright colours smooth animations.
I won't argue that the web is more 'capturable' by LLMs, though. It was maybe slightly out of reach by a large cohort of developers who wouldn't have considered themselves "UI people" (or who scoffed at it for various reasons), but now is well within vibe-territory.
This comment literally forced coffee through my nasal passageway as laughter erupted from my mouth.
Thank you.
Indeed, there are many other more varied domains.
Are no one using these models outside web?
Of course they are, but the quote "LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours" is more true there than in other domains. "Any concept" is the most laughable.
There's many fields where LLMs perform better than webdev. Personal examples including embedded development and reverse engineering
Indeed, the OP's point seems very focused on programmers enjoying programming. And that's a perfectly laudable goal, but obviously this then means that the goal is programmer enjoyment, satisfaction, etc. If the goal is code that allows the user to benefit while also being correct and secure, then that drastically changes the economics and hence potential solutions of what parts of the work should be done by a LLM agent and what parts of the work should be done by a human agent. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants; so what you want from code determines a great deal of how to get there with the greatest benefit and the least cost.
This comment highly resonates with me. I strongly believe coding by hand (defined as an act of writing computer code in some programming language) is moreless obsolete. I.e. my skill to implement dijkstra or quicksort in 10 minutes at 1am in 10 different languages while being hangover/drunk is absolutely worthless now. Software Engineering itself is more than just coding, the creative (and well engineering) part is still there.
>Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools.
You know, it is called "soft" for a reason...
> Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.
If LLMs could be relied upon to produce a good result every time, then they would be like power tools. But they can't, so they aren't. Nobody would use a cordless drill that has a 10% chance of the drill bit suddenly moving several inches to the left of where you were aiming.
I think it’s more analogous to view LLMs as taking steroids while not going to the gym.
The shirtless body of the average LLM user: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/07/elon-m...
it can not not? moreover, it can totally ruin existing invariants, introduce dead code, falsify tests and sabotage further work by poisoning comments and documentation in a few hours.
Power tools cannot "produce any house in hours"
Don't concede the "power tools" analogy. LLM are not capable of building maintainable software.
So what are people like me, who fall into "some values of no one" supposed to do?
I guess just blow my brains out? Just.. Thanks for trying man, but you picked the wrong thing to specialize in, now you're completely redundant and worthless to society. Here's your cyanide pill?
God damn I'm so bitter about all of this. I was doing so well for a bit now I feel like I've completely wasted my life.
I remember the conversations a few years ago when tech automated many other fields and they asked the same question. What did they do? You could ask them.
There is plenty of historical precedent for machines replacing professions. You could read what those people did and how well it worked.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it never worked out great for many of those people regardless of what they did.
That is kind of my point.
Why exactly do you think I'm so bitter?
Alternatively, you can listen to Jimmy Buffett's A Pirate Looks At Forty
Society is for people, people like you. Not the other way around. And your value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce for an employer.
> value to society is definitely not measured in what stockholder value you can produce
This is exactly the value of a person in all capitalistic systems. If we want to change this we need widespread socialism / UBI. Maybe Georgism.
The fact that you're a good friend or partner to someone definitely has value, but not something anyone cares about.
This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.
If I knew what to retrain into I would sign up immediately.
Right now I'm just at a loss. I've never wanted to be anything other than a programmer before.
LLMs can produce some incredible bloated and convoluted pieces of code if one isn't careful. Even to the point LLMs become useless. Blindly using these 'powertools' is a recipe for disaster.
We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.
Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software:
https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...
Assuming the code is produced to serve human needs there will be humans in the loop somewhere. Not nearly as many as before and not in the same roles but they will be there
The advent of the Spinning Jenny, water frame and power loom (etc.) changed textile manufacturing for good and made the end result so cheap that it is now seen as disposable. There are still some people in the loop controlling the machines but not nearly as many as before and also not really the same people since it takes a different skill set to keep a textile production line running than it takes to spin and weave.
The same is true for the advent of the phototypesetting machine (Linotype etc.) and the offset press which irreversibly changed print production. There are still people in the loop but not nearly as many and with a different skill set.
Now what about the "Coding Johnny"?
Generative models are now doing the same to coders, irreversibly changing the software production process. There will be far fewer people involved and those people will have a different skill set. Software will become disposable, more like RNA then DNA, if the specifications change the Coding Johnny will churn out a new version.
> Yes, well, so can humans given the "right" circumstances, e.g. "enterprise" software
The difference is scale. Letting LLMs go out of hand is like the movie Fantasia. Sure people can make a mess on their own but with LLMs can do so much worse in such a short amount of time.
> Generative models are now doing the same to coders
Programming involves quite a bit more than just typing. However, typing the code does help with understanding. Once we stop understanding code because it's just generated AI slop good luck fixing the mess.
Now that even Anthropic and OpenAI called for slowing down. It's obvious that we're past peak hype and realization of the cost of LLMs will set in.
> Since people have mistaken my texts for LLM-generated before, I’ll tell you that it is 100% human written without any AI-assistance.
> This is the game changer.
> This is not communication. It’s a tool output.
Not saying I'm 100% sure, but those seemed slightly sus to me
I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
People just like to spill out their justifications on how they interact with ai and generally try to be agreeable in their comfort zones until they get bamboozled by actual market demands. No competitive structure is willing to pay more (to you) that could be replaced by lower cost means to maximize profits. This is basic economy 101. This article seems a huge cope to me IMHO regarding the advice it gives. Programming is mostly solved, although in a very anti-humane way IMHO. Hobbyist means could justify it in the remaining time...
I just pray open weight wins at the end and people actually utilize their ai and own their ai.
Agreeing with the means/end framing, and the bit that's missing is that most of us are both depending on the day. I'll happily let it generate the CSV parser and still want to hand-write the tricky state machine.
Pick something you always wanted to learn more about and use LLMs to help you
It just needs to be something where you can verify its information quickly enough.
I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.
Is it really that hard to understand?
Same people that make clothes for fun usually do not work at sweatshops.
Some bakers started baking as a hobby, got really good at it, and then better tools and profit margins came about. Now they were forced to make low quality bread at work for 8 hours straight every day and seeing 90% of their colleagues that they considered pretty good bakers actually be fine with it.
How exciting do you think those bakers are to bake more bread at home after they go though slopping bread at work? How enthusiastic are they still about their hobby after a few years or a decade?
I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.
[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.
I kind of agree. But I think LLMs just make it way worse than Sprint boot, enterprise middleware or anything similar ever could.
And I still very much like using LLMs for certain things. I do not miss Googling for hours to compile the right information.
I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.
Valued by whom? The market? Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing. They do it for the love of it. If something's only worth doing when someone pays a premium for it, boy, you're in for a hard time.
> Valued by whom? The market?
No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.
It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.
> Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing
Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.
I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.
> I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.
Yet. But I doubt you'll find that appreciation here on Hacker News, or on GitHub. You'll probably have to find a community of like-minded people who enjoy tinkering with software by hand, and those already exist, e.g. parts of the IndieWeb, or Lobsters. Posting your hand-crafted software here is a bit like a knitting enthusiast showing off their sweater at a textile industry trade fair.
You can also program by hand professionally. There's a reason why the handmade, luxery items are more valuable and desirable than the heavily manufactured counterpart.
1. Because they're genuinely better quality. Usually.
2. There's a human connection (way more important than people think. I.e commodity fetishism)
3. Less people can do it.
-- all of these properties will apply to software in the near future. The person that can hand code the thing an llm does poorly, or because an llm cant be trusted will be extremely valuable, especially as this category of people begins to shrink, as peoppe atrophy their skills with llms.
The rest of y'all are excited about handing over the value of your labor to some billionaires thinking machine because that same billionaire has convinced you that you're going to be able to create your own startup or something stupid.
Nah, you're going to become a (underpaid/poor) conveyor belt operator making mass manufactured slop. Some smart ones will become the swiss watchmakers of software. Rare and in demand.
These narratives are designed for people who want to see programmers taken down a peg. The truth is that LLM generated code is not sustainable and the people hawking it are operating recklessly.
Look, I love code. I have laser cut code snippets framed on my walls. I functions that I have shared online proudly multiple times. I have projects I have lovingly tended to for years just for the joy of making a computer do something strange.
But what’s far far more important is making people happy by producing good software. Ever since my very first SWE internship I’ve cared most about the user. I’m extremely bummed if the user isn’t happy with my work. I’m ecstatic if my work can improve their day. LLMs change how my work gets done and what it is that my effort goes towards. But the core reason to be here instructing computers hasn’t changed.
It doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. Programming can still be a challenge with LLM's, but everyone is panicking and skipping the research portion.
Still, isn't programming fine as a hobby? Honestly, when I program, I hand off the parts I don't want to do to AI, and these days I just do what I want to do. It seems like something worth doing as a hobby. At work, you're forced to use AI to meet deadlines, but as a hobby it seems perfectly good too.
Thanks for sharing. It might also come down to whether we see programming as an end in itself or as a tool.
You could just not use LLMs?
I have been programming for 25+ years and the last year has been the most fun because every single useless-for-everyone-but-me idea ... I could spend a few hours on and get it working. Did 30-40 different small projects this year.[1] Mostly used by me (and some by a couple of friends).
I write software because I am interested in the final outcomes, not because I enjoy the journey, which is often infuriating because of the mistakes you make, or the crap you depend on to get your work done.
Whether people will still have jobs in three years, or thirty, only time will tell, but I feel people are kidding themselves if they think LLMs won't have an impact. We were fine with using machines to automate physical labor as we now balk at the same thing happening to the intellectual side of things.
I, personally, have done a complete volte-face as far as my views on the subject are concerned over the past year or so as I use LLMs more and more for coding and other tasks.
---
[1] There is this idea I have had of an Excel replacement: simple, purely functional, TSV-based spreadsheet with zero backward compatibility with styles as purely optional sidecar material that I have always wanted to do but lacked the time. Brainstormed a spec with Claude today. Might work on it in the near future.
That's been my experience too. 7+ years in industry and lot more before, and I now finally feel like I have more time to do fun side projects. Some may say it is all about the journey, but i rather build for whoever is going to use it, even though it might only be for myself.
Me too.
I used to enjoy the journey more. I feel like the explosion of insane complexity and layers and the mess of dependencies and all the rest ruined the fun of the journey long before AI came along.
Take user interfaces. Making one wasn’t so bad in the 90s or 2000s. Now it’s a hellscape of either bloated Electron or the shifting sands of native APIs that are all complex and special.
All of it imposes cognitive load that has nothing to do with the problem I want to solve and it foists ugliness on you. Before you can touch your problem you have to create all this boilerplate.
I can just have the bot do that crap now.
If I want to code for fun I can code only the parts that are fun.
But there might be reasons you don’t want to be, e.g. you actually need to bring some real productiveness gain to the table, or you don’t want to be left behind while the rest of your team, your company, your industry, is moving towards heavy LLM adoption.
Oh sure, you are not an LLM bro! Honest!
The amount of new LLM articles that try to feed them like vegetables to a child is amusing and tragic at the same time.
It’s very clear AI writes great code and will even review it for bugs much better and faster than a human can. With cloud agents like Devin, you can spawn an army of these agents at a moments notice. Teams who figure out how to do this will simply out compete any teams who don’t.
Now humans operate at a higher level of abstraction. Our focus area is now ensuring the high-level architecture will accommodate future needs well, ensuring the final product meets requirements, and most importantly, ensuring the final product has been validated. It’s important to use every strategy in the book to test the output via unit tests, smoke tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. On our team, we’ve been investing a lot in setting up full test environments that include the entire stack at a level simply unachievable before AI. Now we can merge code changes at an unprecedented velocity without losing confidence in the system.
What product do you make?
>It’s very clear AI writes great code
It's very clear they dont. Maybe they will one day. That day isnt today.