I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.
My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now.
Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.
This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.
It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.
You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.
I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.
I too have lost something I loved, I gained it after years of relentlessly focusing on maximizing what I loved and minimizing what cost me energy. And now the world flips on me.
The good news? I got pretty good at consciously finding the energy givers and drainers and optimizing for the givers, so I'll just keep doing that. I'll either start enjoying micro-managing LLMs, or find something else entirely. Or find that the LLMs need less and less micromanaging, or start enjoying whatever they need next year. (Point an army of agents in a direction?)
I came from the molecular biolab with Linux as a hobby, then when to software dev and infra. What's next ? Idk, I still love biology, keeping eyes and ears open...
You sound like you're processing this well. I think I'm in the group of people you're talking about who aren't processing it well. What kind of conclusions have you come to regarding that list (what you work on and how, finances, kids, etc.)?
* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.
* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?
* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.
* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.
* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.
* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.
From a recent post here on HN, my agent stored it without the URL, it exists just as text for me to get philosophical with, I do that with insights such as above, so here is a quote:
Derek Thompson, in "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep": "If intelligence becomes less uniquely human, we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another".
Funnily my bot was called Cladius van der Bot, nice name ;)
It's about as specific as we can get atm I guess. I have no idea, I just know we VALUE human connection, there is unique human value in it. We value each-other.
Maybe we just sit around campfires and tell stories as the billionaires warm their hands on their burning data centers.
Don't forget that everything anybody owns is just a system we invented, my house, my garden, only a piece of paper that we all accept keep others from it.
We can reinvent ourselves. Idk, to me this is a comforting thought. But I agree it's still lacking. It's not simple, discussing things online helps develop language and vision around it.
Speaking of inventiveness: I was listening to a history of hip-hop, and I started imagining an alternative past, with LLMs arising in the 80s, and AI inventing rap and rap culture. That fantasy is instructively ridiculous, AI doesn't invent things, it isn't cultural.
A non-zero amount of people are preparing (or have already) to leave the industry entirely.
Even if one were to continue doing everything by hand, it will still be harder compared to others who aren't. As in, companies will come to expect more/faster work than you are capable of, so it still affects us old farts that don't want to change.
We'll find something else, sure, or just retire... but not everyone is/was ready to.
I'm not sad on a personal level per se, I can still be positive and look to the future, but I lament what we increasingly no longer have.
Every day I have this glorious schadenfreude on the software industry. The very industry that's been relentlessly rent-seeking, while eliminating jobs, after telling everyone to "just learn to code" is going to zero. In the past month I've replaced nearly all monthly software subscriptions with bespoke clones that meet my needs better. The only stuff I pay for is because there is data that I cannot acquire myself (i.e. live and regulated market data). The snake will eat its tail.
For what it's worth, I also love coding and have been coding since I was 5, but the writing is on the wall. The stuff I get done in a day now would have taken man-years before. It's like having a genie at your disposal.
Writing code was the "downtime" for me, it existed between boughts of intense problem solving. With AI agents my time is shifting heavily towards solving problems and I have less downtime as a result.
With LLM and current economic situation my job is doing 5 things at once and after 7:30h my brain is just in panic mode. On remote this isn't a huge issue but in the office (which I'm obligated to be twice a week) I just don't know what to do so I eat 3 meal 5min each pretending this is normal.
Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.
Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.
Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.
So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible
"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.
Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?
It seems like your boss is doing work that doesn’t actually add value without you to review the code. But maybe the company isn’t set up to fairly evaluate the fact that review provides more value than creating code, with a workflow like your boss’s?
My boss is young, passionate guy overhyped with LLM claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.
When I joined I thought this is peaceful place, after a month this changed tremendously.
And this is third job like this in a row so I have no hope to find anything even slightly as peaceful as 5y ago
If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.
Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, of a knowledge management system for agents, or ... The possibilities are endless.
Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.
> I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.
Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.
Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.
It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.
The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.
I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.
Part of the problem is that senior management in many organizations is so damn bad at, well, organizing the organization. Both the people and the software architecture. There really is something to an approach like everyone credits to Amazon: small team with a discrete product and proper architectural boundaries, communicating to other applications in known predictable ways with a proper process on both ends for making changes.
When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.
You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.
Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.
At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.
Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.
Trying to silence someone (“You should have..not commented”) is pretty rude.
Seems like the same old story. Rude people defending other rude people so that they can collectively continue to justify their own rudeness. Usually with arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And usually using a fresh account.
While interests have a wide variety of norms, communication has a much smaller space of shared norms, and "strange" implies a negative value judgement in most of them. I'm comfortable with my comment.
I feel that the fact that people feel the need to pile on people who enjoy writing code is a problematic trend on HN, whereas telling them to maybe consider other peoples' priorities and preferences is not. The paradox of tolerance is apt here.
I phrased it fine. No-one knows your intentions. If you don't think it comes off as insulting then feel free to disregard, but I (and others, apparently) think it does.
> "I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that."
That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.
But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.
> At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks
Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.
Yeah, but therein lies the difference between coding as a hobby and software engineering as a profession. The latter tends to promote DRY overuse of dependencies, whether the dependencies were invented in-house or not!
I've always enjoyed hacking on random projects and AI does that really well. Every crazy idea I've ever had can be iterated on, and takes way less time now. Sure it's awesome that I don't have to spend hours throwing together a bunch of python and bash scripts, but it just happens instantly now. That's why I actually like Copilot autocompletion for side projects, because I can build something and still save a massive amount of time tinkering with limited blockers. I wish there was a better middle ground between "one shot this" and writing everything yourself.
> I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks
> AI is a "solution" to that
Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?
There's no question that you can have it implemented without reading most of the explanation.
Not necessarily one-shot, but still in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually wade through the implementation.
This was pretty much already the case half a year ago, with some more patience and tolerance for worse UX.
Nowadays we're getting to the point where the autonomous implementation can deliver UX like software produced by teams at Apple or Google and the like, and with optimized performance.
i'm the same way, and my personal projects are being created in a similar way.
i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.
it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.
for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.
I’m in a similar boat, though I’ve found some solace in that AI development (for me at least) has also made other kinds of work more enjoyable. Previously, since I enjoyed programming, problem solving, and learning more than the end product, I tried to work on projects where I would learn as much as possible which had interesting problems to solve that would make me a better software engineer.
Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.
Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.
I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.
It really depends, it seems. Through my coding career I always had interesting, and maybe a bit too big ideas for consumer software, bogged down by the fact that I like to code interesting algorithms but not business processes and interfaces. And in that sense AI is really a miracle for me - I no longer need to get bogged down by tedious work, I can focus on architecting the software and interesting algos (nothing seem too big nowadays) and have AI code it, debug it, and deploy it in a fraction of time it would take me if I had to code it entirely! Also, I no longer need to learn all these modern frameworks that keep spurring like mushrooms. In fact, frameworks are not a necessity when AI can vanilla JS everything anyway.
It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)
Good to hear opinion like yours, I am of the same opinion. I use AI in the same way as you describe.
Now I understand the meaning of the famous opening sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
I am surprised how many people like the actual writing part, it always felt to me like doing micro in an RTS game. I know a lot of people love that too but I always played RTS games to feel like a general. But I'm still in the camp of reading every single change the LLM does, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds, but maybe that will end up being a waste of time soon. Like if the job ends up being just writing and reviewing MD files for the agent to digest I'll hate it too.
Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?
It's funny how differently people see things. I find reading/reviewing LLM generated code to be much more difficult and tedious that writing it myself.
You probably micromanage the LLMs architectural choices. Thats actually a bad idea, you will probably get better results if you let the LLM decide the architecture and just tweak it where its assumptions are wrong. It has much more context than you in its codebase anyway. Then you won’t feel like a general more, but you’ll be much more productive :)
I have a mix of heavily reviewed and more vibe-coded projects, and the ones where I manage the architectural choices end up working a lot better, even just for the LLM itself. I can get features built much quicker with less tokens and bugs. Meanwhile the more vibe-coded stuff always takes longer and sometimes gets bugs
Edit: To add to that, even in my "micro-mangaged" projects, the parts I didn't review end and treat like a block box temporarily up being the parts that introduce bugs.
I’ve seen advanced models implement function calls in an interpreter by instantiating an entirely new interpreter to handle the call, so no I’m not going to delegate architecture to the agent. And no, it didn’t do that because it had more context.
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code)
My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.
I agree it’s very mixed, it strongly depends on what you are developing, how big and established your codebase is, how opinionated you are about simple vs overdone, how many subtle and nonlocal interactions your codebase has, etc. Plus the more experienced you are the more you are likely to reject the AI solution as not well considered, whereas to someone new may think it looks plausible and confident.
They're great and you don't have to review everything.
From what you're always commenting, I could believe that you were exclusively using Haiku 4.5, which would explain how the tool produces only garbage while the rest of the world pretends AI was great.
Just out of curiosity, do you use like Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and you still find the results inadequate?
they're about as great as an average developer. See rsync fixing their fabled code for some time now. They also have more output than the average programmer. so...
It also leaves the part of reviewing the code (which I have realised is really quite different skillset from writing code - it needs a sense of something is fishy here or why is this even here or can't this look better).
It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.
> My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager).
I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.
Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.
What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.
I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.
Well, I can't speak for the person above, but in my case typing out the code is part of solving the problem. Plenty of times I've thought I had a great idea in my head, and then in the process of writing it out found better understanding and an even better approach. Some of that can still be emulated with LLMs -- you can read the output and have it tweak things where you find oddities, but its still not really the same, and I miss having that process of discovery and improvement.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never really clicked with a "plan everything upfront, and then all that's left is writing the code" process
I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming
So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"
So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.
Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being
I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless
And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.
If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
I've commented elsewhere about this but so many are flippant towards your feelings and it's quite sad.
Comments such as "now that economically 'traditional coding' no longer works" get over it. Or a recent one "get over your anthropocentric view of intelligence, AI is here now".
These views (and many more besides) are short sighted, I do think anthropocentrically. The economy is a proxy for the lives of real people, the economy matters only because it deals with real people. People who feel, have agency, who live and die.
Two super AI's talking to each other maybe the most intelligent things in the universe but they don't matter.
Humans matter, human lives matter, human feelings matter.
I wrote a thing about this (https://www.klio.org/theory-of-llm-dev-skepticism/) back at the beginning of the year, in a totally different era of AI dev tooling. What you're describing is what I called there "bottom-up" programming.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of first-person advice for you; as I say in that essay, I was also a bottom-up programmer for a long time and was deeply skeptical of top-down approaches. What changed my opinion and my practice was just doing things for long enough that I started having a sense of where things were going to go before I did the exploratory work to find it out, and eventually the exploratory work was unnecessary and I could create a basically-correct top-down design early on. I don't know how you build that experience without actually getting in the reps (which has some implications for future generations of developers, if we have any).
That said, my second-person advice would be to use the agents for the design part of things, too. "Here's the problem, how would you design it?" and then have a conversation with them, push back on the things that seem wrong, imagine reviewing this as a finished design from a coworker and seeing where it looks right and where it doesn't. Ask why it designed things a certain way; suggest alternatives for it to evaluate and think about what it's weighing. Basically borrow the robot's experience to augment and build up yours.
> And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.
I think that this really needs to be internalized by a lot of people. I really appreciated when my boss sat our team down and said "Yeah this is the new normal, and I know its not what you signed up for. Its fine to feel sad that your job is changing in such a dramatic way." No, it didn't help anyone actually adjust, but sometimes you just need someone to empathize and tell you its OK to feel bad about this when everyone around you is excited.
> If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
I'm trying to replace it with "thinking through with AI" to limited success. A lot of people recommend having the AI "plan" the thing and review the plan, which is OK. I've also had it do a prototype and poked around a bit, summarized the learnings, and then did it again in an iterative manner without rough edges I've found. Whether you are given the space to do that is up to your org -- its hard sell to "do it again" but I've found that the second attempt leads to better results since I can prompt my way around the problems. Sometimes this also leads to a "Not even wrong" moment where I found out that I framed the problem wrong and the AI dutifully carried out doing the wrong thing.
I don't have a good answer, but a question of my own. I wonder if there are only the two extremes: write everything manually or one-shotting without looking at the code?
One-shotting without review is very quick but has its downsides: burnout, less understanding of the code base, less interacton with your colleagues, you miss the poor choices the LLM made so the code base might rot.
Writing everything manually is much slower and in some circumstances not what you want anyway.
Is there a middleground where you get significant parts of the productivity/speed increase but retain the most important parts of the manual process? I have found I preferred the copilot style of working, but the interface was not really optimized.
Instead of spewing out code at 20x speed can we settle for 5x and remain in control? That would be my ideal and more sustainable, right?
I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.
Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.
I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.
>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?
Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.
Speaking for myself. Not really. The problem that I had with enjoying programming was that many of my coworkers who didn't enjoy programming have some opinions that were frustrating to need to entertain.
Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.
In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.
> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.
I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.
Those types of articles make me wonder - is it specific to current US-based software companies culture to be so much involved in AI? I work for in central-eastern Europe and AI has changed the way I code, but not to an extent that I don't ever manually write code anymore. I don't want to sound patronizing, just a genuine question, cause I have a disconnect with what I'm reading on HN and what I see on a daily basis.
I have friends that enjoy knitting and sewing. Those are great pastimes made commercially unviable for most because of great leaps in logistics and automation. But they are absolutely valid and enjoyable hobbies.
And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
It's just tough to hear a mainstream "impactful" line of work be compared to knitting and sewing. Say what you want but people thought that their work was necessary to the advancement of society, or at least something bigger than themselves. Whether you agree with them or not, reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.
There's also a tension in your comment. Are we prioritizing "advancing society" or programmer feelings? If it's the former, then it doesn't matter if AI is better than humans, whatever moves us forward faster is better. If it's the latter, then we're talking about holding back progress for the sake of a programmer's feelings.
For the record, I'm a lifelong programmer who loves AI because now I can experiment with new ideas at a scale I could not before. I feel zero loss. In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.
ok and? both are allowed to suck? most people have lived for 10s of years not 10s of thousands of years so it's not like that "ancestral memory" matters anyways.
Programming is the art of automation, and is being taken to new levels. It'd be quite damming to the field if a substantial % of the world's output over many decade hadn't brought us here, tbh.
Were builders crying when the Hagia Sophia was built? Projects come and go, nothing is forever.
At that point it’s probably worth taking a more mainstream hobby like music or dancing, you’ll have a much bigger community of passionate folks. I suspect that will happen to programmers as a hobby folks too, they might discover they like playing music instruments instead.
Not to mention your friends still enjoy receiving custom made knitted stuff as presents, or your neighbors if you see someone struggling. Or donate it somewhere, or put it in a display shelf to be reminded what you can actually do. Maybe in the future, programs and custom made hardware might be the same :)
Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.
I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.
Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.
Last year I started at a new job and was first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.
Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.
Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.
I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.
> I still program on the weekends because it is fun
Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?
Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".
Its a bit interesting how the very fact that some technology has different grades of performance can escape people.
Its something I've noticed in many folks. You'd say something like "well sure, did you try using a different model" and you will be met with screeching. Its almost as if they've shut off facts and made up their minds.
An example: a year back I wanted to show that AI doesn't hallucinate that much.
Here's like a 20 comment long conversation with a person who believed that ChatGPT hallucinates easily. It took them a long time to prove it - they used toy examples and it did't work because they'd never used the thinking version. Then they had to resort to esoteric examples in the benchmark which still didn't work.
It's really not like that. Sorry to disappoint you but it's more like cars were invented, and someone says "have you tried the Ford Model T, it's much better than a steam carriage".
Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".
Most of the times someone writes something like that I find they are mostly talking to themselves.
Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.
This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.
That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.
That's true too: AI currently doesn't live up to the promises that were made to the execs, so there's also more pressure for human slop and outsourcing to fill the gaps.
I disagree, understanding systems and problem solving, understand technical capabilities, requirements and delivering a product is what always paid for by consumers. Paying programming labor was just a means to an end, removing that expensive and time consuming part creates a world with so many more possibilities.
A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.
Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.
Cool, I don't care about any of the stuff you just said you shipped. I've got enough trash software in my life, and I'd pay to have it reduced. The things you listed are more stuff that I don't want to interact with.
With open source you can also have it improved, and have less trash software in your life.
Codex created a custom build of firefox with a feature I wanted (essentially the ability to override ssl dns like you get with curl --resolve option). Also, it was able to take apple-music-for-linux that I like for streaming apple music and update it so it would work again. There are incredible possibilities here.
And the downsides far outweigh the benefits. Your future still fucking sucks; it's just not good for humans to live in, no matter how many SSL DNS entries you override.
>Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first and to a higher degree, and not the mechanical part. Old time artists (think Rembrandt) used to have make paint by hand, a consuming process, and partially poisonous. Modern artists, it's my understanding largely save all this part by buying it in tubes, giving them time or more important things.
It's debatable depending on who you're talking to whether taste is more "important" than execution/the mechanical part (I think calling it the mechanical part is a little misleading because that suggests one is brainlessly implementing a fixed algorithm). Maybe for the manager/CEO types who have a grand pie in the sky vision that they need an army to implement "taste" is more important. But I think for the artist themselves being able to spawn something into existence with their own labor is a large part of the experience.
Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.
Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.
For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.
We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.
>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.
"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.
But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.
In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.
PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.
Yes, that's fair. But at least if judged purely on output, human taste is no moat.
So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.
>But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first
I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.
Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.
Both sides of this are about exploration. Compare with collage: it's a different thing. It's not painting or drawing. It's fast, and it's art, and it depends on and reuses other people's painting and drawing. It's not strictly superior.
>Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it,
Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.
For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!
Yes I agree, you should try generating your own custom AI assisted art. You might be surprised by the enjoyment you get out of manifesting a vision in your head that you could not have produced before.
Understanding the underlying implementation can have value even if rarely used. I think learning assembly has had a profound effect on my understanding of higher level code, but there is no /real/ point to learning it with great compilers, pre-ai.
I don’t deny that there’s more slop than ever, but I would argue that this is a quantitative issue not a qualitative one, because frankly, the Internet has been drowned in slop for over a decade now. Those creative industries have had to deal with a lot of low quality content (some bot-generated even before LLMs!) for a while now.
So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.
You people don't care about human mastery or excellence at all. So what if we produce more stuff cheaper and faster? That wasn't the problem. We're making it harder for people to get rewarded for genuine effort and dedication and in exchange for alienating us from our work we get a lot of lower quality crap. It sucks!
This is the kind of argument people make about furniture vs ikea and human made watches. This is not mastery, its just hobby/art. Human excellence is in abundance, not in raw dogging the most artistic Java class.
You could've made the same argument at any time in history because all technologies do the same thing. Things will go on, mastery will remain.
I'm not just talking about programming. If you want to give up doing your job to Anthropic and OpenAI, that's your business, just get the hell out of other fields that weren't asking for your help.
It doesn't make all people's lives worse. It makes those people's lives worse that think their job (now redundant) was an artistic endeavour. The rest of the world gets cheaper things at affordable prices.
Some of us enjoy mentally modelling everything to see opportunities to iterate as each cog turns in their head. Often without being in front of a device, letting sub conscious figuring out difficult problems. AI has its place but so does that process.
If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.
Same not sure for the same reasons, to me it all sounds like a big marketing campaign for AI coding. Everywhere I read I see comments bragging about that the quality of these products output is better than us or it is usually taken for granted. Not my experience so far and I'm on the edge of AI usage
The problem is that AI is creating a race to the bottom. We are forced to use AI tools and burn tokens because leadership don't have a clue. And even if you're doing complex work, people will assume it's just a prompt...
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of
SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.
Not really. Even with left-pad there was still some skilled work required. At this point my wife could vibe code an app or a website and it would be actually quite good - not the slop of 6 months ago.
Then you're just a stranger in a land of nerds, only knowing about the history of computing you would know that coding isn't only a means to create something but it is everything. Would the Michelangelo statue have been 3D printed hold the same value? The problem is that programming got popular because it paid good salaries
I'm a little in the middle, I was always really good at programming, it just clicked for me. As a physicist, I could see that I was OK at the math and physics but excelled at the programming piece. At the same time, I never really cared much about the art of programming itself. It still was a means to an end. I know that does make it so I can't totally empathize with engineers who just love the art of programming and the existential fear they might be feeling with the looming AI takeover.
So you're staying you can still program as a hobby. Well, of course. You can also write poetry and do other things you won't get paid for. People are complaining that they don't get to enjoy what they do for work any more.
Yes. There is also reason to believe that the ecosystem is on the path to migrating to one where human developers are an afterthought at best. In the current phase we have lots of more stuff in markdown and other human readable formats and programming languages for sure but there’s little reason to believe that they will stay that way as humans get further from the code in general and the primary consumers and producers are AI. It would be strange if it remains optimized for English-speaking humans for very long.
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
I remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
Probably most of them. Software has been very bad for a very long time. AI lets us flood people with trash a lost faster. In the past, I'd have said the software industry was producing mixed benefits, some improvements and some regressions, but on the whole probably a net positive.
Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.
I always wondered why since the introduction of EHR systems do I have to fill out 5+ pages of personal information and medical history every time I visit a doctor, as if they have absolutely no records about me at all?
Interesting article. Another solution would be to try to reverse this trend, even the doctor in the article isn’t sure if things actually got better functionally by the end of it.
How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.
Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
Work always comes with bullshit. Its the nature of the thing. I don't think anyone was really getting code golf-style experiences at work, but they likely had enough positives that they outweighed the negatives, which resulted in net "enjoying" work. For a lot of people, AI removed a lot of the positives and left a lot of negatives, and some are still coping with that in one way or another.
HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
The listed technologies impacted me none whatsoever. AI has fundamentally changed my relationship with my work, my hobbies, my co-workers, likely permanently.
Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.
100% now discuss AI.
No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.
Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.
Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.
Its the same pyromaniacs lighting things on fire for thrills; last week it was a brushpile, the week before it was some sparklers, this week it was an unexploded 15 inch shell from WWI.
I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.
Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.
Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.
Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.
If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"
I'm a perfect example. I'm nearing the first functional release of my entirely handwritten Linux-native mod manager, and I'm not sure if I want to open source it or not. I love the concept of FOSS software, and it's nearly the only kind I use when possible, and I would love to give back to other humans. However, I'm not interesting in doing free work for megacorps that simply want to see me out of a job for their benefit, and open source is currently looking more and more like that.
Humans are so lazy and obsessed with cost-cutting, efficiency, and "line go up" that we'll willingly walk ourselves into such a bleak inhuman future.
I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.
They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??
I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.
> Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself—HN is for sharing between humans. For the same reason, please don't automate posting.
I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?
In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.
Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?
How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??
You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.
You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?
Did I say programmers haven't done anything culturally significant? No, clearly not. I'm saying the vast majority of all programmers have not done anything culturally significant
really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.
I wonder what the ratio of poster sentiment to comment sentiment is. I figure the sentiment of a post is seen broadly as much more authoritative than the sentiment of comments.
My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.
This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.
It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.
You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.
I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.
Reach out if you want to chat.
I too have lost something I loved, I gained it after years of relentlessly focusing on maximizing what I loved and minimizing what cost me energy. And now the world flips on me.
The good news? I got pretty good at consciously finding the energy givers and drainers and optimizing for the givers, so I'll just keep doing that. I'll either start enjoying micro-managing LLMs, or find something else entirely. Or find that the LLMs need less and less micromanaging, or start enjoying whatever they need next year. (Point an army of agents in a direction?)
I came from the molecular biolab with Linux as a hobby, then when to software dev and infra. What's next ? Idk, I still love biology, keeping eyes and ears open...
* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.
* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?
* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.
* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.
* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.
* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.
Derek Thompson, in "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep": "If intelligence becomes less uniquely human, we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another".
Funnily my bot was called Cladius van der Bot, nice name ;)
Maybe we just sit around campfires and tell stories as the billionaires warm their hands on their burning data centers.
Don't forget that everything anybody owns is just a system we invented, my house, my garden, only a piece of paper that we all accept keep others from it.
We can reinvent ourselves. Idk, to me this is a comforting thought. But I agree it's still lacking. It's not simple, discussing things online helps develop language and vision around it.
Even if one were to continue doing everything by hand, it will still be harder compared to others who aren't. As in, companies will come to expect more/faster work than you are capable of, so it still affects us old farts that don't want to change.
We'll find something else, sure, or just retire... but not everyone is/was ready to.
I'm not sad on a personal level per se, I can still be positive and look to the future, but I lament what we increasingly no longer have.
For what it's worth, I also love coding and have been coding since I was 5, but the writing is on the wall. The stuff I get done in a day now would have taken man-years before. It's like having a genie at your disposal.
I worry about burnout.
Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.
Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.
Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.
So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible
Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?
It seems like your boss is doing work that doesn’t actually add value without you to review the code. But maybe the company isn’t set up to fairly evaluate the fact that review provides more value than creating code, with a workflow like your boss’s?
When I joined I thought this is peaceful place, after a month this changed tremendously.
And this is third job like this in a row so I have no hope to find anything even slightly as peaceful as 5y ago
Get resumes out.
If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.
Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, of a knowledge management system for agents, or ... The possibilities are endless.
Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.
Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.
Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.
It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.
The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.
I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.
When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.
You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.
Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.
At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.
Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.
People enjoy different things. Its not strange. Treating it as strange is kinda insulting, so I'd recommend that you rethink how you phrase this.
Seems like the same old story. Rude people defending other rude people so that they can collectively continue to justify their own rudeness. Usually with arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And usually using a fresh account.
While interests have a wide variety of norms, communication has a much smaller space of shared norms, and "strange" implies a negative value judgement in most of them. I'm comfortable with my comment.
I feel that the fact that people feel the need to pile on people who enjoy writing code is a problematic trend on HN, whereas telling them to maybe consider other peoples' priorities and preferences is not. The paradox of tolerance is apt here.
> Strange implies a negative value judgement
It sounds like you've internalized some negativity around being "not-normal" -- how I would define "strange".
In a society of vice, greed, and perfidy, acting nice for no reason is "strange".
So, as many things that can be compared and have a "normal" can be strange.
Deviant implies negativity, but I would say pacifists are "deviants".
Any negativity with "strange" has to come with context.
That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.
But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.
Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.
> AI is a "solution" to that
Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?
Not necessarily one-shot, but still in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually wade through the implementation.
This was pretty much already the case half a year ago, with some more patience and tolerance for worse UX.
Nowadays we're getting to the point where the autonomous implementation can deliver UX like software produced by teams at Apple or Google and the like, and with optimized performance.
i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.
it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.
for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.
Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.
Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.
I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.
It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)
Now I understand the meaning of the famous opening sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?
Edit: To add to that, even in my "micro-mangaged" projects, the parts I didn't review end and treat like a block box temporarily up being the parts that introduce bugs.
My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.
From what you're always commenting, I could believe that you were exclusively using Haiku 4.5, which would explain how the tool produces only garbage while the rest of the world pretends AI was great.
Just out of curiosity, do you use like Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and you still find the results inadequate?
It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.
I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.
Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.
What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.
I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming
So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"
So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.
Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being
I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless
And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.
If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
Comments such as "now that economically 'traditional coding' no longer works" get over it. Or a recent one "get over your anthropocentric view of intelligence, AI is here now".
These views (and many more besides) are short sighted, I do think anthropocentrically. The economy is a proxy for the lives of real people, the economy matters only because it deals with real people. People who feel, have agency, who live and die.
Two super AI's talking to each other maybe the most intelligent things in the universe but they don't matter.
Humans matter, human lives matter, human feelings matter.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of first-person advice for you; as I say in that essay, I was also a bottom-up programmer for a long time and was deeply skeptical of top-down approaches. What changed my opinion and my practice was just doing things for long enough that I started having a sense of where things were going to go before I did the exploratory work to find it out, and eventually the exploratory work was unnecessary and I could create a basically-correct top-down design early on. I don't know how you build that experience without actually getting in the reps (which has some implications for future generations of developers, if we have any).
That said, my second-person advice would be to use the agents for the design part of things, too. "Here's the problem, how would you design it?" and then have a conversation with them, push back on the things that seem wrong, imagine reviewing this as a finished design from a coworker and seeing where it looks right and where it doesn't. Ask why it designed things a certain way; suggest alternatives for it to evaluate and think about what it's weighing. Basically borrow the robot's experience to augment and build up yours.
I think that this really needs to be internalized by a lot of people. I really appreciated when my boss sat our team down and said "Yeah this is the new normal, and I know its not what you signed up for. Its fine to feel sad that your job is changing in such a dramatic way." No, it didn't help anyone actually adjust, but sometimes you just need someone to empathize and tell you its OK to feel bad about this when everyone around you is excited.
> If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.
I'm trying to replace it with "thinking through with AI" to limited success. A lot of people recommend having the AI "plan" the thing and review the plan, which is OK. I've also had it do a prototype and poked around a bit, summarized the learnings, and then did it again in an iterative manner without rough edges I've found. Whether you are given the space to do that is up to your org -- its hard sell to "do it again" but I've found that the second attempt leads to better results since I can prompt my way around the problems. Sometimes this also leads to a "Not even wrong" moment where I found out that I framed the problem wrong and the AI dutifully carried out doing the wrong thing.
One-shotting without review is very quick but has its downsides: burnout, less understanding of the code base, less interacton with your colleagues, you miss the poor choices the LLM made so the code base might rot.
Writing everything manually is much slower and in some circumstances not what you want anyway.
Is there a middleground where you get significant parts of the productivity/speed increase but retain the most important parts of the manual process? I have found I preferred the copilot style of working, but the interface was not really optimized.
Instead of spewing out code at 20x speed can we settle for 5x and remain in control? That would be my ideal and more sustainable, right?
Who is forcing you to use AI?
I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.
Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.
I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.
This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
Now all I have to do is make sure they're not peddling an actively bad idea and if not I can just tell the bot to incorporate their dubious ideas.
In the past it was all, I'm not familiar with this construct that solves our problem perfectly, why don't we cludge adapter pattern in here again.
I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.
And the skills they provide are transferable. Patience, attention to detail, staying on task.
There's also a tension in your comment. Are we prioritizing "advancing society" or programmer feelings? If it's the former, then it doesn't matter if AI is better than humans, whatever moves us forward faster is better. If it's the latter, then we're talking about holding back progress for the sake of a programmer's feelings.
For the record, I'm a lifelong programmer who loves AI because now I can experiment with new ideas at a scale I could not before. I feel zero loss. In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.
Programming is the art of automation, and is being taken to new levels. It'd be quite damming to the field if a substantial % of the world's output over many decade hadn't brought us here, tbh.
Were builders crying when the Hagia Sophia was built? Projects come and go, nothing is forever.
Work is a significant amount of my waking life. I chose this career because it is something I enjoy. But AI is removing a lot of the enjoyment for me. And saying "if you don't like it, just switch careers" is not helpful, and ignores the difficulty and cost of doing so.
Thanks blog!
Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.
Last year I started at a new job and was first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.
Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.
Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.
I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.
Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?
Detractors say it causes needless suffering, accelerates global warming, bad for you in excess. Some say it simply doesn't taste nice, and are met with "Have you tried wagyu-7.1, it's much better than sirloin-flash-3".
We get it, you’re vegan, but your agenda is extremely off-topic in this case, to the point of being flamebait.
Its something I've noticed in many folks. You'd say something like "well sure, did you try using a different model" and you will be met with screeching. Its almost as if they've shut off facts and made up their minds.
An example: a year back I wanted to show that AI doesn't hallucinate that much.
Here's like a 20 comment long conversation with a person who believed that ChatGPT hallucinates easily. It took them a long time to prove it - they used toy examples and it did't work because they'd never used the thinking version. Then they had to resort to esoteric examples in the benchmark which still didn't work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693707
Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".
Great to hear that the author found peace somehow, though I would advise not to worry too much about what you consume out there if it affects you to the point of needing justification.
Phew!
This AI shit has degraded most of what I enjoy. Artists, musicians, and writers are drowning in a sea of slop. Mathematics is looking like it won't have a human future. Programming is something you can't get paid for.
The future sucks.
That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.
It sucks on that end too.
I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.
It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.
A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.
Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.
It's a great future.
With open source you can also have it improved, and have less trash software in your life.
Codex created a custom build of firefox with a feature I wanted (essentially the ability to override ssl dns like you get with curl --resolve option). Also, it was able to take apple-music-for-linux that I like for streaming apple music and update it so it would work again. There are incredible possibilities here.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.
For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.
We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.
It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.
"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.
But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.
In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.
PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.
So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.
I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.
Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.
Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.
For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!
So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.
AI will make things cheaper and more abundant - at the cost of a few people not enjoying their jobs. So what.
You could've made the same argument at any time in history because all technologies do the same thing. Things will go on, mastery will remain.
If that sounds like you, then don't be discouraged to keep thinking.
It is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.
Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.
Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.
But I would prefer to have a job.
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.
How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
The dumbest people always win temporarily.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...
Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.
100% now discuss AI.
No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.
Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.
Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.
Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.
Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.
If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"
Humans are so lazy and obsessed with cost-cutting, efficiency, and "line go up" that we'll willingly walk ourselves into such a bleak inhuman future.
They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??
> Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself—HN is for sharing between humans. For the same reason, please don't automate posting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.
Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?
You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.
You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?
really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.
If you had to larp as an anti AI person just to say the stupidest thing possible, this is what you would say.