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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me.

Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction.

Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill.

Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there.

Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp.

Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain.

Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead.

Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...

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It reminds me of the Hamming quote:

"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."

Each of those little interruptions is a clue about the wider state of the world (codebase / APIs etc). AI offers a shortcut, but it does not provide the same mental world-building.

That's a nice quote. And your comment reminds me of why I (and maybe some other people) prefer windows managers over desktop environments. You go with the basic and everytime you notice some missing capabilities or inefficiency, you code it away. The end result is something that fit you like a glove and you understand thoroughly. It's 100% your own.

But with DE, you need maybe 80%, and the 20% you build with workarounds is constantly under threat. Why, because you're effectively enclosed in a small space by the design decisions of the DE.

Exactly this, though for me a lot of boilerplate is actually a comfort zone that I often look forward to, the way an athlete might to a light jog. Earbuds in, forget about everything, crank it out.

(That said your point is valid — there is boilerplate that is tedious and the resulting pain will be motivation to improve things)

Reformatting data is the very last thing I’d trust an LLM to do. What if it picks numbers it likes better? Compiler won’t catch that.

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