To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.
> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments
That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.
Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?
The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.
Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem in any professional environment.
Lawyers spend literally hundreds of hours doing just that. Well, their paralegals do.
Git is a legitimately amazing tool, but it can't magically make version control free. You still have to think because ultimately software can't decide which stuff is right and which is wrong.
It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.
You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.
I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.
In fact, I usually hate writing code at day job because it is boring things 20 out of 26 sprints.
I don't think it is. Labeling passion and love for your work "tech fetishism", is spiritually bankrupt. Mind you we're in general here not talking about people working in a mine to survive, which is a different story.
But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account? That is the fetish, that is someone who has himself become an automaton. It's no surprise they seem to take no issues with LLMs because they're already living like one. Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?
Do you understand work-life balance? I get paid to do the job, I satisfy my curiosities in my free-time.
> But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account?
Because I doubt finding a well paying job that you love is something that is achievable in our society, at least not for most people.
IMO, the real fetishization here is "work is something more than a way to get paid" that's a corporate propaganda I'm not falling for.
Which is why I stressed twice, including in the part you chose to quote, that I am talking about people who can achieve that. If you have to take care of your sick grandmother, you don't need to feel addressed.
But if you did have the resources to choose a career, like many people who comment here, and you ended up a software developer completely devoid of passion for the craft you're living like a Severance character. You don't get to blame the big evil corporations for a lack of dedication to a craft. You don't need to work for one to be a gainfully employed programmer, and even if you do and end up on a deadbeat project, you can still love what you do.
This complete indifference to what you produce, complete alienation from work, voluntarily chosen is a diseased attitude.
That's not what am I saying at all. Unless you have Stockholm syndrome about your job, it's very hard to find a well paying job that you can love.
For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. The hacker culture of the 1970s from which the word hacker originated often poked fun at incurious corporate programmers and IIRC even Edsger Dijkstra wrote a fair bit of acerbic comments about them and their disinterest in the craft and science of computing.
We’re 50 years past that now. We’re in the era of boot camps. I feel semi confident saying “most of us” meaning the current developer work force are here for well paying jobs.
Don’t get me wrong I like software development! I enjoy my work. And I think I’d probably like it better than most things I’d otherwise be doing.
But what I’ve been getting at is that I enjoy it for the solving problems part. The actual writing of code itself for me just happens to be the best way to enjoy problem solving while making good money that enables a comfortable life.
To be put it another way, if being a SWE paid a poverty wage, I would not be living in a trailer doing this for my love of coding. I would go be a different kind of engineer.
I think bootcamp era was a decade ago and we're past it now. Not long ago I saw something on here about how a lot of them are closing down and attendance is dropping for the ones still open - likely because of LLMs.
(Given how massively widespread piracy was back then, programming looked rather like a good way to do hard work for free.)
Money matters, but coders who were drawn into the field purely by money and are personally detached from the substance of the job is an unknown species for me.
"You can also solve problems as a local handyman"
That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.
> That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.
if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast :)
I don't believe that. When it comes to motoric skills, including dancing etc., I am probably in the lowest quintile of the population.
Of course, I could become somewhat better by spending crazy amounts of time on training, but I would still be non-competitive even in comparison with an average person.
OTOH I am pretty good at writing prose/commentary, even though it is not a particulary lucrative activity, to the degree of being a fairly known author in Czechia. My tenth book is just out.
Talents are weird and seem to have mind of their own. I never planned to become an author, but something inside just wanted out. My first book was published just a few days shy of my 40th birthday, so not a "youthful experiment" by any means.
It feels like we’re all going to have to have a reinvention or two ahead of us.
Additionally in many countries, being a developer is an office worker like everyone else, there isn't SV lottery level salaries.
In fact, those of us that rather stay programmers beyond 30 years old are usually seen as failure, from society point of view, where is our hunger for career and climbing up the ladder?
Now the whole set of SaaS products, with low code integrations, that were already a bit depressing from programmer point of view, are getting AI agents as well.
It feels like coding as in the old days is increasingly being left for hobby coding, or a few selected ones working on industry infrastructure products/frameworks.
Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?
The real answer to this is collective action - unions etc - to push back against the lowering of the standards by our employees. But software engineers still seem to be broadly allergic to unions.
> Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced.
Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod.
I also understand the possibility of all of this potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking my job.
What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?
Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this. The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of petulance + burying head in the sand.
It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than other people.
It was wonderful.
I know you don’t care. So just go to some other forum where you don’t have to endure the whining of us who have lost something that was important to us.
I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it.
The collective whinging in every AI topic is both annoying and self-defeating.
No brother. You are the one being annoyed by it, because you are the one doing nothing about it.
>What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?
What I know I refused 'em out of principle, turns out I'm doing fine. I also know for certain that had I not refused them, I would not be doing fine.
>to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it.
Trick question: do you think you deserve a good life?
What if there isn't enough good life for everyone, do you deserve it more than others?
Than which ones then?
>collective whinging
And this is why I think you don't.
The moment you began to perceive mass dissent as "collective whinging" was the moment the totalitarian singularity won you over.
And then it's an entirely different conversation, conducted by entirely different means of expression.
And vibe coding is pretty much diametrically opposite to the hacker ethos.
Believe it or not, you can actually use these tools to level up your skills and understanding faster and then ship better code! Like with any powerful tool, it requires some care to use it correctly.
Nevertheless the point remains that the net effect of industry-wide forced adoption of AI is not a "level up" but rather "more slop".
I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you implement tasks fast with shitty code instead of considering the fact that tasks are easy to implement and the code is really fast as a strong evidence that the abstractions were well-chosen.
Thus, I believe that people who just do it for the money have it easier in the "programming industry" than programmers who really love programming, and are thus a big annoyance to managers.
I thus really wonder myself why companies tell all the time about "love for programming" instead of "love for paying the bills" and "love for implementing tasks fast with shitty code", which would give them people who are a much better culture fit for their real organizational processes.
If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this.
That's also how people like me see programming. If the code delivers what we need, then great. Leave it be like that. There are more interesting problems to solve, no need to mess with a solution which is working well.
People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that crash does happen and they don't know how to recover, so queue up the war room, etc...
Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.
How do you mean? If the software works, then it's done. There is no maintenance and it will continue working like that for decades. It doesn't have corrosion and moving parts like a car. Businesses make sure not to touch it or the systems it is depending on.
Then there’s the fact that the user’s needs fluctuate. Imagine having to pay for a whole another software because the current code is spaghetti and full of hardcoded value and magic constants. It worked, but now you want a slight adjustment, but that can’t no longer be made unless you’re willing to rewrite the whole thing (and pay for it). That would be like having to buy a whole new car, because you moved to the house next door, as the car is hardwired to move only between your old place and where you work.
Sure, if you test it and see that there is no issue with updating, then you can update if you want. But neither the OS or the hardware or anything else should get any priority over the business-crucial software you are running. Even with hardware failures, the better option is to get older hardware for replacement if newer hardware has compatibility issues.
Now, you might argue that it doesn't matter because it's not the users who pay you, it's the company. But, well - some people have professional standards. It's rather unfortunate that this is apparently not compatible with "doing business" in this day and age, at least outside of very narrow niches.
Because in a lot of jobs where you (have to) solve problems, the actual problems to solve are rather "political". So, if you are not good at office politics or you are not a good diplomat, software is often a much better choice.
For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.
It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".
I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.
Sad to see people reduce themselves willingly to cogs inside business machine.
May seem depressing, but the bright side is that you as an individual are then free to find joy in your work wherever you can find it... whether its in delivering high-quality code, or just collecting a paycheck.
Of course, but I said that people see themselves this way.
To be clear, personally I do not find fiddling with configs particularly exciting, but some people do.
I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but those statements are subjective, not an objective truth. Lots of people fundamentally enjoy the process of coding, and would keep doing it even in a hypothetical world with no problems left to solve, or if they had UBI.
I very much enjoy the end product and I also enjoy designing (not necessarily programming) a program that fits my needs, but rarely implementing, as I have issues focusing on things.
100% this. I think a lot of the people who are angry at AI coding for them are "code calligraphers" who care more about the form of the thing they're making than the problem that it solves. I can't see how someone's who's primarily solution focused would shed a tear at AI coding for them.
solving problems is an outcome of programming, not the purpose of programming
LLM's feel like a non-deterministic compiler that transforms English into code of some sort.
A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end
This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.
They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately
Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?
Nevertheless there's still a luxury market for hand prepared food.
Perhaps software will evolve the same way
And it also seems exceedingly wasteful to boot.
I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.
My [GPT5's -poster's note] take / Reflections
I find the article a useful provocation:
it asks us to reflect on what we value in being programmers.
It’s not anti-AI per se, but it is anti-losing-the-core craft.
For someone in your position (in *redacted* / Europe)
it raises questions about what kind of programming work you want:
deep, challenging, craft-oriented, or more tool/AI mediated.
It might also suggest you think about building skills
that are robust to automation: e.g., architecture,
critical thinking, complex problem solving, domain knowledge.
The identity crisis is less about “will we have programmers” and
more “what shapes will programming roles take”.I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?
But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?
The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...
And you can see it coming so there is plenty of time to prepare.
I personally tire of people acting like it's some saving grace that doubles/triples/100x your productivity and not a tool that may give you 10-20% uplift just like any other tool
Outcome is really the same, right? Why waste all that effort on a deep understanding of how to prepare food?
...
> doesn't add value
What about intrinsic value? So many programmers on HN seem to just want to be MBAs in their heart of hearts
Intrinsic value is great, where achievable. Companies do not care at all about intrinsic value. I take pride in my work and my craft to the extent I am allowed to, but the reality is that those of us who can’t adapt to the businesses desires will be made obsolete and cut loose, regardless of whatever values we hold.
I consider myself an engineer — a problem solver. Like you said, code is just the means to solve the problems put before me.
I’m just as content if solving the problem turns out to be a process change or user education instead of a code commit.
I have no fetish for my terminal window or IDE.
Good problem solvers... solve problems. The technological environment will never devalue their skills. It’s only those who rest on their laurels who have this issue.