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Comment by chankstein38 | Hacker News Reader

Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.

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If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.

Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.

There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.

It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)

Along those lines, one of the biggest areas completely left out of this article - and many I've seen like it - is operations, cost, incident response, etc.

Maybe eventually you'll want to trust your corporate credit card to the LLMs too, but that's gonna be one of the last things where humans get taken out of the loop. And once the AI is that general what even is the CEO, salesperson, or entrepreneur's role either?

That "programmer/archeologist" idea of Vernor Vinge's books is likely to grow as the piles of generated code get bigger and the feasibility of tossing increasingly-large piles into a single context window at once might not keep up (or probably won't be the best or most cost-effective).

I think what we're missing is certainty, not hope. You used to have more certainty that if you checked all the correct boxes your financial future would be guaranteed. Hope for the future is sort of separate and the most optimistic person could hold on to hope even now, and the most pessimistic person could lack hope even graduating with a CS degree in 2015.

You can have hope even if a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. In fact that is when hope is the most valuable (and maybe also difficult to find).

> Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.

Unless you're a plumber.

BTW the whole plumber/electrician/whatever thing is ridiculous. I studied industrial automation before I joined tech. I checked the salaries for manufacturing maintenance engineer last month. The wages are a sad joke compared to the costs of living.

Also don’t forget the part where we’re told housing will never be affordable again in many areas, and don’t expect to be able to remote work to move to LCOL areas any more.

If the economy is profoundly affected by employment conditions going forward, how can housing costs not drop?

If majority of housing is owned for profit by REITs or landlords they have such a leverage over ordinary person, that they can indefinitely hold the prices/rents at a level where they extract maximum of available resources from owning land while making sure people have enough processed food and cheap internet-provided entertainment that they don't rebel.

The prices will adapt, but the equilibrium will always be elite-oriented economy where accommodation of the masses is a second-tier goal.

Don't forget large scale purchasers using property for tax evasion, money laundering or other such uses. They largely don't even care if the property is maintained.

(eventually properties collapse, but if they keep the values inflated this way, that won't matter to them)

If you want to know more, look into RCMP reports on high property prices in Vancouver BC/Canada circa 2010s+, for example.

Not sure that is warranted. AI will create exciting changes to society for the better. These times are uncertain but certainly not depressing.

I don't think with any confidence we can say it will be for the better. Or at least, not on balance for the better.

"AI will create exciting changes to society for the better"

Why are you certain of this?

it is depressing to me for exactly the same reason

Prove your assertion.

I don't doubt this, however, the question is if AI will do this in our life-time. The industrialization has led to prosperity in the long term, but initially it led primarily to the proletarianization of the people. Are you willing to accept a devaluation of your skills and a decline in your prosperity so that in 50 to 100 years there is a chance that AI will lead to a better future?

No one is going to ask if you're willing to accept this - it's simply going to happen whether we like it or not.

Some people will answer without being asked. The most we will get out of that is that the word "saboteur" will get a more modern synonym (not sure what it will be, but the inventor of cheap EMP granades will have the biggest say in that). The future will, of course, steamroll over such answers, as it always did, but we'll all feel the bumps on the way.

I think we can assume it will create disruption, but by definition this is both positive and negative for different individuals & dimensions, and it is small solace if society improves while your life languishes or declines - this is just what's happened to a generation of young males in the US and is having huge repercussions. I think you're right to suggest the goal is to avoid letting the uncertainity make you depressed, but that does not automatically make it so of everyone.

It’s positive if you are already wealthy, negative if you have to work for a living.

Is that AI generated by any chance? Seems like an AI crystal ball that you're looking into.

It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.

Uncertainty is frequently a contributor to depression. Uncertainty is one of the most reliable stress triggers, which, over prolonged periods of time, especially when paired with low perceived control, is a direct path to increased depression. So if something is uncertain, it is often depressing as well.

AI companies are not even pretending they will improve society.

They are promising CEOs they can eliminate their workforce to increase profits. For people working for a wage it’s all downside, no upside.

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