Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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It sucks the joy out of it because to the extent that you build something with AI, (Obama voice) you didn't build that. I am allergic to the concept of developing with AI, especially for personal work, because AI-authored code isn't something I built, it's something I commissioned. It's like if I went onto Fiverr or Upwork with a spec and paid money and said "Here, build this" to a freelancer and then went back and forth with that person to correct and refine the result. I might get a halfway decent result in the end, but I don't get the experience of solving the problem myself. Experience solving problems yields new insights. It's why math textbooks have exercises: the only way to grasp the concepts is to solve problems with them.

With AI, you are no longer a developer, you're a product manager, analyst, or architect. What's neat about this, from a business perspective, is that you can in effect cut out all your developers and have a far smaller development workforce consisting of only product managers, analysts, and architects whom you call "developers" and pay developer salaries to. So you save money twice: once on dev workforce downsizing, and again on the pay grade demotion.

The problems I've been working on are at a much higher level than the nuts and bolts.

I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.

It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.

This is what I am exploring:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl

Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?

No need to go that far. I bounced off weekend projects many times because I lost interest the moment I had to relive fighting the "modern" frontend ecosystem set up (or whatever else unrelated to the actual building), which is what I was already doing at the day job. In the end I just gave up because I'd rather get some rest and fun out of my time off. Now I can just skip that part entirely instead of tanning in front of <insert_webpack_or_equivalent> errors for hours on Saturday afternoon.

Speccing out a language, and implementing it, are two different kinds of work. There are doubtless GCC devs on the C standards committee, but when they're writing the standard they're not doing the same thing as working on GCC.

You decided you wanted to focus on speccing out your language and outsource the implementation. That's fine if you want to do that. But let's be honest: you outsourced the bits you considered boring or tedious. Someone else may find that the interesting part, and the experience of outsourcing it rather than building it themselves to be hollow in comparison.

Huh? What about all the open source software you use, did you build all of it?

What about the phone in your hand, did you design that?

HN loves to believe they are the noble few - men and women of math and science, driven by nothing but the pure joy of their craft

But this whole AI thing has been super revealing. Almost everyone here is just the same old same old, only that now that the change is hitting close to home, you’re clutching your pearls and lamenting the days when devs were devs

The younger generation born into the AI world is going to leave you in the dust because they aren’t scared of it

My math teacher used to say that people felt this was about…calculators, imagine that

Take a deep breath and try again. You'll get more of a constructive argument with the person you're responding to were you to engage with intellectual honesty.

You are going to end up property of openai and with zero skills. Good luck

I'm aware I didn't build the things I depend on—OS, language runtimes, etc. But if I use AI to build the thing I'm building, I'm not really building it—I'm asking someone else to. We've been hoodwinked into believing that AI code generation is just a tool, but it's not—it's a service. You're asking OpenAI or Anthropic to make all but the highest level decisions and write the program you described. It's just done automatically by machine. I feel the same way about AI-generated other things too. What else is paying money, submitting a description, and getting back an image or a song but a commission?

If that's the tradeoff a business wants to make, that's their call. But AI-assisted development really is just outsourcing with a bigger carbon footprint.

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