Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

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> why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency

Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

> would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting the power saw in favour of a hand saw to retain their artisanal capability?

Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition, but let's be real, a lot of companies are horribly inefficient and that does not make them bankrupt. The world of producing software is complicated.

I know that I deliver. When I'm asked to write a code, I deliver it and I responsible for it. I enjoy the process and I can support this code. I can't deliver with AI. I don't know what it'll generate. I don't know how much time would it take to iterate to the result that I precisely want. So I can't longer be responsible for my own output. Or I'd spend more time baby-sitting AI than it would take me to write the code. That's my position. Maybe I'm wrong, they'll fire me and I'll retire, who knows. AI hype is real and my boss often copy&pasting ChatGPT asking me to argue with it. That's super stupid and irritating.

I can totally relate to your experience.

I started this career because I liked writing code. I no longer write a lot of code as a lead, but I use writing code to learn, to gain a deeper understanding of the problem domain etc. I'm not the type who wants to write specs for every method and service but rather explore and discover and draft and refactor by... well, coding. I'm amazed at creating and reading beautiful, stylish, working code that tells a story.

If that's taken away, I'm not sure how I could retain my interest in this profession. Maybe I'll need to find something else, but after almost a decade this will be a hard shift.

> Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

I totally emphasise as a fellow developer, but I doubt you realise what an incredibly privileged position it is to just refuse working if you don't have fun doing it. And it doesn't really make for a convincing argument to keep you employed either.

> Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

If all other competing carpenters use power tools, you're going to loose contracts. We've had a few incredibly easy decades as software developers where market pressure wasn't really a thing, but that is about to change when the cost of producing code drops considerably.

> You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition […]

You're moving the goalposts here. We're not talking about wringing every last drop of efficiency out of employees. We're talking about businesses not tolerating paying for licenses for AI agents to enable developers to sip Lattés while their computer does their job. That's a fundamentally different proposition.

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