Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ronsenshi | Hacker News Reader

Agree with the author. I like the process of writing code, typing method names and class definitions while at the same time thinking ahead about overall architecture, structure, how much time given function would run for, what kind of tests are necessary.

I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into this field for seemingly very different reasons.

I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I usually have when working on codebase myself.

View on HN

It's not so much the writing of the code (which I did like), it's the aesthetic of the code. It's solving a problem with the right code and the right amount of code (for now). That's still the case, even with AI writing most of the code. You have to steer it constantly because it has very bad instincts, because most people in the profession aren't good at it, so it has bad training data. Mainly because the "learn to code" movement and people getting into this profession just for the money and not the love. Those people are probably screwed.

For me its the money. Software paid and does pay well when I got in. I have actually been trying to get the eff out as fast as I can and move to management/research (I work in ML). I have avoided web dev shit like the plague since it is indeed very low value added work. The fact that LLMs can finish all this crappy work for 20bucks a month where I dont have to do it by hand is a welcome step. Otoh, I dont think point and trust is the way to do AI assisted coding. You get better output when you know the business logic and can make sense of the code. In fact, I prompt many many times until the AI spits out something I understand.

Honestly all the complaining about dying of a craft is just pathetic. In one of the jobs I worked, there were specific performance rubrics under "Craft" and those really annoyed me. Software / Code is just a tool to solve a problem.

Coding is a tool to solve a problem, but, to many it is also a culture. It has a history, it has connections, it has lore, it had some loosely commonly held values, and yes it absolutely was a craft. It’s okay for people to mourn that. It’s not the same as someone who may have taken it up for money. That itself, is seeing coding as a tool for income—which is valid.

Calling it pathetic I think lacks empathy and perhaps an appreciation for what it might mean to other people outside the letters we type. Those letters, the languages we type, compilers that process them, and libraries that enable them were, at the end of the day, made by people.

Thats actually right. Tbh, I loved learning languages and read books like Programming Perl just because somebody recommended it in an online forum (back in the day). So I get the appeal. But in the end, coding by hand is on its way out and its better to move on rather than romanticize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com