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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore.

It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.

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You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com)

Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

Funny how people complain about macros as an abstraction mechanism, but replacing them with an LLM is fine.

Macros are referenced, like a function call.

LLM output sort of “vendors in” smart macros (for lack of a better description) by saving the actual output of the LLM. In that sense, they serve different purposes.

Yes, LLMs are more like offline code generators that can't be reliably re-run. So the very first step of producing the code is "easy", but after that you have lost that ease, and have to read and maintain the larger generated output.

Not just laziness of writing scripts, but also laziness of learning what your options are, like inside the framework you use, or what is available off the shelf.

And btw AI is also terrible with this, because they learned from the same code written by the people who make these mistakes all the time. I need to write detailed explanations for them all the time about how to use tools/frameworks/language features properly, because majority of examples in their learning data are simply a huge pile of technical debt. They could never created anything proper without a step by step rulebook, and examples written manually.

This is a nice fantasy. In practice, maintaining tools that help you scaffold common code patterns take more time to create and maintain than it does to copy, paste, and edit.

Turns out LLMs are REALLY good at "make me this thing that is 90% the same as another thing I've built / you've seen before, but with this 10% being different"

Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.

> Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.

I mean, so is paying someone to write the code for you, but you're not really an engineer at that point, are you?

Engineering involves using stable, deterministic abstractions and components and understanding the architecture and ramifications of your design on a deep level. Yes, you can outsource this work. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you're still in the same profession.

(Of course, maybe you always thought of yourself as an entrepreneur and only saw coding as a means to an end. I think a lot of people are coming to that conclusion.)

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