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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now.

It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers…

Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it as simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the code-base in a way that anticipates expansion…

I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs.

Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a dog I this race.)

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Sorry for the dumb question but how could you feel threatened by LLMs if you retired just a few years ago? Considering the hype started somewhere in 2022-2023.

You're right, as I say, I no longer have skin in the game.

Retired, I have continued to code, and have used Claude to vibe code a number of projects—initially I dod so out of curiosity as to how good LLM are, and then to handle things like SwiftUI that I am hesitant to have to learn.

It's true then that I am not in a position of employment where I have to consider a performance review, pleasing my boss or impressing my coworkers. I don't doubt that would color my perception.

But speaking as someone who has used LLMs to code, while they impress me, again, I don't feel the threat. As others have pointed out in past threads here on HN, on blogs, LLMs feel like junior engineers. To be sure they have a lot of "facts" but they seem to lack… (thinking of a good word) insight? Foresight?

And this too is how I have felt as I was aging-out of my career and watched clever, junior engineers come on board. The newness, like Swift, was easy for them. (They no doubt have rushed headlong into Swift UI and have mastered it.) Never though did I feel threatened by them though.

The career itself, I have found, does in fact care little for "grey beards". I felt by age 50 I was being kind of… disregarded by the younger engineers. (It was too bad, I thought, because I had hoped that on my way out of the profession I might act more as mentor than coder. C'est la vie!)

But for all the new engineer's energy and eagerness, I was comfortable instead with my own sense of confidence and clarity that came from just having been around the block a few times.

Feel free to disregard my thoughts on LLMs and the degree to which they are threatening the industry. They may well be an existential threat. But, with junior engineers as also a kind of foil, I can only say that I still feel there is value in my experience and I don't disparage it.

and they only got really good like last December.

how would you suggest someone who just started their career moves ahead to build that “taste” for lean and elegant solutions? I am onboarding fresh grads onto my team and I see a tendency towards blindly implementing LLM generated code. I always tell people they are responsible for the code they push, so they should always research every line of code, their imported frameworks and generated solutions. They should be able to explain their choices (or the LLM’s). But I still fail to see how I can help people become this “new” brand of developer. Would be very happy to hear your thoughts or how other people are planning to tackle this. Thanks!

My "taste" (like perhaps all other "tastes") comes from experience. Cliche, I know.

When you have had to tackle dozens of frameworks/libraries/API over the years, you get to where you find you like this one, dislike that one.

Get/Set, Get/Set… The symmetry is good…

Calling convention is to pass a dictionary: all the params are keys. Extensible, sure, but not very self-documenting, kind of baroque?

An API that is almost entirely call-backs. Hard to wrap your head around, but seems to be pretty flexible… How better to write a parser API anyway?

(You get the idea.)

And as you design apps/frameworks yourself, then have to go through several cycles of adding features, refactoring, you start to think differently about structuring apps/frameworks that make the inevitable future work easier. Perhaps you break the features of a monolithic app into libraries/services…

None of this is novel, it's just that doing enough of it, putting in the sweat and hours, screwing up a number of times) is where "taste" (insight?) comes from.

It's no different from anything else.

Perhaps the best way to accelerate the above though is to give a junior dev ownership of an app (or if that is too big of a bite, then a piece of a thing).

"We need an image cache," you say to them. And then it's theirs.

They whiteboard it, they prototype it, they write it, they fix the bugs, they maintain it, they extend it. If they have to rewrite it a few times over the course of its lifetime (until it moves into maintenance mode), that's fine. It's exactly how they'll learn.

But it takes time.

This answer probably feels unsatisfying and I agree. But some things actually need repetition and ongoing effort. One of my favorite quotes is from Ira Glass about this very topic.

> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

> Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

> And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.

> I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

> —Ira Glass

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