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Comment by wishfish | Hacker News Reader

Not only do the CRUDs have value but they're good for your sanity. I knew a guy back in the dot-com era. Very skilled coder. Backbone of the company. He pulled off miracles. Fulfilled impossible deadlines. Then one day, out of the blue, he quit. Took a job at a non-technical corp. They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called it his paid vacation.

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> He called it his paid vacation.

As a fellow CRUD writer you're kinda seconding the OP's point here...

Personally I say oh well, some people are smarter and/or harder working than me. Now watch this drive -

I was seconding his point. I personally ended up in educational software which is CRUD-adjacent in terms of stress and sanity. Never regretted it.

> They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called it his paid vacation.

That was all nice and good for a while, but the times are ending.

I suspect there will still be a human involved in the production of software, but it will be domain experts, not CRUd monkeys who picked up just enough domain knowledge to be dangerous.

The really valuable CRUD monkeys are already domain experts as well. The threatened ones are junior developers whose output is barely better than AI slop.

> The really valuable CRUD monkeys are already domain experts as well

Sure but that’s a minority I’d argue. There wouldn’t be such a volume of shitty business software otherwise.

I will be interested to see if there are any economic effects of ending one of the last well paid, low barrier to entry careers in which some level of meritocracy was permitted.

Shitty business software is rather the result of changing and murky requirements, prioritization, and bad quality control.

AI tools can help good developers be more productive, but they won't magically make a mere domain expert able to produce good software.

ai slop

Looking at the user's other comments, I disagree.

Looking at your comments however, while probably not AI, they're still not helpful.

Never seen an LLM write so many short, halting sentences in a row. Very human.

You can tell from my comment that I'm not AI. I've had a lifelong habit of using commas instead of dashes in situations where the dashes would have been more appropriate. AI would always go for the dash.

First time I've been accused of AI.

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