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Comment by Blackstrat | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious. Vibe coding seems to be all the rage on HN these days. And yet many that discuss it are unhappy. My question, seriously, is why did you go into the software development field if you were willing to surrender your autonomy to an LLM? I can't think of anything more demoralizing.

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Well I started out as an idea guy. I just got into programming because (1) I thought it was interesting, (2) wanted to be able to implement my own ideas and (3) if I'd ever be an idea guy towards programmers then they'd know I'd be able to speak their language.

So yea not demoralizing to me at all. I've been a SWE for 5 years now and studied for 8 years before that (2 bachelors, 2 masters - most CS related).

I have a lot of small apps nowadays. One of them is a HN dark mode chrome extension that I actually like. Another one exports my emails in bulk. Another one tracks what wifi networks I connected to on a given day. Small apps that make my life a bit easier. Also a lot of apps that I'd rather keep to myself. One of them that's on the edge of that is: certain companies have this math test. I recreated it pretty well I think. Oh and I implemented this thing I call "personal coach". It's a GraphRAG on my whole journal (all local). It has all the features I want and is great for answering questions solely by combining my notes.

Mine goes a bit further than that. It structures the codebase first, feeds that into local agents, and then uses whichever model is on top with actual system context instead of making it guess from prompts.

Yea I was on the doom spiral thinking vibe coding/agentic engineering is the future. I didn’t love my results. I’m back to hand coding things and my quality of life is so much better.

Yeah. Sometimes we have to finish ourselves. The vibe gets you started, but it rarely gets you all the way there.

Because I want the result, not the journey.

I code to build things.

The journey is made up of little results. If you like having results, that implies liking the journey as well..

LLMs takes the "little results" away, and ruins the whole fun. And sometimes the final result takes you somewhere you didn't want to go.

Anyone can get a "result". It's the quality of the result that matters. The intellectual journey of choosing the right algorithm, optimizing the code, etc. Software development should be a journey, not a goal. Once I learned that and started applying it as a manager, I found that team productivity and quality both rose. The result came from the process. Systems trump goals in nearly every endeavor in life.

I don't work on a team. I don't have a manager.

I need things. That's why I build software.

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