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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

I recently spoke to a very junior developer (he's still in school) about his hobby projects.

He doesn't have our bagage. He doesn't feel the anxiety the purists feel.

He just pipes all errors right back in his task flow. He does period refactoring. He tests everything and also refactors the tests. He does automated penetration testing.

There are great tools for everything he does and they are improving at breakneck speeds.

He creates stuff that is levels above what I ever made and I spent years building it.

I accepted months ago: adapt or die.

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> stuff that is levels above what I ever made

How is that measured? Is his stuff maintainable? Is it fast? Are good architectural decisions baked in that won't prevent him from adding a critical new feature?

I don't understand where this masochism comes from. I'm a software developer, I'm an intelligent and flexible person. The LLM jockey might be the same kind of person, but I have years of actual development experience and NOTHING preventing me from stepping down to that level and doing the same thing, starting tomorrow. I've built some nice and complicated stuff in my life, I'm perfectly capable of running a LLM in a loop. Most of the stuff that people like to call prompt/agentic/frontier or whatever engineering is ridiculously simple, and the only reason I'm not spending much time on it is that I don't think it leads to the kind of results my employer expects from me.

You can still survive without using generative tools. Just not writing crud apps .

There is plenty of code that require proof of correctnesss and solid guarantees like in aviation or space and so on. Torvalds in a recent interview mentioned how little code he gets is generated despite kernel code being available to train easily .

Your experience may be valuable, and in fact made me think, but I also think the brashness of framing everything in the "adapt or die" ultimatum is unnecessary and off-putting.

The way I see it, the kid has a dangerous dependency on at least one expensive service, cannot solve problems by himself and highly likely doesn't understand core concepts of programming and computers in general.

Yeah I dread the software landscape in 10 years, when people will have generated terabytes of unmaintainable slop code that I need to fix.

Maybe adapt and still die anyway?

The most pathetic of deaths as well.

“He automated his job so well the company doesn’t need him anymore.”

I'm a solo entrepreneur. If the company does well, I do well.

How did you make the transition to working for yourself? Genuinely curious

I couldn't tell you since I started my company when I was 18. I'm 42 now and never worked for a boss.

Psychopaths running the circus

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