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Comment by sassymuffinz | Hacker News Reader

Like I said I still use Copilot as needed, I just don't trust Claude to go off on its own and generate a mountain of technical debt that I can't 100% trust.

To use your own analogy, there's plenty of carpenters still around for when someone needs something doing properly and bespoke, even though we can all go to Ikea, or any other flat pack furniture company, to get wobbly furniture cheaply at any time.

I'd rather be the last carpenter charging a liveable wage, working on interesting problems for clients who appreciate a human touch than just pumping out mountains of slop to keep up with the broligarchy. If that makes me ignorant that's fine, but I'll be happily enjoying the craft while you're worrying about your metrics.

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No one is paying a liveable wage for purely human-authored code anymore. This is the job now, and you are far more effective with these tools than without. If you still have an issue with their output, that's a PEBKAC and you need to upskill and/or attitude adjust. Stop thinking like a programmer and start thinking like a business person. Delegate! It doesn't matter if the machine wrote code just the way you would have, only that it gets you closer to the goal, and the machine can help with vetting and assuring that it does. If you choose to remain stubborn and closed-minded, what you will find is that clients will not care about the "human touch" in their code, and some AI-assisted consultant will come along and deliver more for less money, drinking your entire fucking milkshake.

In 2005, Tim Bryce wrote that programmers were by and large a lazy, discipline-averse lot who are of average intelligence at best but get very precious about their "craft", not realizing that it's only a small part of a greater whole and it's the business people who drive actual value in a company. AI is proving him 100% correct.

Interesting - I'm still making a very liveable wage building projects for small and medium companies, because they don't know their AI from their elbow and don't want to know, they have their own business to run.

You forget that templates and off the shelf SAAS products have been around forever and yet I'm still here getting work because there's always a catch and it always shits the bed.

You mention that I must have a user/skill issue because the AI can't be trusted, I had to explain multiple times to Claude during my work that it had left a very obvious security hole in a controller and in a different policy. Stop pretending it's some sort of super intelligence, they can't even do a timer bro and OpenAI is laughing at you while taking your money.

This sort of angry post, with many demands "attitude adjust" "delegate" and invectives "close-minded" "lazy" never appeared for any other technology shift. React devs never posted like this about jQuery devs. Mobile app devs never posted like this about mobile web devs. Yet tons of AI users post like this about non-AI-using devs.

Is it some kind of fear or doubt? It's a strange phenomenon.

Like for example I strongly believe Typescript is better than Javascript and needs to be used instead for any serious project. But if someone says they don't like it, I cannot imagine myself writing a post like yours about it. First of all I don't care what they use, but second of all if I really wanted to convince them it would not look anything like this. Your post and many like it reads like anger and condescension and incredulity.

He's drunk the kool aid and forgotten that some of us have been working in this industry for decades and got along just fine without AI, while he's busy debugging his technical debt and getting sued for leaking customer data I'll just be over here quietly enjoying coding for customers who like dealing with human beings and not black box robots.

Indeed it is quite bizarre. Why are they so emotionally charged? I dont quite get it. Frankly if they are so confident in what they say, why not just watch from the side lines and laugh at the people who get bulldozed?

Me thinks something far more bizarro is aloof.

Im not even a SWE btw so I have no financial interest here, but I can see how bizarre his post is.

"Stop thinking like a programmer and start thinking like a business person."

Lmao software engineers are engineers because its not their job to be the business guy. Man you have been here since 2007 but you sound like an absolute bozo.

FYI I am a CEO and I would never expect my engineers to be thinking like a business person - thats my job. Their job is to go make my vision a reality whilst ensuring the product is trusted and so on.

You're offering to deliver parcels by horse - thinking that somehow your 'delivering is better because it's more natural' and that your customers will appreciate it, over the 'smog' that the cars create.

Or in other words - 'non existent'.

It is arrogant and luddite to suggest that 'using AI is not doing it properly' or that anyone will care.

They care that it's done well - that's it.

FYI, the code that AI produces is probably better than what you produce - at least a functional level.

'Artisanility' is worthless in 'code' - there are no 'winding staircases' for us to custom build, as a master carpenter would.

Where you can continue to 'write code by hand' is for very arcane, things, but even then you're still going to have to use AI for a lot of things in support of that.

So if you want to get into compiler design - sure.

But still - without mastery of AI, you'll be left behind.

At least with horses, there's a naturalist component, with 'code' - nobody cares at all. There's zero interest in it, there's not 'organic' angle to sell.

I really don't understand why you people always say these things so matter of factly. I'd put a lot of money (and do, in the markets) on you being wrong. I'm pretty sure in ten years I will not have a problem keeping a software job without using AI.

Maybe it's because of the environment they work in or their understanding of other people because of the business they're in.

Your average 50 year old business owner doesn't understand AI at all and doesn't care to know, he's too busy thinking about getting a new order for 5000 widgets that he invented. What he needs is a website with inventory management, some sort of email marketing software, some sort of CRM, maybe a dashboard or something. What he wants to do is pick up the phone to someone and get them to take care of it for a reasonable price.

AI is coming for programmers with no social skills, but it isn't coming for the human relationship side of the business where you need to have a few meetings to work out what they want to achieve, build a plan that works long term, have a call with other third parties or their vendors etc to alleviate pain points and then build a project around the business needs that won't crash every five minutes and leak their internal information because Claude decided security was optional.

Half my job is understanding what they need and then instead of accepting their original scope, building a brand new scope in collaboration with them to fit the business needs long term. If one of these guys just wants to plow the original scope into Claude and let it rip then the customer isn't getting what they need.

Maybe in your industry but in mine working with small and medium businesses they value reliability above everything else. They don't give a shit whether you use AI or not as long as it's stable and works and are prepared to pay a premium for someone who knows what they're doing.

If you want to have a race to the bottom and be Sam Altman's lap dog, that your business.

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