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Comment by musebox35 | Hacker News Reader

Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.

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> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job

But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...

To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.

I agree with this. I feel like there’s a false dichotomy right now in a lot of these discussions where one can only vibe code or only code by hand. It is possible to do both…

But we’ve had tools to automate out the boilerplate for years. We don’t need ai for that. It’s seriously like we all forgot we could run one command and scaffold a project. AI isn’t even that great at it. Last I tried a month ago it used a really out of date version of nextjs and picked all sorts of random deps that weren’t in the plan.

I could have just used the next project scaffold tool and been on my way before the ai even started returning output.

Or copy paste another file and edit the 10 lines that are actually different. The nice thing is that when you have an epiphany that you’ve already done this twice and that it’s for the same purpose, so you abstract the code and remove 100 lines from the project.

You have no idea how many times I’ve asked “why are we not using the project generator” or “why did you write 200 lines to parse a csv? Here’s a library and five lines to get it done” in the last year. Its easily up 20x compared to pre ai, and getting worse.

I agree, but the reality is that most people work to make a living, not to have fun. If you enjoy your job because you mostly get to write code in a tight feedback loop instead of doing the "hard" work of planning, writing and reviewing specs, balancing customer requirements, and the lot, you have a very privileged life. And those jobs are probably going to get fewer now.

It's kind of sad. But on the other hand, I am glad I don't have to write every little line of code myself *on top* of having to do all the other stuff.

I totally agree. I loved coding because of its closed feedback loop. Since last November, I also delegated it mostly to agents. Now I concentrate more on the design part, which is not the same. However, you move with the times and hope something else will become exciting. I do not know a more worthwhile and satisfying way than computing to spend my work hours.

Which episode ?

I watched the last one S5:E17 What jobs are AI jobs and I think it gives the right framing to think about this. It is not prescriptive, it does not give a list which is smart. The job title might be the same but the actual role might have different context so the best is to have the right frame to explore your particular situation.

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