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Comment by TakeItToTen | Hacker News Reader

I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate.

I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

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I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.

> I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.

If your goal is to become better at writing code, it almost certainly is a net negative.

If you define growth as shipping stuff and getting things done that you previously wouldn’t have had the time for, then it might be a positive.

Hell, it’s probably both at the same time and what each person cares more about is the deciding factor.

Programming/software engineering isn't writing code. It's understanding and designing systems. The code is the way we encode the logic. The runtime/compiler of your language is one system among many engineers have to understand and develop expertise in. When working yourself on problems you learn about the various protocols, interfaces, past design decisions and their trade offs, tooling, and develop your general system thinking. When you delegate to AI you get the resulting artifact but none of the personal growth that comes with developing it.

Think of the recent bun rewrite from zig to rust, around 1M lines of code. If you would have a team do that migration they would very likely have to become close to Rust expert, and develop an intimate knowledge of the codebase, its tradeoffs, have ideas for future improvements, good understanding of the technical debt they accepted, reliability of tests, etc. That's A LOT of expertise you can then apply to other things in your professional life.

Instead they went the AI way. The got the artifact (the migration) in ~1 week. But that's pretty much it? What did they learn from that project, other than the fact the AI can do that work? My guess would be pretty much nothing. And pretty much any other software engineer could have done the same migration. There is zero personal growth here.

How is bun going to progress from here, though? Is it feature complete, never to need another update? No. So are they just going to vibe code in Rust now? Keep developing in zig and convert each merge to Rust? Or hire/become the Rust experts they need to maintain the project?

We will see, I personally expect they will continue the vibe coding approach. So, just throw mythos at the reported issues, with some high level guidance

There was a thread[1] about this the other day! People have different goals, motivations, and reasons for developing. I guess I just like sorting colored blocks. I'll agonize over the code... I really will go back to a class I wrote months ago and ask "Do I really need this member variable?" and "Does this really need to go on the heap or can it live on the stack and be automatically cleaned up?" "Can I use a pImpl C++ pattern here and reduce the number of headers that this header file includes?"

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056

> I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

I don't believe this, every architect ive ever worked with that was not regularly in the weeds on various things in the codebase were universally terrible and out of touch.

That's probably all true. But I wonder if brains are just wired differently. I was never the developer that cared much about the particular shapes of any concrete IF/ELSE blocks in the code, so initially I was very bullish on using Claude Code a year ago. I realized that I'm the kind of guy who discovers the high-level architecture by writing the low-level code though. I'm not always sure what that architecture is up front, but the sheer act of writing code into a specific module sets off an internal background task probing the specific invariants of the module with respect to the architecture I have in mind, allowing me to revise and improve the design. That is all lost. All my agentically engineered projects look crude from an architectural perspective.

> I am becoming a better architect with AI

Be careful with that claim. Abstractions more or less leak especially in CE where the OS and hardware you built on are already full of leaky abstractions, e.g. performance traits. It is still important to look through and comprehend code.

I agree. I use the grill me skill and superpowers brainstorming to learn different methods of building stuff as far as architecture goes. Stuff I wouldn't normally think of if I just continued being "just a FE engineer"

ai can do architecture too.

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