It is an amazing time for programmers
46elks.com
46elks.com
The legends the article talks about are legends because they either started a project that blew up in popularity and/or solved a demanded problem with original code.
For most people writing software for a living that is gone. Its been gone since I started writing software 20 years ago. The goal post has moved. Its no longer about solving any problem. Its about hiring.
The distinction is massive. Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code. Instead they will use tools and modify templates. There is still some troubleshooting there, but no originality. Its like being a plumber. Plumbers still make good money, but they aren't engineers. Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation.
The most clear exception are hobbyists, which has always been there as an exception through my years writing software. The only real distinction between most of these hobbyists and the legends is obscurity. The very real distinction between the hobbyists and less original professional is time spent practicing.
As the era becomes increasingly advanced, the cognitive cost of making a single project public keeps rising. But if you try to use an LLM to share or assist, there are many people who say LLMs are bad.
It's a difficult problem
I have been contemplating a rating system for open source software with a mandatory tag for each star. Allows you to filter out perspectives you don’t care about.
Becoming? :D Since day one, me and other's have called it a vanity metric, and trying to push back on hiring decisions being made over what developers have the most starred repositories/followers (no joke, one place I worked at almost hired one developer over another because of their "total star count" :'( ).
Stars been around for as long as GitHub been around, and people actively shouting to get people to stop caring so much about stars been around for the same time yet.
Maybe there should be a distinction between software creators and programmers.
Not sure that analogy applies. I'd compare it to the difference between an engineer building a bridge and a politician ring-fencing the funds for it.
But if you want to design the aesthetic of the bridge, ensure that it is ergonomic for cars, bicycles, pedestrians, make sure it is designed to last and withstand rare weather events, and fully modeled with FIE… you can do that too.
AI is like having a thousand specialists in every field, waiting for you to ask. You can have them research, check each other’s work, build simulations, etc… or you can let them go unused, or you can ask them to tell you how smart you are.
I’m sure you’re right. Though, let me add, there are a lot of minuscule problems in the small business space. Not fame and fortune level, but gratifying nevertheless.
Yes, but this also has a silver lining: nobody will need to do the rote, toily, plumbingeque, but still economically valuable work that most software engineers spent most of their time on, which means they will be freed up to solve drastically more novel and/or higher level problems.
The obvious issues with this are 1) not everybody is a Carmack or a Bellard; 2) not everybody may want to be, either; and 3) you most likely won't get to be them by outsourcing all your coding to an LLM (meaning we would need to rethink upskilling.)
The short term will be painful, but in the long term, Economics theory suggests we would experience a golden age of productivity and progress once we build the pipeline of novel / higher-level problems to solve and upskill the hobbyists and erstwhile plumbers to tackle them.
If people cannot refactor the code they own the only option is to start from scratch every single time. Any perceived economic benefits assumed of AI cannot be realized if the common knowledge underlying it dies.
1. We have infinitely more durable means of storing, indexing and retrieving knowledge (and now potentially even means of programmatically reasoning about that knowledge!) We can re-derive things from our records using first principles, as long as we have critical reasoning skills -- about the only skill we will need in the future, and ironically the one most at risk of becoming rarer as people increasingly outsource all thinking to LLMs.
2. We will always need and have engineers of the caliber in TFA. They derive their capabilities, in no small part, by having in-depth knowledge of the entire technology stack they work with. I'd say most of them can operate at the abstract architecture and algorithmic level down to low-level hardware bit-twiddling. If most engineers in the future are of that caliber (which I'd argue is now easier with LLM assistance for those so inclined) there is no chance we'd lose that knowledge.
There is no cheat sheet or magic tool for human behavior.
You're right that the main driver for loss of knowledge is human behavior, but I would posit the underlying reason is economics. Craft that reduces in economic value simply disappears because there is no incentive to preserve it.
As such, there is a cheat sheet for human behavior, it's called economics! ;-) And the already high economic value of code is only going to keep increasing sharply, so even if LLMs do most of the work there will be strong incentives for people to manualy craft code whenever LLMs, like all systems, inevitably fall short.
Someone skilled enough should have many original enough problems to work on. But such persons would have to speak on that topic.
AGI is an interesting one.
Some years ago I realized that I can just start sending emails to an OSS mailing list. Without introduction just starting to post as if I belonged there. I had already made some grammar fixes more than five years before that but I started to comment and critique submissions. And submitting my own patches. Now checking the mailing list is daily habit. Unfortunately I didn't have time to post the second version of a submission on the bus today (another documentation fix).
People, and especially in my culture, are very good at staying out of places where they do not belong through self-policing alone. Unfortunately to the point where at least I do get stuck in narrow patterns and never even consider certain opportunities.
debug1: Sending environment. debug1: channel 2: setting env LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL = "iTerm2" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL_VERSION = "3.6.10" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug2: channel 2: request shell confirm 1 debug2: channel_input_open_confirmation: channel 2: callback done debug2: channel 2: open confirm rwindow 8388608 rmax 32768 debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2 debug2: channel_input_status_confirm: type 99 id 2 debug2: PTY allocation request accepted on channel 2 Connection to late.sh closed by remote host.
I didn’t like CLI, since it didn’t pick up my default ssh key from the agent.
I grew up on a island where there was maybe one or two other people who knew computers enough to know programming as a thing existed as a concept, but similarly to you, absolutely nothing else, and it gets very lonely and outright boring after a while.
I solved this (accidentally) by moving to another area, but isn't possible for everyone, then the closest you can get to that would be to bring people closer to where you are instead, or start up something small and reoccurring :)
I stopped going, because the “circle of avoidance” around me makes me self-conscious.
The ageism in New York, is even worse than in Silicon Valley.
No one makes eye contact, and no one looks at me. I find it extremely difficult to start conversations, and I'm a fairly gregarious chap. There's usually a space around me, about a meter wide; even when it's crowded.
The good news is, I rarely have trouble finding a seat.
As much as I'd like to judge, I had a little bit of that 'elder avoidance' in my 20s, and I look back and cringe at how stupid I was.
I'm old enough now to know that 'my people' can't be determined by things I can judge easily by looks or short interactions. I'm going to hope they get it at some point.
I gave away an old PCB to a guy in gumtree. We got talking. He's now my 3D printer shop talk guy, and we meet at the pub every other month.
It's surprisingly easier to foster your own hacker space if you trade goods in those circles.
Best part is that Gumtree/Craigslist/Kleinanzeigen let you define a radius to meet these people, so they're all local
I'd advise against the "Im lonely..." angle in seeking out these connections, go more for the "hey I've got this thing you might want..." style patter, even if the former is true.
And always use protection.
I’ve learned not to talk about what I do, as I see eyes glaze over, quickly, when I do.
If I were to talk about the commodities exchanges, though, we’d be chatting up a storm.
I miss having people to talk to, about this stuff. The few techhies around, tend to freeze me out. They all like going into Brooklyn, to hang out.
I guess that’s one reason that I’m so busy here.
Being one-upped all the time, having devs nag about tiny irrelevant flaws just to show who is smarter. Adding just one more sentence to keep upper hand and trying to „make better” when good wasn’t done yet.
When I was younger I also had my fair share of those flaws.
Then why are you on HN? ;)
HN is full of these types (myself included when something really triggers me). The amount of trivialities/nitpicking/arguing-for-the-sake-of-arguing going on here is enough to try anybody's patience. I think if i were to discuss things face-to-face with some of the people here it may most probably end in screaming/yelling and fisticuffs ;-)
It is a fundamental Human behavioural trait (i.e. the need to assert dominance through any means) that needs careful regulation in our communications.
I try to deal with these people the Sherlock Holmes way ;-)
"It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it ...
When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.".
I had the same feeling, until some years ago I met up with some local HNers and lo and behold; they're nothing like what's going on here typically, just regular people who can have regular (but interesting) conversations :)
I'm guessing for many it's really hard to "read the vibe" when it's just text, and people take everything very literally here, while in real life, even people who write and behave like that here, don't actually act the same.
Maybe facial expressions, body language and more basically solves all those trivialities/nitpicking/arguing-for-the-sake-of-arguing issue, at the very least because those who perpetrate those things, actually can see the "what the fuck is this guy on about" expressions in real-time as they speak to people. That's my guess at least.
From that pov, eliminating everything other than pure text (like on HN) is actually a positive. Here we just need to agree to abide by some common rules for the pursuit of curiosity/knowledge and not mere socializing. Don't post everything that comes to your mind, slowdown and think before you post, know your audience, be succinct and to-the-point but with links to further details/study etc.
As an example, 19th century scientists wrote to each other sharing/discussing/refining their ideas/theories. See Explore 19th Century Scientific Correspondence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389055 for the actual and interesting correspondences.
IMO, the following quote very well expresses the power of mediocrity and how it can drag us all down;
“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. ... The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
This is what we need to guard against i.e. "not become mediocre" (and add to the inanity on the Internet) in our own communications/behaviour on HN and elsewhere. We need to focus on the s/n ratio always in our communications.
The best developers are consultative, inquisitive, and focused on delivering value that makes stakeholders' lives easier. No one outside of technical people care about implementation tools or details.
Go to meetups/hackathons
Threads the app, reply to coders on posts you find interesting and have things to add to.
I’ve gotten replies from authors on NYT best sellers lists, musicians, and more.
People like to be appreciated.
The exception is game programmers. With AI/engines, making games has never been easier, Steam takes a lot of the guesswork out of packaging/release, and the moat in games is taste/refinement which is very AI resistant.
Daniel Stenberg is not on the list but he is also a very active programmer on social media like LinkedIn that you can interact with.
If someone want to interact with people like Linus Torvalds, they should be aware that in his case he publicly admitted the way he interacted with other was toxic[1]. To be clear, it’s no personal attack against him, it’s about the kind of interaction that can and does occur with largely celebrated figures in general. If anything at least in that case there is some recognition of the issue, though fair credit should probably given also to all people beyond the scene who certainly made tremendous effort for this to happen.
And things like popular micro-blogging platforms are notoriously known to cause interaction going toxic[2].
Just because something is possible doesn’t mean its a nice path to thrive for everybody.
To each their own judgment, but at least consider the tradeoffs.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab...
Learning to find this balance of not being annoying is probably easiest by trying to make relevant comments on someones tweet. And the response back will give you an energy boost! :)
These people are much more approachable than people generally believe.
If you approach an expert, you need to be clear in your communication, know the subject you are talking about and in general be aware that experts find trivialities aggravating and are not obliged to suffer your ignorance.
Somebody sit with Fabrice Bellard and pick his brain on how he thinks, how he organizes projects, how he studies so many different domains, how he implements them, views on work-life balance etc. etc.
Basically i want a brain dump of Fabrice Bellard.
That’s actually what I asked Mike Pall to do regarding JIT. He was reluctany and probably thinks too little of his teaching ability.. but that book would be awesome for future generations of compiler folks to read!
Back to Bellard, maybe a good first approach is to ping one of his co-authors like the person he made QuickJS with.
There's not many geniuses without an ecosystem around them that produced them. And even if there are, how would we know about them if they weren't well connected enough to start mattering?
Growing up rural, I had about zero people interested in technology around me, even less about programming. But, there was a few of those "curious people" who I talked to about computers and programming. They mostly had no idea, but they were interested, and engaging to talk about, they acted more like a wall to bounce the ball against, rather than actually mentoring me for programming, or whatever.
Anyways, these people, the curious ones, exists everywhere, even in rural areas, even in places with less than 1000 people. They tend to be seen maybe as eccentric, odd or weird, but you can talk to them about everything and anything, and you'll still probably learn something, if not about the subject, maybe about yourself or maybe about your new friend :)
Makes for an intresting conversation and you can learn a lot by posting a well thought comment :)
I doubt he’ll get more than a handful.
Which is why I wrote this.
Is the same at conferences: one of the best things you can do is to fo and talk to the person holding the lecture. They usually appreciate it very much.
You don’t need to be famous to do that.
It seems like it's been around for a few years so it probably isn't vibe-coded, but I do wonder if even small services like this will inevitably be gobbled up by AI. Like I know it probably isn't the case but I've become so jaded now that I'm looking at their teams page and wonder if these are even real people.
Yes it's an amazing time for programmers but only in a "twilight of the gods" sense. The time for community passed about a decade ago, before Twitter turned into a Nazi bar and everything went entirely to shit. There's a little bit left but it's dying fast. Why would any of these people want to waste their time talking to the community that wants to assimilate their work and replace it with the mediocre shit dribbled from a Claude prompt? These people don't need your emails, they're probably already deluged with bots as it is.
Actually wrote the draft on this in January but last week finally got enough time to complete this with proper project links etc.
We are certainly real people, except for one of the faces on our /support page who’s signature we use when replying to particularly aggressive fraudsters (to avoid feeling personally offended).
The service might look easy on the surface, but getting all required infrastructure in place here in Europe is hard and the telecom world is surprisingly complex.
”I am jealous at you guys: backend services still has a future” a coder friend told me today at lunch.
On topic, I obviously don’t think the community train has passed.
Especially on meetups I see a lot of genuine connections between programmers being made. Threads, the app, has recently been the most relevant place for me to casually chat with other programmers.
I don’t vouch for people to spam: but to overcome their imposter syndrome and dare to talk about coding with fellow programmers. Even the legends.
And they often invite for conversations: wether it’s a comment field, pull request or tweet.
But ... why?
I don't understand why I should write an email to Linus. Or Phil. Or Pete. Or Joe. I can barely keep up with the influx of existing emails as-is. Do I really want to extend to this and have to read through even MORE emails now?!
How to increase the signal and not the noise.
Sending an email without any clear purpose is not something I would encourge. But a highly thoughtful email about some of their works or question you have about a recent piece of code is probably appreciated. Genuine conversation.
The easiest way to start your journey towards overcoming the imposter syndrome while not burdening someone is to reply to a recent tweet.
If you have something relevant to say that is. But you probably do: more often than not.
There probably won't be any more "legendary" programmers in the future. Not because AI is qualitatively superior but because the incentives of capitalism will force us all to accept the mediocrity of AI generated software and because the lack of opportunities and loss of knowledge created by mass deskilling will make education and community impossible.
They also don't know much that you can probably make use of. They might think they do, and you might think they do, but they got there mostly through knowing how to talk to boards and investors, not by being able to engage deeply in expertise that is applicable to most people looking to make their way in the World - and if becoming a CEO of a major tech firm or President is the thing you need the help with, you probably know them or people like them already.
I've met quite a few famous people in tech over the years, particularly open source, and have had some short and some long conversations with many of them. I've found most people pretty approachable.
I also know through another side of my life quite a few people in the media and am an acquaintance of someone who is a household name in the UK. Through him, I've met famous sports people, writers, actors, etc., and through that and other networks I know people who have worked behind the scenes on major TV and theatre shows who have met hundreds of famous people.
The one thing that unifies all of them is obvious, but seemingly lost on a lot of people who "other" those whose names are known to them despite never meeting them: they're all just human.
They're not "other", they're us. Including everyone you see on TV, everyone you have read about in magazines, everyone you see on a stage.
They have to put up with being recognised and people dealing with them in strange ways (how would you really deal with a stranger asking for a selfie while you were eating dinner with your family in a restaurant?), but they still do all the things you and I do. As the old saying goes, they all have to put their trousers on one leg at a time in the morning.
I'd definitely encourage people to seek out experts (not just "famous people" unless those people are famous for expertise), and engage them as you'd want to be engaged about your expertise. You'll find most people will be approachable.
But emailing that specific list of people is unlikely going to get you much beyond a template reply from one of their army of assistants.
(Maybe Cook and Huang are not that bad, but Musk and Trump I’d like in my life as much as cancer).