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Comment by fenprace | Hacker News Reader

People programme for 2 reasons:

1. Some programme because it’s the one of 2 ways to get the things they want (another way is hiring a team to code for them). Now that they have vibe coding, they’d happily never touch a line of code again. 2. Other people programmes because they just enjoy it. Vibe coding ruins the best part for them. Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."

Most people getting paid to code are probably somewhere in the middle?

But nowadays hand-writing code at work is starting to feel kinda 'illegal'. The manager is gonna ping you just because you fall behind on the company's token waste leaderboard.

Maybe it's just another "hobby should never become job" story?

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> Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."

Also like building a robot to cook food for you. Sure, it's fine for mass produced meals, but it won't replace a top-notch chef.

Hobby should only become job if you enjoy the craft of it and if the profession / job rewards craftsmanship.

People in it just for the money won't care about craft - you see the same thing in plumbing. And when there's enough money and scale on the line, craft becomes progressively more niche - that is why Ikea furniture is a thing. And you can even say that there is craft in Ikea, just not along the axes a traditional furniture maker or user would consider.

This is such a great point and raises existential career questions for everyone who got into a programming career because they love the craft. Either find your niche where craft will matter until you retire, leave the profession or accept that it’s now mostly about prompting. It’s almost like everyone’s being promoted into management or tech leading and can’t refuse…

I think it was implied through the conversation but the other thing I have come to realise is that your hobby and craft should be about producing not consuming. Too many people think they like videogames or films and think they should therefore work in the industry only to be crushed by the industry. Even being a youtuber devolves into hours of storyboarding, editing and engagement farming which are orthogonal to your hobby.

With respect to code it's a little murky but I guess the tension really is enjoying the process enough while being able to output the desired quality, volume and velocity required of you.

Quality is usually the stickler because it's invisible to the end user and requirement setter but sometimes quality affects both ergonomics and future delivery and sometimes it's purely self-satisfactory. That isn't a value judgment, making things well is a gratifying and edifying experience - so much so that this practice overlaps with Shinto philosophy.... but not many people are going to pay you to have that experience.

We're not that far into this new era and I already see people go back to hand-writing the important bits and manually designing their architecture because it turns out that unless you have them spit out yet another boring web app, they aren't very good engineers at all, their errors and bad decisions are very hard to predict and accumulate over time, and the resulting mess becomes unmaintainable at some point, and it appears all the harness engineering in the world can only stave that off somewhat, not prevent it from happening. So perhaps IT won't become a monoculture of agent prompters after all.

Well, sometimes it's not a choice you have. I am arguably still a hobby programmer, but was forced by circumstance to go pro. I could not earn enough in graphic design to fix my teeth. Still managed to retain my love for the underlying mathematical (lambda calculs) and do to this day. I was always an enthusiast even as a manager. Now I do volunteer FOSS maint on numerous projects. Some embedded, most Linux phone adjacent. A circle.

Thanks for sharing! We're blessed that such a hobby is lucrative enough to pay our bills. Not many hobbies are, and usually this leads to wage suppression as there's too much supply. My pet anecdata is how a violinist playing for the BBC Symphony Orchestra would earn roughly 30k despite being a top tier orchestral violinist.

Programmers are comparatively blessed that a relatively arcane and niche craft ended up creating trillions in value and the growth in demand for the skillset outpaced supply of the skillset. As such, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. But this was the exception not the rule. Tech has been glamorous for over a decade now: you have people from other industries moving over at all levels and armies of MBAs keen to rentseek internally and externally, and a fat pyramid of aspirational career coders coming up as graduates. And thus we see craft in software fading out.

You could argue that the same wage suppression does somewhat play out insofar as open source software is capable of producing far far more value than paid maintainers earn.

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