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Comment by reticulates | Hacker News Reader

I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :)

My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age is over, our skills aren’t useless, they can still be applied to making things with modern tools, but it is no longer on our terms, no longer programming, no longer the meditative thinking process it once was.

For non-programmers, this is their golden age, the reign of programmer tyranny is over.

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I'd argue that this is the golden age for consultants.

The old equation was several expensive programmers per project. The new equation is a clown with a token budget plus an expensive rescue operation. In either case, the project will still be late, and it'll cost roughly the same.

> I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill,

But it doesn't require some skills. People have posted showing their 7 year old turning out some game using AI; if your software requires the literacy of the average 7 year old to produce some target, trust me - it doesn't require skills.

It requires a different but somewhat overlapping set of skills, and the barrier to entry is much lower. It's neat that 7 year olds can make games, but they're probably not publishing polished and marketable products.

barrier to entry what? to entry having some (seemingly) working code has lowered. But barrier to enter software marketplace with that has not -- that may have been only increased due to the supply pressure. Having working code was always the easier part, but knowing what to write, and what to do with that later is not solved by whatever coding improvements.

That's exactly what I mean.

I sympathize with this take but I think it’s conflating programming as a hobby vs code needed to run a business.

I always believed that programming was solving problems and building things. With AI, you can still solve problems - the better your questions/ prompts the faster you get to your answer. To ask those questions you need to probably have that meditative thinking to grasp the crux of what you’re trying to solve.

On the business side, paying a programmer for their meditative time would be the first line item to cut, when you can bark orders at an idiot savant instead.

When a business pays me to develop software, that's a lot more than coding. Sometimes it takes weeks to just translate the business needs into a plan, budget, and timeline (not that I ever meet it). Often that includes documentation, training, infra, and a maintenance contract (hopefully with retainer).

The coding really is such a small part of that process.

Absolutely. And honestly, I don't think AI can really replace that. It can execute a plan, but it can't really figure out the best plan from a sea of unknowns strewn within people's minds. There's a certain meditative aspect to this stream of work still, but I would hesitate to call it "programming".

> I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming.

Exactly, it is a skill, and it is different from programming, but in the age of cars why train to outrun them on foot? train to drive the car.

Using AI for hours and hours every day has got to leave a new skill set in the human users. It's hard to sit there and steer every minute, just the volume of verbiage and speed of change is amazing. That time and effort spent into AI steering is your new training.

The age of "programmer tyranny", as you call it, was over long ago. Product manager tyranny has been the de facto regime in Big Tech for years. That's how we ended up with subscription models everywhere, enshittification, and infinite data tracking. Imagine that x1000. That's where we're heading, IMO.

It became much easier to make open source too.

The current biggest problem is reputation and QA. Ie I see hundreds of same kind of apps when I search for open source stuff on F-Droid, but I can't really say whether it was properly audited with current influx of vibe-coded stuff, whether it contains malware, is it fully vibe-coded or human evaluated the result, etc. which one of those hundreds is actually good?

When we solve the slop recognition problem, we can actually see a positive turn from enshittification, because copying products overnight without spyware became almost trivial.

What were programmers' terms?

The code

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