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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of.

I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis, and just writing the first line of a project was a daunting prospect.

With AI I'm able to construct an entire ecosystem of programs I've always wanted.

The code isn't perfect, but I understand enough to fix architectural mistakes and to guide the AI to a good enough solution.

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>> I've never been the kind of coder >Looks like you were never really a coder, to be honest.

I do not understand the bitterness here at all. AI is just a tool you can use for better or worse.

I learnt basic programming at an old age of 10 and 6502 assembler 2 years later from (paper)books.

There was no Internet and I dreamed of one day owning a magical software program called Macro Assembler so I could use labels and advanced loops in assembler programs instead of tediously translating examples from the book or magazines using a pencil and paper into assembly without such features.

The AI today is like that Macro Assembler for me back then. You, a human, are simply moved one layer of abstraction higher.

Did I enjoy writing that assembler back then when the goal was to complete a calculation in the time it took the crt tube's electron gun to draw one line on the screen? Sure. Would I want to write accounting software in it? Hell no.

There have been very crappy coders and great coders before and after AI. Just like almost no one writes assembler anymore, almost no one will write normal code in the age of AI. But knowledge of it, how it should be written is still going to be important.

Your value as a human is in the architecture of the software and choices that influence it's entire functioning. In maintainability, scalability and resilience present in your design from day 1 not added a year later.

You know how much slop and crappy work I saw before AI? A lot.

Is this a bot, or real..?

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion related to work) with pro-AI messaging, and the simultaneous ease with which AI makes it to do so, makes it hard not to ponder what amount of seemingly organic pro-AI sentiment is not.

I'm sure there is some that is indeed genuine. It could even be most. But I'd be surprised if it is all.

The comment reads like flesh-generated language to me, but I might be fooled. The breadths of pro-AI sentiment is possibly astroturphed, but there's also an argument for an enthusiastic minority of people to write a lot more comments.

As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers, always liked building things, but was never that great at coding, and was never that good at going super deep into one topic. Instead, I have broad knowledge of a lot of things like product design, requirements engineering, devops, security.

I work with a fully agentic flow, but I would argue very seriously; My job has not gotten easier, I am doing at least as much hard thinking as before. From assisted RE over design (TDD focused Spec), implementation by agents, review by agents with partial human oversight, I have a speedup of maybe 50-100%.

More importantly, I can do things I couldn't do before. And when it comes to performance and defect-density, it is comparable to very senior people I couldn't touch before. I do agree that the code doesn't look like a human would write it - too abstracted, sometimes convoluted, often way too dense. But it isn't worse code, and if you accept that no one has to read that code ever again, then it is good. Agents are able to grok it just fine.

Way to completely miss the point of the article.

> point of the article

Nth iteration of pointless AI navel gazing?

What was the point to you? What I took away from the article is that AI adds a bunch of complexity that is making it harder, not easier to understand.

And I'm saying that is true, but it's also enabling a kind of complexity and ambition in outcomes that might be a worthwhile trade-off.

In the same way we accept that cars are no longer something that a mechanic can understand and repair without a laptop, because we trade off the repairability and understanding for better mileage or safer handling.

Either I misunderstood the article, or people are misunderstanding my point, because I'm genuinely confused by being called a bot.

It's useful to you. I'd say take the win and let the haters quibble. I'm good enough at coding that I can use it as part of my day job, but I hate coding for the sake of coding. For me coding is a tool for solving problems, and now AI can sometimes help me solve problems I might not have had the motivation to persue. My scale is usually "a small application that helps me do X", not "I develop photoshop singlehandedly".

absolubtely. Worth noting though that a large number of people here literally do develop photoshop, or similar apps of similar complexity.

The fact they aren't doing it singlehanded makes it way harder, not easier. This is a central counterintuitive finding of most thinking about software development

> The fact they aren't doing it singlehanded makes it way harder, not easier.

As N->large, fraction of time spent coordinating approaches infinity.

> I've never been the kind of coder

Looks like you were never really a coder, to be honest.

Okay, and why is that a problem?

I never said it was a problem.

It's true I've always been better at breaking things than making things, but for someone who was "never really a coder" I've had a good career doing it all the same!

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