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yhcj

OP and long time lurker here, I'm desperate and looking for honest-to-god advice on what to do.

I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation.

I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise.

I don't own a car because I love walking, and such.

So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living).

Luckily I have some savings and I have other interests from years of doing random jobs and businesses, and as much as I love programming, especially with others, I think very few of us still want to program.

I'm like the Last Samurai of programming while everyone is using AI-assisted gattling guns.

Is it time to let go?

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The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools.

Two things you can do regarding programming here.

1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.

2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.

I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.

1. is a bit contradictory or at the least a "devils in the details" wishful fantasy which hasn't been showcased convincingly in the wild yet (by "the wild", I mean software eng shops and corps). It's assumed the devs who have taste were able to implement their taste fine pre-AI, sure, but the whole gotcha in 1. is that the ones with good taste currently are not confident in implementing their good taste while simultaneously "producing good results quickly using AI".

I disagree. There is a lot of boilerplate to write and mundane things to check, which AI can speed up a lot. I'm not talking about 'software engineering' here, but about 'programming', which consists of a lot of write DTO->write rest interface->write interface->write simple select query->map response. The good taste here comes from the architectural design and the UI design.

The amount of 'software engineers' who couldn't design a table to be readable or a flow to be intuitive is off the charts. AI neither helps nor harms here, it just makes implementing good and bad decisions faster.

also people have no clue how to know what is good or bad.

It's like if I asked an LLM to produce a contract for a a new hire

(my friend the one I mentioned, did that BTW LOL)

Yeah, okay, it might be good, probably very good, in fact might be GREAT.

But I just have no clue

Since the discussion was related to the job security of a programmer with good taste, I'm trying to read your comment from that perspective.

If I am understanding you correctly, you are claiming that an AI will not design a table to be readable unless a programmer with good taste is prompting it. Did I understand you correctly?

If so, then yes we are going to arrive at different conclusions, because my claim is that the table made by the programmer with no taste will be acceptable to the client, hence good taste won't save the other programmer because good taste will require more guiding and interference by the programmer. And then the client will just go with the no taste implementation.

If the programmer with good taste truly does not lose any time implementing their solution when compared to the other programmer, as you claim, then yes the client will go with good taste since all else are equal.

I just find those assumptions hard to believe at this stage.

RE:

1. I did consulting for a bit, $500/hr haha I was so reluctant to do it. I do admit that SV was just pouring way too much money back then. The good old days. I don't live in the US, and remote opportunities have been vanishing quite quickly. In the US I would have no doubt I'd get crazy good offers, I have lots of people who respect me there. My friend and I even got offered high positions at Youtube way back when.

2. I quit 3 years ago and have done a lot of artisanal code. Lots of fun. But next year I'll need to figure out stuff, hence why I accepted this small contract (ends next month) and thinking if it's time to move on.

BTW I have a family to feed and my son eats like a husky even though he's only 45 pounds, so there's that. My daughter is a big fan of Argentinean shrimp and caviar. You get the point.

Hitting you an email

I called it quits about 8 years ago (I'm 55), mostly due to the fact that I couldn't get excited about anyone's "next big thing". Got into teaching, which was a new, rewarding skill to work on mastering. (I've still got a long way to go--what a challenging field!)

But of course I am teaching CS, and now it's just a nightmare of trying to figure out how to teach it. We have a lot of people saying we still need to teach the basics in addition to AI-assisted, and we have a lot of people saying to just teach vibe coding, and a lot of people saying just teach SE and no coding. And we're just trying to do the best we can for the students, while wondering if the field even has a sensible future.

(Anecdata: universally, my hired grads have told me they are incredibly grateful to have gotten through college before LLMs hit the scene.)

And it's a pisser, because teaching CS was great. I get to try to optimize learning and talk about what I love? Heaven.

I think I'm in this category of software engineer in terms of how much I love the work:

Requirements gathering: 5%

Functional spec: 5%

Design doc: 20%

Programming: 65%

Deployment: 5%

And engineers who were here:

Requirements gathering: 20%

Functional spec: 25%

Design doc: 25%

Programming: 5% (or 0%!)

Deployment: 25%

are having a much easier time with this transition. Unfortunately for me, programming is also the most fun to teach.

I have a lot of other interests outside of CS, one of which would actually pay money (GIS). Not sure how to get paid for dualsporting, hiking, bicycling, geology, visiting museums, writing (I do get paid grocery money for this), hand-coding, or reading. But I'm open to suggestion. :)

Hey beej71, I'm 41 and I love advice from people with more life experience than me.

I also love teaching (not particularly great at it, but not the worst) and taught SALSA dancing for a few years. The money was okayish (enough for myself but not to feed my children) but I LOVED being around ppl.

I wasn't talented in dancing but my talent in programming really made me happy (and well paid), so that kind of sucks. Definitely same as you, I'd even say programming can be my 90% of joy and effort (in a bad way sometimes, but I manage to talk myself into dialing it down)

I can't imagine the hell teachers are going through, especially coding, with AI.

Luckily I have a lot of weird interests and some can pay well (for example, I've had a decent success teaching people how to lose weight doing intermittent fasting, imagine the randomness of my interests)

What is your next plan?

I wasn't joking on becoming a yoga teacher, as cliché as it sounds, because I did it and quite successfully so (I was young, handsome, and single back then, and my classes were PACKED. I'm still handsome but the other two are gone. People paid cash so I had a lot of bills in my home lol)

I also really enjoy programming, and relate to your comment below about sometimes waking up in the middle of the night because your brain figured out how to code a hard problem.

Sorry to hear you're having a rough time with work. I do think AI availability has made otherwise smart people put out lazy work. But I also think that there are more people who still "code by hand" than you think.

You might find some joy by going to certain events where people talk about different items coding-wise. I enjoyed the talks for this conference recently https://www.youtube.com/@softwareshouldwork (particularly Richard Hipp's, Delaney Gillilan's and Carson Gross' talks), maybe you can find similar spaces. The benefit has been Youtube's algorithm recommending me better software talks now too.

Thanks for the recommendation, I in fact couldn't sleep past 5am today and woke up to check an SQLite presentation on that channel. Pure gold!

I think that's how it is, we just gotta fine-tune the algorithms on our favor. I'm doing it slowly with Youtube (I'm into rock climbing recently, and it's been a fun ride on YT). My Twitter feed can actually be pretty amazing, even my IG one. I don't check them much often any more but they're still pretty good. No BS.

The trick is not to fall for the stupid videos with millions of views. I just recently learned about Mukbang or something like that (a weird trend where people binge eat on YT). Crazy

You are far from alone on that path and indeed I also wonder if it may be time to let it go.

yeah, I've seen plenty of people like us.

What I'm sad about is when others call us out for being a ludite or so.

But now I understand that these people don't understand that some of us just love programming.

I mean if I say I love gardening, nobody is going to tell me "Oh you're a stupid ludite, just buy a tractor and glyphosate"

Or when I mention my love for long walks in nature, imagine somebody telling you "that's so inefficient why don't you buy a segway, you'll be able to explore 10x the number of places without wasting any effort and time"

> who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation

A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process.

But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN.

The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone using a Python-like language.

Of course, I didn't use AI, because where is the fan in this? In "normal life" (work, personal projects), it is very hard for me to convince myself to do anything manually, because generating code is more efficient. But in a game, using AI assistance would be like using aimbot in a shooter or a cheatcode in some other game. Yeah, it's much more efficient, but what is the point? There is no challenge and no fun that comes from overcoming the challenge.

So, anyway, I was writing code by hand for the first time in I-don't-even-remember-how-many years. And it was so much fun. I don't remember when was the last time I felt so engaged, so immersed, so "in the flow".

So, yeah. After all, maybe I'm not a ruthless pragmatic who only cares about the final result and doesn't gives a shit, how did he get there...

I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode a week or so ago and started writing little programs in TI BASIC. TI BASIC sucked. It was slow, due to being written in a form of bytecode which had to be interpreted (and it would in turn interpret your program). And you couldn't do sprites, not without getting the Extended BASIC cart.

But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming.

It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.

EXACTLY! The dopamine we get from doing stuff with mostly our own hands is unbelievable. But social media, junk food, and adult content should have taught us that cheap dopamine is addictive and dangerous.

Most of us will learn the hard way (or never learn)

The economics of it are such that writing code is, for humans, a handicraft to be indulged in out of idle curiosity. When it comes to actually useful software, for personal or industrial use, that is better off produced by machine; it's simply a waste of human time and energy to write it by hand.

good you realized that, but you do mention an interesting approach:

Most of my friends would use cheat codes to beat games.

Me and my brother (who's a crazy amazing artist btw) would instead figure out how to get good enough in a game to not lose a single life.

Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Mario.

I could see that the amount of fulfillment we got was 100 times more than my friends who played the game like that and didn't struggle.

I’ve been on a sabbatical for 99% of this year, small pockets of time spent doing some maintenance for clients I love.

I bought a seriously derelict property in country Australia and am having a good time slowly fixing it up.

I’ll get back to programming next year, hopefully the blow-ins have moved on to the next hype cycle by that time.

Hey great for you!

I've been on a 3 year sabbatical, and I spend most summers in the countryside with my kids, grilling meat, planting berries, going in nature for hours-long walks.

It's really a great life ain't it?

So you're planning to go back for work? I'm unfortunately on my last 12-months or so of runway so time to figure out stuff.

>It's really a great life ain't it?

Yes, there’s no complaints from me :) Spent 4 months camping and now I’m still camping but fixing a property.

I’ll do something for money next year, who knows, I might find a good programming contract or I might be serving coffee at the local cafe!

Did you have a lot of savings or something for this? I suppose the closest the rest of us can do is see if we can work part time and make use of longer weekends to go on exploratory trips, or paid holiday (if you work for a company) to go on exploratory trips, see the world, that sort of thing.

Saved, bought assets, saved & paid off debt, sold assets.

My home town had super undervalued real estate for roughly a decade prior to 2023/4.

I bought another stinker of a property nobody wanted.

I’d save and look for under valued property, my understanding is the US has ridiculous amounts of it provided you’re happy to live in small places.

Very informative, thanks. Nothing is undervalued here in the UK.

I always see videos of people on YouTube buying abandoned properties in the UK?

I must seek these out then! I avoid YouTube a lot as its noise I don't need in my life, and I hate the "facial reaction" / pointing thumbnails, or thumbnails with arrows, all designed to make you look.

I think AI is not really the subject. You probably chose a bad partner. As for quitting, since you mentioned gardening:

"C’est une folie de haïr toutes les roses parce qu’une épine vous a piqué."

One thorn?

I already lived under a cave but did you see the amount of money and hype pushed into AI? Just look at YC, 90% AI, just like it was crypto back then.

Jensen Huang saying we have AGI.

One thorn I can handle. A field full of slugs and nettles with billions of dollars to burn I'm not so sure

I was refering to your partner, but ok.

Why not become a machine gun operator?

Pretty much anyone can volunteer and became an UAV drone operator in Ukraine. Get an experience you'll use in the WW3!

because some of us have some dignity (and savings) left. That's really just what it is. If I lie to my wife I can't sleep at night.

I almost sold my soul to the devil doing AI assisted coding review for top dollar. That night I almost cried in my sleep

Just find a better place to go. If you have savings, quit this nonsense and start looking for something else while working on yourself.

I just got back to working on a project I like where we don't use any LLMs for code generation because we think it kind of sucks and leads to bad results unless it's for incredibly small contexts (which is usually not worth the prompting).

You're also not as alone as you think in actually liking programming enough to do it by hand even after having used LLMs. There's also the fact that you build more theory up by actually writing the code anyway, so someone who actually wants to know their code base intimitely will always have to write the code.

Damn, would love to work somewhere where no LLMs are needed. I have a friend working for Nintendo stuff (I think he does something for their secondary software, IE sales) and he is not allowed to use LLMs. Happiest man on earth.

If I were in the States, where I have connections, people would hire me easily. But for my wife and kids, it's not really possible to emmigrate.

Remote is crazy. I heard from a friend who got 100s of applications on a remote job on a single day.

No it's absolutely not time to let go. You are one of a limited set of people with pre-AI taste and intuition for good software. They aren't making any more of them. And you'll be a super valuable asset anywhere you go.

I mean, if you want to retire go ahead, but don't do it because of AI. AI is just a tool to generate code faster. It doesn't replace the work of actually making design decisions and knowing what will scale and what's better going forward vs what will work now but spiral into unmanageable spaghetti code soon (yes AIs also have a harder time managing messy code than neat code)

I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers" [1], but I fear the truth may be closer to "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".

In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents. And let's not forget that we are part of an industry whose motto is "move fast and break things". Sure, NASA has a zero-bugs approach to software dev, but they don't have room for all of us.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646820

SV echo chamber here it seems. No, most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things' (and unlawful on top of that, but who has time for some boring stuff like that when greed fully takes over).

Banks will not work like that for next 10 years at least. The tiny amount of money one could save on those big banking projects by using llms aggressively will bite back immediately when shit just doesn't work, clients leave for good and regulators will fine you to the ground (or remove your banking license). Many other businesses who are not race to the bottom and realize how crucial reliable IT is to their business also won't go that way anytime soon.

World is not ending, there is some transformation and thats about it. Its true there will be much less jobs for devs but its mostly affecting newcomers. Statistical models are not making code better than experienced humans, and won't for some time if ever.

> most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things'

Not sure what business you are in but the non tech industries (corporate IT, in house apps) have not, in general, been associated with quality. Cost cutting, outsourcing to the lowest bidder: yes. Quality: no.

Mostly banking but dipped my feet in many other areas in the past (telco, insurance, municipalities, army etc).

Its true budgets are often the problem, but not much 'move fast and break things' mantra of SV, rather 'move as much as low budget and corresponding quality and bureaucracy allows you to'

There's a lot of distortion on this forum. Some people don't consider anything less than being overpaid by venture capital furnaces as worthwhile work.

I'm am certainly an "ai believer" and have been since I saw the tragectory we were on.

It was pretty simple to project the compounding effects and headroom that we had. I go back and forth on this all the time.

There probably won't be much demand for "un-fuckers". Up until recently I thought knowing what to build for a given context would give you quite a bit of runway.

I still think knowing what you should build will be important for the next 12-24 months.. but I have to be honest.. after that.. I don't know.

I don't know how to feel myself. I'm certainly an "ideas" guy as well as a nitty gritty build it guy. I just think my technical side is depreciating very rapidly.

Completely agree. Saying this as someone who loves handcrafting code and has been doing it professionally for decades, it looks like a dead end at this point. LLM generated code might not be pretty, but these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base (which honestly would also describe most human-derived codebases I have worked with). I am still reeling from this realization and trying to figure out what it means.

> these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base

Not really. They're only as good as whatever they are prompted for. If you prompt them for the wrong thing, they'll do it. Great tools, human error

> I still think knowing what you should build will be important for the next 12-24 months.. but I have to be honest.. after that.. I don't know.

I'll bet we'll all still work in software in 24 months

I used to think there'd be space for unfuckers. Now I'm doubftul.

Yeah I could do management and all that crap but I was Eng Manager for 5 months and hated it.

Some of us are like huskies, we need to run on the Siberian Permafrost in order to thrive, else we get depressed.

That's me.

You're misunderstanding. There is space for people who aren't so stupid that their prompts are stupid and their output is stupid and they sling and spam their stupid shit all over your system and attempt to get it committed and screw everything up.

> I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers"

That's not what I've said though.

> "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".

That's true of a lot of software. But the big bucks things right now have too much money riding on them to be broken and remain broken. Every big tech co right now is talking about and sharing solutions for how to handle the wave of AI generated code that hits their systems from internal devs every day. Reliability is not at levels it was before. Change safety is far more challenging. Move fast and break things was shelved long ago at these companies. It's only popular in the public imagination.

That's not to say these companies will stop using AI. Absolutely not. It's a great tool, but like all tools it needs an ecosystem built around it. It needs evals, debugging, maintenance, telemetry, etc. It ultimately needs goals and directions driven by human beings who understand the domain well enough to steer. And that's why devs like OP are important now and will remain so for quite a while bc the rise of AI is the rise of many new and challenging engineering problems.

> In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents

So what? How does this change anything I said? Being proficient with AI agents is far easier if you have the domain knowledge about what they should produce and far harder if you have no idea.

And anyways, what you're asked in interviews is not a mirror of the job. I see many people every day at work who are lauded and praised for using their knowledge to course correct and improve AI agents and other AI workflows. The idea that there will come a point where they work perfectly and don't need to be messed with, well that's also true of software and services. But it doesn't mean big tech companies with quite stable main services just stopped hiring people years and years ago

This is what’s know as “cope”. People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI. That is the basis of what people were hired on before AI, because no alternative existed.

> People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI.

Oh look a thing I never said being refuted

> pre-AI taste

You pretty clearly did say this.

Look at the COBOL devs. They are been called in their retirement years. You don't want that to be you. Life is short

Have you seen what they charge per hour? Let’s just say it’s not Upwork rates.

my uncle is 70+ years old and he's one of those haha

I saw him starting at a monitor at midnight, back all hunched up and thought "nope, not what I envision"

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