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> The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.

This is sort of meaningless; the purpose of _every_ job is to produce value. The reason I chose to be a software engineer is because I enjoy solving the kinds of problems that it involved, not because it would allow me to deliver value to companies. Changing what a programmer does is _changing the job_, and I think it’s no wonder that some people are disappointed by that. If your boss said that instead of building software you were going to now clean the bathroom all day, would you be fine with that? You’re still delivering value!

Yea this whole “your job is to create value” argument is always really shaky. Add “with computers and stuff” to the end and it becomes more plausible. Nobody gets a degree is “providing value”.

Nobody is hired for a job if the person hiring does not think they will produce value

Nobody is hired for a job if the person hiring thinks that the employee will murder them. So I guess that makes the most salient job description "refraining from murdering your boss"?

Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment

Hm “Bullshit Jobs” terminology by David Graeber seems appropriate here.

Of course, “produce value” is slightly different from meaningful jobs that Bullshit Jobs was referring to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I don't see it as "do a job because adding value" or "do a job because enjoying the activity".

I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.

Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.

Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.

But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).

Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.

If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.

I think the secondary fear is that the big salaries and great working conditions are a result of a scarcity that may be on its way out.

Paying me $150k to do work that produces $1.5M for your business is great value - but getting the same work done for $15k is even better value.

Very off topic but I think you would highly enjoy watching the movie "Perfect Days (2023)" directed by Wim Wenders.

It had a profound effect on me in introspecting my long software career.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384

You got me curious. Could you say a bit more about the your reflections? I really enjoyed that movie.

Huh, I like using my mind. The thing I despise about AI in software engineering is that it is much more difficult to engage my mind consistently and fully.

I like using my mind too, just usually not on software engineering.

So was your motivation for being a software engineer just money?

I coded for fun before I ever coded for money. However, at this point I've been a professional software engineer for enough years that the interest in software that I once had has almost entirely drained out of me. I find professional software engineering to be very very different from, and much less fun than, coding passion projects. And at this point, the interest in coding passion projects has drained out of me as well. I just don't find coding to be that interesting any more. I feel like I've already spent more of my life coding than I should have, more than coding ever really deserved. I think that if I found a different way to make money, I could be perfectly happy going the rest of my life without ever looking at another piece of code.

I am considering trying to move to some kind of non-coding role in tech. Maybe some kind of management role.

you can do software engineering without the money just fine.

make an open source project without ai

Most of us like to use our mind. Just some prefer not to on a boring and dull senseless corporate solutions. If they can.

There are offshore oil mining rig that needs workers. They pay big bucks too. You get some months off. The physical movement is better than cleaning the bathroom.

No need to thank me. You're welcome.

Interesting idea. Only problems for me are: it sounds dangerous and physically straining for someone like me who hasn't done manual labor in many years and has no experience relevant to oil rigs. And also, there are almost no women. I guess oil rig workers probably pack in their women time hardcore when they're on their months off.

You can stand outside the Marriott on Canal St in New Orleans at 2 am on a weekday night and observe this yourself.

I lived in the same building with a bloke who did dangerous construction type work in the Pacific NW. Sawing branches on high cliffs, that sort of thing. He'd make a grip on a job, come back home and spend it all on booze, weed, and women, go out and do it all again. I thought of him as my life's version of Lawrence from Office Space.

> Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like.

I haven't calculated a cube root by hand since, what, sixth grade? (It's been so long I don't remember.) I'd hate to spend the mental cycles having to do that kind of task.

come on man, back to reality please

I believe my job as a programmer is to produce value, but your retort is very strong. Cleaning bathrooms would not be fullfilling for me.

Ultimately, I like the creation part of programming: creating something that doesn't exist that is of value to at least one person (usually me). In general, though, I get more satisfaction when more people get value out of my creations.

Through that lens, AI does change things: a whole set of things that I can create no longer have value to people (at least the value is lower, because AI can do it better than whatever product I create). But at the same time, I can now create more sophisticated and more powerful things with the help of AI.

On the whole, I'm more satisfied with AI than without.

I approach the thing differntly. My goal is not to add value (value means money and I don't care). I'm in for "creativity" though. I like to create programs. I'm not particularily fond of programming though. So what I have always done is to work on never-done-before stuff. Oh, I don't mean rocket science nor anything spectacular, but I like to be where defining the problem or understanding the problem is as much or more important as the skill needed to solve it.

For example, I'm working on an emulator in a field where emulators do exist since long. So I set myself to improve these emulators by emulating tricky corner cases. These corner cases do not exist in AI's memory because nobody has ever coded them. So although I use quite a lot of AI to investigate the corner cases, the actual problem solving is entirely mine. So I stay happy :-)

In my daytime job, a big part of what I do already exists in some form or another (fluid dynamics). But my job is more of understanding what I do so that I can convince someone else that my programs are robust and reliable. So again, I'm programming a lot with AI, but the important stuff, it's my skill to understand it, not AI.

I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable.

In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.

The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.

Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity.

It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.

The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.

This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.

I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html

What a great comment, I wanted to quote my favorite parts but would just have to quote the whole thing. The “I suffered so you must too otherwise you’re unworthy” is so on point. The people whose identity is tied to gatekeeping programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.

For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they feel met their arbitrary bar of "good developer" with trivia or a command of arcane details. It makes the work harder and it discourages talented people who are new to the field, like junior devs.

Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.

In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.

Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.

  > people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity

I came across too many of those people in my career and I can't say I'm sad that LLM are taking this away from them.

The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.

>> You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.

Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, was famously rejected from Google for not being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

I remember running into a lot of those kind of folk here on HN, and unsurprisingly, a large portion of them are the biggest LLM detractors.

NGL, its a little annoying and disheartening that many can now partially build with an LLM tool what I spent so many years learning. It does not cover all cases, but there is an element of this.

I think it’s very human and honest of you to admit that.

There has to be a changing economic undertone to it as well. For a lot of years, the craft that many people enjoyed also happened to pay well and had significant barriers to entry. It's easy to like the craft when it pays you well.

The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose knowing there is almost no shot of ever being paid or paid well and only a few people may ever read or run it. If the answer is no to that then I would propose that you are actually in it for something other than the craft and its worth settling what that is for yourself.

* I know I am stereotyping artists and there are many kinds and many ways to make your way in the world, it's just a thought experiment.

As a career? Almost certainly not but I do think I (and probably many others on hn) would still do it as a hobby

Yes. And in retirement, I still code because I like the process of creating (hopefully cool) things. Even without remuneration. Ideally things that other people will use and benefit from in some way.

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.

30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take.

My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the drag and drop coding tools that we have ever created. For the first time people are bringing me the "hard" technical challenges rather than the "I have a startup idea" or "can you fix my computer" type questions.

> The people who are upset by this change...

Are the ones who view their responsibility as code and system ownership. Where they feel smart because they know where the problem is when they hear it described. That isn't the job any more - and the people and the tools have not caught up.

It's interesting to hear that lawyers are coming to you with those questions, because my read was that there was almost universal contempt for AI within law (save for the few "dumb" enough to use it and get caught).

The language of the law attempts to be consistent, legal English isnt entirely the same as ours, it remains somewhat inured to modernization. It is, if nothing a domain specific way of writing. (There is a great bit by Lenny Bruce on this very topic)

If a basic filing with some citations is needed, letting one AI generate it, and then another validate it (to catch soft ball hallucinations) leaves it to be read and reviewed.

Lawyers, good ones, are by trade, critical readers and reviewers of documents. The contempt exists for those who fail to do this part of the job. Letting AI write your submission without reviewing it, validating it, is telling.

I don't think that's quite it. Particularly in America's common law system, written laws are not "the law", in terms of what actually happens in enforcement, or in judgment when something ends up before a court. You have to deal with unwritten or disparately-documented standards, norms, case law, etc. LLMs don't know and can't account for curveballs that appear in practice; they'll correctly tell you what the law actually says, and work off that documentation, and blow your case, because that law isn't "the law" in its practical totality.

The lawyers with contempt for AI aren't necessarily the best "critical readers and reviewers of documents"; a good number just appreciate the substantial moat the current system keeps for them, and are contemptuous of 1) attempts to cross that moat without paying a toll, however likely that attempt is to fail, and 2) the way such failures highlight that our legal system doesn't work the way most people seem to think it does, because that increases the chances that the public will become dissatisfied and push for change.

I guess if it doesn't cross that moat, there cool with it?

> The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians?

In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users.

I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code.

I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book".

I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily.

And how many vibe-coded apps am I using?

Zero.

Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?

I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.

What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)

Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.

So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.

But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.

In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.

I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.

Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it.

The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.

Sounds like a failure of imagination to me (I hope you're right). It doesn't have to be the CTO, it can be anyone who will sit there for the cheapest cost to read output while assuming the risk of it all working until they retire. Sounds glorious

Even if all the changes are “good” not shoddy, awareness of changes will still require layers of cognitive filtering. One human PM clerk will not be able to oversee all of the products, one developer will not be able to oversee all changes in all codebases.

Well obviously the real solution is for the owner of the company to

1. Fire everyone else

2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?)

3. Retire to Aruba

Right, in 5 years time the economy will be entirely vibecoded by pension fund and family office bankers. No one will be employed at all

> assuming the risk of it all

scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.

Sorry I meant ownership of it working when an alert goes off in production and having to fix it, not legal liability. I should have been more clear.

> just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas

Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.

You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.

Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.

I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.

I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.

I agree with you, it's the same experience I've had. But I've seen completely nontechnical people build some sites and become convinced themselves, and if those people control the purse then it doesn't matter as much what devs think the reality of agentic dev is. (Until they get burned enough times).

> people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.

I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.

The non-technical people can learn (or can be forced to learn to keep their jobs) and enough will succeed to devastate programmer employment.

What if engineers push out all non-engineer CXOs precisely because of what you are saying. Hypothetically, if you replace all employees with engineers (so all the non-engineering roles) and allow them to optimize processes using LLMs, isn’t this like lean/six sigma on crack?

Yep, that could happen as well. I suspect some engineers would be surprised how much work, time and effort it takes to build the relationships to market and sell to (along with all the other roles).

I hope that everyone agrees to collectively recognise we all need to still do some things together and the knowledge in our heads is still much more important.

>The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.

Think of it another way:

You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.

Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.

The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.

Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?

I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.

At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”

> You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.

I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.

We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.

Yet you can look for accountability in all the data breach, Windows ME, GIMP, or unreliable bluetooth. I would take bricklayers that can reason and say "yeah, we need to delay because the nearest brick factory is currently in low supply", instead of a robot that will yeet bricks that no one can understand why. I value the human.

You can look for accountability. You probably won’t find it. But I’m also not saying there isn’t value in humans.

I am saying that we all have worked on projects where “artisanal software development” bore as much resemblance to our process as an abstract art painting does to reality. We’ve all worked with plenty of coworkers (and maybe have even been that coworker ourselves) who just punches the clock. We’ve all worked with developers who have had 1 year of experience for 30 years in a row. Everyone knows the average piece of software being produced is a buggy mess and it’s amazing it all works at all. Hell our industry coined the phrase “worse is better” and “move fast and break things”. To turn around now and pretend that we’re actually all master craftsmen, regularly constructing artifices of pure beauty and logic that will stand the tests of time is a bit silly.

Sure I would take a real human over a YOLO coded piece of software any day. But I’d also take a real application over an excel macro monstrosity any day too. That doesn’t mean excel macros don’t have their place or that they aren’t used to produce things of real value.

I'm not seeing the same kind of resentment towards non-technologists as you are claiming. Overall in my life I feel like I haven't seen as much gatekeeping as people claim there is in tech.

Why do so many people miss that it lets software engineers build more bigger better things? It's not just people who think the job is to create value. It's anyone who cares more about creation itself than the process of the creation

I was already pretty clear that the job of producing value was separate from the part of the job that I enjoyed. What makes me sad is the part that I enjoyed evaporating entirely.

I agree that the employee's purpose is to bring value. The question is, now that AI can generate code that's good enough to get by, is there enough value that a software developer brings to justify their continued employment. IMO, the answer for most software developers is no¹, even the ones eagerly embracing AI, so the smugness of AI adopters is likely unwarranted.

The notion that more work will spring into being to justify their continued employment is wishful thinking, particularly if AI keeps improving as fast as its promoters claim. Supporting themselves by creating their own new software businesses is also wishful thinking.

¹ Probably including me.

One question: did you jump straight from programming to depending on the AI without looking at the code? If so, I've got some bad news for you.

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.

My frustration is a) people vastly overrate the LLM's ability to program (they really suck, but people act like they are actually good), and b) that delusion is likely to have a material impact on my ability to make a living, if not kill my career entirely. I don't care if non-programmers can make things, but I do care if the skill I spent my life developing becomes worthless overnight (as anyone would). And when the machine isn't even a competent replacement for me, that just adds insult to injury.

"has AI broken that stranglehold?"

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

No, I'm annoyed that they submit their sloppy code to me as some value and then I have to deal with it. Happened in our org.

You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".

I wish I gave a shit about producing value for a company.

A lot of people create AI art and AI music and attempt to make it as if they are the one making it, they are the one that has talent.

But still souless, still sucks. Its just excuse of laziness. Pick up a brush, pick up an instrument and stop jerking around all day.

Talentless people are talentless because lack of effort, not because of lack of talent.

In front of those people, I will always bask in my sheer superiority because I make real music and real art. People compliment my musical skills and people don't compliment those who create song with AI.

We as a society need to be able to identify which one is AI generated and which one is not, and let the free market takes care of itself. Those who want AI generated things can have it, those that don't want can avoid it.

Take a guess which one will have more demand.