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If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others.

A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.

That's beautiful, and true.

I love this articulation.

I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected.

The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.

>The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.

Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.

But what if they no longer have to "tolerate mucking out the stables" and can instead focus on riding.

We could go back and forth on the analogy but I think it comes down to one of two things:

1. You enjoy writing code to fix a problem

2. You enjoy fixing problems and solve that by writing code

If you're in camp 1 then AI feels extremely unfulfilling and understandably so, for camp 2 it's a whole new world.

Now take away the chore of 'focusing on riding'. Genetically or chemically calm the horse so it does not get flustered or moody. Metabolically tweak the horse so it does not get tired or thirsty. Robotically till and smooth the ground so there is nothing to trip over. Notify everyone in the vicinity where the horse is going, so there are no obstacles to avoid. When you can't crash or fall off if you try, when it doesn't matter if you're focusing or not. Maybe dynamically adjust that so you know the AI overlord is pampering you to keep the difficulty 'just right' and this is not a real challenge it's elaborate wireheading.

Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.

> what if they no longer have to "tolerate mucking out the stables" and can instead focus on riding.

Then you haven't seen the say to day life of modern western civilization. That's not the reality. People are working more than ever for the worst buying power in a century in a time where the job market is worse tham ever. Recreation in all forms that's not scrolling social media is down, because people can't afford it.

>We could go back and forth on the analogy but I think it comes down to one of two things:

Your two things are completely orthogonal to my comments. This isn't about enjoying your job. It's about not being able to survive on the remaining jobs left (which aren't much).

And if they liked optimizing transport, but now the box is self-driving and the logistics are planned by machine? The farm is automated and humans get in the way. The vet is a robot. Also any other suggestion you have is automated - AI is now better at everything. Nobody needs or wants anything the human can do. AI is a more fun friend, a better singer, a more engaging teacher or entertainer, a better movie creator, a better cook, etc. All that's left is Postel's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", from cradle to grave nothing the human does matters or can matter. Then what?

Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!

The difference is that person who loved tending to horses had no delusions they were mot out of a job and their horse tending would just be a hobby with few exceptions. They didn’t complain trucks sucked and couldn’t do the job of hauling people and goods better than horses. They saw the progress and had to come to terms what it.

That’s a far cry from how many on HN are dealing with LLMs

I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers...

The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.

With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...

That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.

I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.

I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.

Filling your retirement with all those rainbows and unicorns nobody but you care is fine, but what do those who are not retired yet do?

The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.

I think the IK comment is interesting.

Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.

I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.

Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.

But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.

> I really don't get the hate

I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"

It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"

I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

> I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"

Perhaps this comment spells the end of my account but I can’t not say this.

What you can create for your employer is and always was the ONLY reason they valued you. And why would you ever expect anything different? You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.

By the way, I do not think your time has been wasted! Your knowledge and experience are extremely useful to avoid entire categories of problems that a naive LLM-only approach would produce in spades.

THAT, I believe, is what our craft truly is.

> You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.

Yes obviously. But consider:

In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them

Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck

Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet

Why would you stop learning new things? I lead a team of developers as part of my current role, reviewing and approving what they work on (in addition to doing development and architecture design as well) and from my experience, the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane. One person can build more than an entire team in some cases, while maintaining quality and needing little to no feedback, yet others using the same AI tools struggle to get anything done. How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?

> How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?

It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building

My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future

I wouldn't be so negative.

Maybe to cheer you up: we're doing a few tests at our org, and we found that product-minded engineers still have a tremendous leg-up compared to other people when it comes to actually shipping products. It's not even a race.

It's not just quality of code, it's also speed of execution, maintainability. Why? Because we're not building 200 database tables + 200 endpoints when 1 table + enum suffices. Yes that happened. There was also one feature that I can't comment much on because it would doxx but: a PR from non-dev took months, was 100k LOC and rejected by product and engineering as low-quality. The same feature built by my team was 900 LOC, feature complete, shipped.

Nothing beats the combination of domain expertise and expertise in the medium.

>Why would you stop learning new things?

I'm always learning new things. The things I learn jsut happen to no longer align with what current speculative crazy investors want.

>the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane.

and what if I do not need agentic development for my creations? my domain is not one where "building more" is the bottleneck. I don't need to ship faster, I nee to ship more deliberately

>It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it?

---

>have "problem"

>don't care

>have no problem

Life is literally so easy.

I don't understand this comment. I also slogged through blogs, docs, forums and websites and throughout it all I found it enriching and enjoyable, despite some frustrations along the way. Even if the end result is much faster to get to, I can sit back and think to myself that I learnt a lot and had enjoyable interactions.

Some may think their pursuit of mastery is now wasted, but I find that intriguing especially in a field where mastery cannot really be obtained due to technological progress. I suppose I just don't let others reduce my own experience and what I value?

> I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

It's possible that wishing instant death on people may make you unpopular. But also, maybe you're a poet or artist now. No one makes money of the years of toil it takes to become an expert at that craft, either. If the craft is important, then the money is secondary, and no one will ever stop you from writing code the way you love to, they just won't pay you to do it that way.

>If the craft is important, then the money is secondary

the money is secondary. Sadly, rent is primary.

Give me enough to retire and I'll happily spend the rest of my days on my craft. Until then, the options are combining your craft, minmaxing your career to minimize work (too late for me), or to do something else that pays the bills for the next 30 years. And the cost to retrain isn't cheap either.

That's most people. You have a day job that pays the bills, and you have your passion and art that fulfills you. You had the great temporary luck to have both for a bit, but it's not coming back. I don't feel sorry for us, and it's not helpful to carry so much animosity.

> You have a day job that pays the bills

That's the part that worries me most. Jobs aren't paying the bills these days, the ones that do are in decline.

> You had the great temporary luck to have both for a bit, but it's not coming back.

I had 5 years, so I'm not too sure of that. I'm better off than someone properly Gen Z, but you're talking about someone who was getting his feet wet in a senior role, them suddenly the floor collapsed from beneath. Not enough time to minmax retirement plans even if I was working some kind of Blind success story (I wasn't.

> I don't feel sorry for us, and it's not helpful to carry so much animosity.

I'll survive. I don't have generational wealth but I have a good support network. After over 3 years there might be a moment of reprieve finally.

I will continue to be angry. I was civil and tried to be empathetic for 10 years now. It's clear that lied on deaf ears. Ignore the negotiations, and you get pitchforks. Then fires rise once again. Let's see how many factories need to burn this guided age.

Let's plug AI into the parent's post and see where that takes us.

> "Used to be you had to reason things out using your brain. Then we got LLMs, then AI. Complaining that using your own brain was better seems like nonsense. I'm old enough to have had to use my intelligence and my education to figure out solutions and if the engineering challenge was too hard, I had to really work at it. I don't want to go back."

That is where "LLM is no different from a calculator, bro" argument falls down hard; it's one thing to lose your arithmetic skills but it's quite another to lose your reasoning and learning skills. We are already seeing students who use LLMs to do their schoolwork failing to get properly educated (and they themselves acknowledge it), so this isn't some kind of made up hyperbole.

The only thing that separates humans from animals is their reasoning and their intelligence. If some people want to give that up to climb down the evolutionary ladder, well, have fun with that.

I've seen a few people already descending into pure AI madness, not able (wanting?) to do their work anymore, and just repeating everything the AI says, going to it for every single decision on the job.

A few of those were fired. Another two are just producing slop and are being kept because nobody cared about their work in the first place.

It's not just generating text, but using the agent to make every single decision.

This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs?

LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.

I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done.

Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).

But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.

I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.

>So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).

"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.

like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.

Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before.

Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.

A million lines of LLM slop?

As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.

> LLMs just replace what you were already doing

IF you were already doing it. But LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing as well. In the same way Excel macros enabled some people to run whole businesses on a spreadsheet without hiring a "real" programmer, LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer. And yeah, some of those excel macros were a nightmare, one of the many jobs I've taken over the years was a contract job converting the business logic that used to be in excel macros and later vba script to a "real" language and application. But the business that hired me only had the sort of money they needed to hire me because they had a successful business running off that horrible spaghetti mess. I wonder what businesses will be hiring "real" programmers when their founders hit the wall of what they can accomplish on their own with AI.

> LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer

SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this for several decades now.

So what? Just because you had one way to do something before, that means having a different way of doing it is useless? We have the C language, and it’s been letting people write applications for decades. Does that mean there’s no value in other programming languages?

> that means having a different way of doing it is useless?

That’s a ridiculous jump to a totally extreme conclusion that’s not supported by any message above. What does one even answer to this without getting sucked into a pointless argument?

You don't understand how a comment chain that went from:

> Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. > Same with the computer. What about LLMs? > LLMs just replace what you were already doing

to:

> LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing > as well. > ... > LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications > without hiring a "real" programmer.

to:

> SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this > for several decades now.

leads one to conclude you seem to feel that if something doesn't let you do something you weren't doing before, that it has no value? Because I'm otherwise unclear about what your comment was then supposed to express. The entirety of your reply was to express that the thing an LLM will enable was something that was also enabled by something else. Given the topic of conversation, it seems reasonable to conclude that expression was in the context of talking about the value of AI tools with respect to how they remove friction. If that wasn't the point, then if you could perhaps use more words to state your point directly instead of leaving it to the reader to infer that your point was tangential to the main thrust of the discussion.