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Comment by Palomides | Hacker News Reader

AI has really revealed the programmers who were temporarily inconvenienced idea guys

This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The idea guys were always incredibly annoying but very ignorable. Now they are constantly in your face but providing the exact same 0 value as always.

Not the case here. When I was young I dabbled in reverse engineering and hacking games for example.

I don't think I am less of a 'hacker' or programmer than the next person on HN.

Same here. Loved hacking on things from all angles, still do. The only thing lost to me now is the yak shaving, and good riddance. I want to think in systems, solutions, integration, and first and foremost the higher level problem, not nitty gritty implementation details.

Ever since Fable and Sol level LLMs/agents came online, I have ceased to look at the code. I recently launched a project for a client that integrated many many systems, has considerable traffic with low latency requirements and everything just.. works. I've never had to do this little firefighting when launching a project of that complexity and scale. It's been liberating and I was able to focus mostly on polish and QoL improvements of the stack and systems. What a time to be alive for a technical builder.

I mean, wasn’t that the case for most of them? Im not a developer anymore, but to me programming was always a means to an end. Sure you can have preferences (static vs dynamic typing, functional vs OOP, etc.), but in the end they should only be relevant if they make you more productive, makes the codebase more readable and so on.

Since these nuances are progressively getting less and less important, why would you care about the process?

Because a lot of people enjoy the process. Why do you think people so wood working as hobby or the whole demo scene?

There is such a thing as difficult concepts that code can express elegantly and words cannot. Its far beyond the simple preferences you allude to. Recursion is the simplest example i guess. Perhaps maths is even more elegant, but im among many a non mathmetician for whom code is the only way ive experienced it thus far.

Especially when you combine and mix those concepts in expressive, simple, intuitive ways. Im just not sure what else is like it that our minds can percieve.

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