I am done with this shit
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Before you used to sometimes having more tech savy customers put out a VB or Delphi click demo over an weekend kind of effort, and then complain why is the delivery so expensive.
Now they do the same with AI agents.
And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.
From my experience, most developers are actually very anxious and scared about their future.
I'm not sure how much that translates in other countries where protections for workers are stronger and companies have different operating models. Not to say it's without trade-offs, you might feel safer over in Europe but you're never gonna see US-style compensation, and the concept of becoming a millionaire (and a new startup founder with ex-FAANG credentials) because you joined a startup at the right time is practically non-existent.
I’m glad I’m not just a software programmer.
Same thing happened 25 years ago when most engineers were doing component level work on expensive bespoke hardware, which was all replaced over 10 or so years with COTS.
(i.e. the ability to copy existing things does not obsolete the need to be able to make new things)
Likewise since digital photography became common, most photography shops closed, those that are around usually barely survive with services like photos for government official documents.
Events photography is also a niche nowadays, as the organisers then sample the photos done by guests on their mobile phones. Very few professional photographers still get such gigs.
However in many forums and blogposts still looks like that the "only happens to others" mentality is quite prevalent.
Technology is a convenient escape goat and a lot of glue-code gigs were made possible by the market distortions I mentioned. But I do think a big correction is taking place and we may have passed the high water mark of employment in software development. Especially cushy jobs being overpaid to configure frameworks, as this sort of work is proving quite tractable for LLMs.
I do think there will be more opportunities in high skill software engineering created by the new tooling on both sides - demand for building and maintaining automated systems as well as dealing with the consequences security, reliability, etc, wise. At this level the industry has been short staffed for several years and that trend should intensify I believe. There is lots of money to be made in being very knowledgeable on fundamentals and detail oriented. That has been true for a while and it seems to me that it will be only more so for the foreseeable future.
If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.
We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.
And in our twice-yearly self-improvement reports, we have to write how we can use AI further. To reach grade 4/4, you need to "trust" the AI.
Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.
The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.
My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.
So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)
The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.
So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?
The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?
I’m sure LLMs have only made it worse, possibly pushing it over an edge where hand coding as a freelancer is not viable. I do not know.
Personally, I tell myself that we’re in the lowest of the low at the moment. Either AI will get substantially better, or it will get substantially worse. The amount of debt the industry is loaded up with is not sustainable. Something is going to have to crack. I expect in another 2 years for things to “settle down” on some side of the fence, although which side I do not know.
My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself. Be the boss that doesn’t require AI. We need more builders behind products, more indie products built because they’re cool and the founder is passionate about the problem; not more business types and cash grabs.
That’s all easier said than done though I know.
This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
I know an ME at work who have begged software folks for a year to build specific software he wants and was getting a mix of "we are too busy", "it does not work this way" and quick prototypes that were not quite what he wanted. Then he spent his free cycles with Claude building what he wanted. It took some time and some iterations and it may be ugly under the hood, but he wowed many folks with different types of demos of our system. The view he presented resonated with many users. And he feels empowered how that he can build tools he wants to try himself and do some projects that before he had to beg for, himself.
The software is being disrupted and disruptions are painful. But maintaining the status quo of several big tech names controlling everything we do on most electronic devices and optimizing for the doomscrolling time is not a worthy goal either. My 2c.
That isn't me. I have the software skills. The problem is not lack of ability building complex stuff from scratch, I do it over and over again, and I have had my own products in the past.
The problem is that LLMs do not actually improve the psychology of sustainable lone freelancing, which is more burdened with the problem of actually owning the entire problem and its consequences than someone vibe-coding their fun ideas in the lunchtime safety of their salaried job or even a single developer within a corporate team setting (because they can quit and walk away when they hate it). If you're still getting paid as you fix it when it breaks after deployment, you're in a different world; it doesn't matter to me how empowering LLMs are in that context!
When you are up against people who are bluffing/bodging, or small agencies who think coding is just a little step up from web design, or over-extended hobby coders working in the evenings, LLMs have a very different set of impacts on your life. I can't just run an experiment with some LLM code and roll it out, because I have to face the customer directly and because nobody is going to pay me to fix it; I am not on a salary that allows that kind of experimentation.
So I am left trying to work out how to use LLMs to catch up with the above people who are, without losing control.
The issue now is that LLMs increase the blast radius. Before it was one person lighting a firecracker. Now it's one person setting fire to the fireworks factory. For example, the LLM exposes the ME's tools and internal company data to the Internet.
I do not agree to that. Being able to make computers do your bidding is a very powerful skill, but is not universal. Software is a small part of the real world. If LLMs help non-software types tinker and try their own ideas more effectively, vive les LLM! If some folks who write CRUD apps or ad distribution algorithms feel threatened by LLMs, ... well, that is a trade worth taking. My 2c.
For example in years gone by, the ME may have requested data and would have been provided a weekly SQL dump of relevant data in CSV format. No harm if that data is becomes corrupted as it will be replaced in a couple days time.
But now, the ME can prompt the LLM. The LLM may search the company wiki, emails, Sharepoint servers, discover some AWS credentials, and directly access whatever environments those credentials allow, perhaps the production systems. The ME didn't know to tell the LLM to not do this. The ME asked for "n", and the LLM went off and did a bunch of stuff to accomplish "n". Huge harm if production data becomes corrupted, tables modified, etc.
"User asks for the wrong thing, LLMs corrupts production data" -- fair, do not do this, ME, SE or anyone else.
But I am not talking about safety or enterprise critical systems. In those systems a random SE also does not have the skills to comply with implied guardrails and should not have the authority to do damage. Those systems have explicit, enforced guardrails that apply to every request.
I am talking about prototyping and personal projects. We let softwies use a kitchen knife to cut beans and bread without a licensed ME supervision despite the fact that knives can (and do) cause a lot of damage. In the same vein we should let everyone use LLMs as just another tool and set their own safety vs functionality constraints.
If people feel that LLMs are so dangerous that they require specific licensing like firearms, explosives, etc. they should advocate for such licensing. But it will be a hard sell. My 2c.
I sympathise with you. I do feel that consultancy and freelance had always had this issue where bad practices in client systems introduced by careless people ended in your shores when clients phone you asking for help. This used to happen with poorly maintained codebases or broken implemented projects done by competitors. Most potential customers are likely to be past or future victims of careless rivals of yours. Is it sustainable for you to ignore past customers that were victims of careless rivals?
I am not judging here just curious about your thoughts on this.
This is all going to end very badly--or very well, if you understand this basic rule of markets, which many managerial types don't.
For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.
It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.
The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen. Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.
Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".
Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.
For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.
So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.
The root cause of the issue is not the bottlenecks or the ability to identify them. It’s about caring about doing a good job. Because once you start caring, you will need to exercise judgment. Better or worse only matters when you have goals.
This is one reason we have so much slop with AI. The cost of the journey has lessened, but you still need to have a destination and be willing to appreciate the journey to get there. Without, it’s just endless drifting.
'Move fast and break things' is the ultimate Silicon Valley motto.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
That is the best thing I’ve read on this topic in a while.
... or never started caring about comprehension. In which case you are primary audience for the con trick of so-called AI.
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
This is a profoundly bad faith argument. Of course an argument is “obviously wrong” if you straw man it.
Your parent comment didn’t say that a single person has to understand the whole system, just that you have to understand the part you’re responsible for (which should be obvious).
I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.
My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.
Software engineering as we knew it is not coming back, except maybe for very niche fields and your own crafting.
Many other engineering fields have experienced this change long ago, where the majority of the "craft" is done by algorithms. Think chip design, aerospace, automotive, structural engineering, material design.
Their engineering is now focused on higher level design (and even that, less in some cases), and verification.
Programmers are not a special species, immune from this trend. Heck, we are the ones who did it to the other fields, and so it is quite amusing that we're not crying when it is our turn.
If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.
AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.
The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.
I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
At work, everything is chaotic, the people who make the key decisions do not understand their consequences, and the AI allows this chaos to happen much faster. On top of that, meaningless restrictions, for example only the managers are allowed to use the AI to search for information on SharePoint, the developers are only allowed to use it inside of their IDEs.
Ironically, it would be possible to use the AI to do things much better in my company. For example, there is a key component that is full of bugs, it would be much better to throw it away and vibecode a replacement in one week. But that's not going to happen, because someone very important in the company management has approved the purchase of that component. So instead, the remaining parts of the system must be tweaked to accommodate for its bugs... these days with the help of AI. It does not help that AI writes code, if humans make spaghetti architecture.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.
It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
You would not want a surgeon who says that they’ve tinkered around with surgery. You would not want a pilot who says they’re tinkered around with piloting.
Synonyms are quite literally beginner; dilettante; novice; pretender; uninitiate.
For example from the original analogy, if you told an entrepreneur that because they didn’t use AI, they were not an entrepreneur, but instead “unskilled” or a “beginner”, that would be disparaging; pejorative.
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing... But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
I do chat with the web interfaces of LLMs quite a bit as my workflow. I’m always baffled by how rarely it arrives at the correct solution.
I pose a question with code snippets, it gives me some incorrect answer. I pose a better question, and it gives me another wrong answer. Wash rinse repeat several times; not until the LLM gets the right answer, but until I pose the question specific enough that I can answer it myself.
I do find this loop of question refinement quite beneficial, but man it makes me terrified of vibe coded applications. 9/10 times the LLM doesn’t even get in the ballpark of the problem, let alone the solution.
The real tragedy is the offer is false.
But the damage that LLMs have done to the social aspect of work is horrible. Beyond horrible.
I get that there’s cognitive debt. Some just seem to never even pay interest or get a basic understanding of the domain model.
My suspicion is that these people were always lazy programmers, but now they can take the laziness to a point where, after weeks of working on a project, they don’t get the basic vocabulary right.
I just want to say: #notallvibecoders
Never get sidelined by your tools again
Here for the 3am deploy
It's like Bible study, everyone studies the same Bible, but everyone wants to have their own highlights and notes.
Some might say to use comments, but my Monday morning chain-of-thought doesn't belong in a comment.
I want a way to do literate coding. I want to interleave writings, and drawings, and editable code snippets that point to actual code in the code base -- and I want to see when those code snippets are stale, or have been edited by other developers (or agents).
I want a way to build up some artifact of my understanding that I control, that exists primarily to aid my understanding, and isn't constantly shifting as a thousand LLMs pass through the actual codebase changing everything.
The code used to be the canvas of the programmer. Now programmers have no canvas. They need a canvas. They can't understand things without a canvas to hold their thoughts.
They have lost money for the last two quarters, customer satisfaction is at an all time low, staff morale is gone, defects are piled up, costs are escalating on tokens and cloud, nothing is getting done but everyone thinks it is.
Let it burn.
We need a total reset. The entire market is overblown, overhyped and sells things nobody needs. Layers and layers of stupid to get nothing done. It’s an extraction economy. I’ve seen people replace simple stuff like a spreadsheet with a cloud hosted vibe coded turd. What the fuck is wrong with people?!? Have we collectively forgotten simple and elegant solutions?
It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.
A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.
Suit up and brace yourself is all I can say. We should all be concerned in protecting our communities from the adjustment. Not in an doomerist way but you know prepare to weather a storm. I think it will be worse than 2008. But I also think that the next boom will be very very interesting and with a lot of great opportunities to advance humanity and technology.
The next turn of the spiral will always be higher and wider.
So there will always be value to be made and markets to serve.
There are many things which benefit from being digital, which aren't digitized enough. Usually this means third parties are making a lot of money by offering a platform until digitization happens.
If you sell any product or service to the public, these are generally the steps you go through to benefit from digitization:
1. No digital presence at all.
2. Digital presence through a third party which takes a 15%-25% cut of sales.
3. Digital presence through a SaaS which has a monthly fee.
4. Digital presence which you own yourself.
Step 3 and 4 are still very underserved markets, where customers could make massive savings or sales increase. And those who offer these solutions will profit.
My favourite artist is dead and I have CDs.
Do you also understand that most people fucking hate to use computers? The only reason normal people use computers so much and even have their entire careers in front of computers is that those machines can perform tasks extremely efficiently.
In French a computer is called "an organizer". In Swedish it's called a "data machine". And with the Internet, it's also a communicator.
If you run a business, would you like to compute everything in your head and organize all your things in filing cabinets and have all your data on papers everywhere?
1) the typical (non-Mac) PC architecture beige box isn't really ready for this; it's starting to change a bit, the new Nvidia laptop RTX chips might change it a little, and maybe the Ryzen AI/Strix Halo stuff will catch up, but I suspect the lack of unified VRAM in boring corporate machines is holding back routine corporate experimentation (since most corporate machines also have bare minimum GPUs)
2) frankly, the Apple Silicon architecture isn't truly ready for it either! Even with unified VRAM, memory bandwidth is limiting, and the processing power of the GPU holds back prompt processing for things like document analysis. So far the MoE models and the really small footprint dense models are lacking somewhat, though you can use them for some things (and the Mac is a much better pre-existing-machine playground for early experiments).
3) perhaps more importantly, the apparent progress of the cloud LLMs has persuaded corporate customers that what they are aiming for is increasing delegation rather than increasing developer capability (the former does not automatically lead to the latter)
The first two will be fixed.
Just think, if they can sell your a virtual worker that can compete with human employees in your industry/niche, they would be a few steps away from being your DIRECT competitor or at the very least selling those same workers to someone else.
Thing is that's the goal (owners/management), not an unwanted side effect (programmers perspective). You can't get rid of workers if you're still dependent on their thinking. This pain is seen as a necessary step towards the promised land of profitability without pesky salaries, demands for foosball tables and RSUs.
This will get pushed by the powers that be...code base quality & people's feelings be damned.
Brave new world...hold on.
If we're looking for a silver lining, AI is an equalizer and creates competition among the mediocre, driving salaries down. It's not all bad.
so.. What do you call a doctor who failed out of med school? A software dev?
It's a significantly harder career, but less automatable.
I believe I would end up enjoying life more while everything gets solved through agentic development.
If I compare this with my previous companies (publicly valued companies), I would definitely be on vacation while still delivering perfect PRs and features in a matter of hours, instead of the 2-3 week timelines it took me and my team in the past.
Whatever miracle maker you're talking about, if it exists, should be making you money so, it's either doing that, is a weird train hobby, or a delusion.
Genuinely: how? Share some insights. So far I have seen anything exceeding about 2k lines of text in the context diverge. Meaning, throwing more LLM at it rapidly baloons the size at the expense of internal coherence. Things become stale, hallucinated, duplicated and outright faked. Only thing that works is constant manual intervention and pruning of the generated slop.
Not only these things are unable to find "best solution", they are unable to find any solution. Instead (especially for Opus) they seem optimized to convince user that the task is accomplished.
My investigation skill can create one, two, or dozens of probes with benchmarks. Once you're confident in the solution, you can plan and author the investigation, then execute it phase by phase.
- Post https://www.minid.net/2026/7/14/how-to-automatise-with-ai
- GitHub repo with examples of skills and rules. https://github.com/meerita/monorepo-nextjs-golang-rust-pytho...
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
I'd call that a victory.
People writing software have been automating others away for a long time. The "I'll replace you with a short shell script" attitude. It's not surprising nor especially unfair we get the same treatment.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood. Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus. Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
I understand the sentiments, genuinely. I do miss the feelings of carefully crafting a great piece of code. There was a genuine sense of accomplishment there. I still get a sense of accomplishment from agentic development, but it's different. It feels more similar to when you've steered a team of people who are actually doing the work, and then the final product gets delivered. I never touched the actual work, but my input / steering / taste / direction / etc. was a big part of what was delivered. And now we have the solution that we wanted.
If you got into this field because you like to hand-write code, and that's what you view as your craft, then yeah, I think you probably are in a tough spot. There's always the opportunity to do that on your own time, just like I'm sure the vast majority of woodworkers today are doing it for fun, not as their profession.
But if you're in this field because you have a passion for building things that solve problems (you know, engineering), if that's what you view as your craft, I don't think there's any shortage of opportunities to practice your craft.
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
Most of times people would say the do solve them. Still I might or might not be right that quite often they do not in reality.
Regardless, in my case, I build a SaaS app that I sell to real non-technical small businesses in a tiny niche that helps them with a particular problem they face in their business. They don't care that it uses AI, they just need this problem solved at an affordable price so they can focus on other things. This solution that I sell would have been absolutely impossible to provide in an automated way pre-LLM, and I could never have built and grown this business on my own (in this time frame anyway, probably at all) without agentic development.
But what is code for? I don't know that I think there's any inherent value to code for its own sake. Just like I don't think a tool's value can be separated from what you do with it.
I'm not sure where the "profitable" part comes from. I know lots of people who have vibe coded little apps that solve a problem for them or their friends and family. There's no profit involved, but it solved a problem.
Can you give an example of a problem worth solving for which there is truly no demand? I don't understand that, because to me it seems like the demand is what makes a problem a problem. Otherwise it's just a state of being, and if there is no demand to change, whether yours or anyone else's, what makes it a "problem"?
But it doesn't have to be so brutally outcome-based as you're demanding, although you do get a ride on a steam train out of it too.
It's not entirely unprofitable, either, if that matters. Niche.
The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.
Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.
Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.
For guys like those you can't really make an argument that they don't care about the craft when they use power tools 90% of the time normally.
So are LLMs a short cut? sure. Does that mean people using them don't care about the craft? not necessarily.
I'd love to spend more time actually learning iOS development. It's just that I work in a different area for my regular job and when I get home I don't have the time (due to various responsibilities) to sit down and spend adequate time on iOS.
This is crazy. LLM usage has somehow convinced people that it's $999 for not just knowing where to place one nail, but for knowing where to place an almost infinite number of them. Disingenuous marketing by the big players does not help either.
This. In the past, when you could challenge a sloppy and rushed feature, done wrongly. You could steer people into better designs without adding much overhead. These days, if you try to challenge those no-reviews, ship-50k PRs daily, you instantly get labeled as AI-sceptic, someone who is afraid of change, afraid of loosing your job. I don't see a way out from this.
Imagine a world where they only employ 1 engineer instead of 5, and so the 4 unemployed engineers just build 4 competitors by Q1 next year.
So, I don't care. On the contrary: I can at least see a silver lining thanks to strong LLMs. They often can reduce the code to 20% without loosing anything obvious. Yes, it's error prone. But the untested and often not even linted code by my coworker is a maintenance hell and has a lot of subtle errors.
The main problem is that there isn't enough manpower to do proper reviews.
Which leaves us two options without LLMs: ignore the code and leave a lot of necessary work undone, or run brittle code, that never saw testing, linting and a second pair of eyes, in production and hope for the best.
At our place, I wouldn't mind if any commit would get at least a mandatory (surrogate) review by a decent LLM. Could not be worse than now.
It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
Some people are too quick to drink whatever kool-aid they’re served. That’s all I see in these tired excuses.
> It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
Better to swim against the tide than letting yourself get swept up in the current and drowning.
It no longer surprises me, but the profound lack of empathy shown by AI (or any other popular hype du jour) proponents is worrying. A large numbers of fellow humans are saying “this thing is negatively impacting my life” and the response is “lol, and you should be thankful”.
What part of "job has changed" is kool-aid, or an excuse?
> Better to swim against the tide than letting yourself get swept up in the current and drowning.
If you really think AI is something you can "defeat" by being stubborn then best of luck to you.
> It no longer surprises me, but the profound lack of empathy shown by AI (or any other popular hype du jour) proponents is worrying. A large numbers of fellow humans are saying “this thing is negatively impacting my life” and the response is “lol, and you should be thankful”.
Not sure how this relates to my comment even a little bit.
Surely it cant' be this bad, or a company would collapse?
This is similar except mindlessly churning short tickets with no time to plan or think and producing crap has been replaced my mindlessly herding bots and producing crap. Management doesn’t care and just wants to push tickets is a constant.
I’ve seen the term “code grinding” for these environments and I saw that phrase as far back as the 2000s.
This isn’t a new type of workplace. I’m willing to believe AI has made it even more dull.
We're watching in real time the conditions that created the Luddites.
We may never again have as many "software developers" as we did in early 2020s. That shift is sure to have severe economic, political, social, and cultural consequences.
I am especially interested in how the work in security, assurance, performance, and such hard problems will evolve in respect to the large amounts of LLM-generated code. I see a lot of opportunities there. Not in terms of how many people will be able to work on that but in terms of how much income those competent enough will command. Individuals and teams. There are some really interesting developments in spaces that have historically been shunned by the framework configuration crowd. It seems to me that the advocates of speed over quality in software development are about to be swallowed whole by the tide of code they unleashed.
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
It's horrible. It's over engineered in every way. It follows a completely different pattern than the other repos. It adds 10 CLI options that don't have any use (why does Claude add --threads to everything). It's impossible to follow the flow of the code. Of course, days after I inherited it, it broke so good luck to me fixing it I guess
You will not edit Assembly in this.
Claude will have to edit it and Claude will not whine.
I refuse to keep adding shit to the pile
Natural language is not a programming language and cannot be compiled
Bytecode is obviously not human readable - lets make Assembly. Assembly requires very specific skills - lets make a language that is more human readable. This new language is way more readable but requires very specific skills like understanding computer memory. Lets make a language that takes care of it. Lets make a language that is not compiled but interpreted. Lets make a language where you can just simply write 1 + 2 and computer would just give you an answer and you don't need to define anything.
Lets make the language that is simply a natural language and computer interprets it an writes the program you need itself.
We are comparing because any programming language is just a try to make programming easier.
I find that if you pay a lot of human-in-the-loop attention to the design phase, LLMs can produce perfectly decent stuff.
They’re also good at writing tests. Lock in the (non-broken) behavior of the old app with tests. Then use those tests to re-create the app, except with a talented engineer (you) guiding the design this time.
I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
I am looking for a noscript/basic HTML alternative front.
Can I just grab a copy of my company's vibe coded app and start selling it myself? What stops me? Not copyright law.
I suppose what really stops me is that power wins, and the company has more money and power than me, and so regardless of whatever the law says, my life will be fucked up good if I did copy their codebase.
Valid answer, I guess, though some might wish for a deeper connection to life than a mechanical, subservient existence.
That’s what I do with my $300k when I get off work