Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

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I freelance too and I have been struggling personally for a while for other reasons but I absolutely recognise this. I have only about eighty lines of code in production that I fully did not write (thanks Muse Glimmer).

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 don’t freelance anymore, so I can’t give any freelancing advice. Although freelancing has always been fraught with offshoring, price arbitraging, and generally lower quality (not saying all freelancing, just that it was an issue when I was freelancing a decade ago).

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.

> My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself.

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.

> 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.

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.

Back in the day, folks without software skills were able to build certain things themselves; from standalone Microsoft Access databases with simple Visual Basic 6 frontends, to finance maintaining huge spreadsheets as pseudo databases, etc.

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 understand this blast radius, firecrackers and explosions talk. No offense intended, but this seems to assume that those not in software engineering are like kids that should only be allowed to play with new toys under adult supervision.

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.

This isn't the ME's domain so they aren't aware of the guardrails to enforce.

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.

> This isn't the ME's domain so they aren't aware of the guardrails to enforce.

"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.

> nowadays I say no

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.

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