40 years of writing code. I didn't see the end coming | Hacker News Reader

40 years of writing code. I didn't see the end coming

20 pointstemilson18 comments

So I started programming when 'the cloud' was something about the weather and code was shipped on floppy disks. For over 4 decades I've loved writing every line of code.

But now, AI writes most of the code. The advantages of course are many, not the least of which is that I'm able to build and maintain multiple products at once.

But instead of coding, I've turned into a full time reviewer instead. Spending the day reading, questioning and correcting AI is tiring in it's own specific way.

Worst of all, I no longer enjoy the satisfaction of solving hard problems on my own anymore.

For those of you in the same boat, what's your feeling? Has AI given you back your time? Or has it taken something away that you loved?

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Professionally speaking, at least for me, it's not worth it anymore.

But personally? I won't stop using technology and I do my best to avoid AI as much as possible.

I like exercising my mind, to develop new ways of thinking and above all, cultivate critical thinking!

If there's no critical thinking, there's no creativity, no arts, no nothing!

I'm with you on that ... critical thinking ... exercising our minds ... those are the things that could easily fly out the window if not careful. Great points.

Using AI’s naivety can lead to surprisingly creative solutions as well. A bit like going down the rabbit hole with an autistic co-founder.

For me, so far AI has been a net positive. It gave me back control of my small company in a way that I really needed to continue. I am going to continue to implement AI across our company to make things more efficient but with the right guardrails. As a previous programmer who was average at best, AI has given me wings. I don't care what others think but it is helping me take my company forward.

what does your company do?

I am of your vintage and it occurs to me that programming may return as a hobby, which is how I started. Maybe it will fill the gap in the declining number of ham radio hobbyists, of which I am also one.

Get over it. There is a lot AI cannot do. If you struggle with originality then perhaps your use to the world is over, otherwise continue investigating problems of interest and do things nobody else can.

In my case my passion is high performance in the JavaScript language space. I wrote my own WebSocket library and perf tool. A defect in the perf tool indicated that I could send 3.25m messages in 0.002 seconds if I separated each test of an experiment into a separate call stack. That number was confirmed as valid by Claud. Two weeks later I confirmed it was a defect and after fixing it my actual performance was only 100,000 messages per second. But, now I know the cause of the performance limitations impacting WebSockets. I modified how I manage multiple pending messages and my performance went up to 800,000 messages per second. I then discovered another similar performance hack and my performance went up to 6m messages per second on a single socket, or 5m round trip. So now I have something that is 1.5 orders of magnitude faster than everybody else or 4.5 orders of magnitude faster than http. AI doesn’t have that, I have it. What do you have? There is a lot AI cannot do.

I think it has move the balance between two things that I love on top of increasing something I don't love that much.

I love(d) to figure out hard code and write it, but I also loved the creative process of searching the solution space and deciding (and optimizing) what to build.

I do not in general like to review code that much, which, granted, has grown.

But I feel that for me, all the former (figure out hard code and write it) has mostly split into the other two (in lack of better word) "solution design" and reviewing.

And also I feel that the endless supply of crappy yolo code for personal project is thrilling. Professionally I watch some code like a hawk and some is yolo, based on a concrete per "job" risk assessment.

And for context, I have administered unixy systems and written software for pay since 1999.

Well said. I have to agree with you ... I do love the creative process as well, and AI has made that much more exciting in many ways, giving ideas/mocks/etc.. that I probably never would have come up with.

Whether it was our career aspiration or not, we’ve turned into middle managers now

Yup. And it wasn't my aspiration. Lol.

Look back at how interpreted languages sped the development cycle, and empowered home users to write working stuff in Basic and Hypercard. Professional work made a leap out of these, but sysadmin people relied on scripting languages to get things done, often in perl and friends.

While the new tools offer a "step up" as noted, turning developers into reviewers, and possibly empowering home users, I see some problems.

AI tends to reinvent the wheel at every turn, and whether I am a professional developer wanting reliable and thoroughly tested routines as building blocks, or the home user not wanting the fridge to launch a DDOS attack on government sites, this seems counter to good practice, and the verbosity makes review difficult, so you have to get your tools to review your tools.

And there's no learning. Our great skill is in confronting the unknown, and ma lose this when everything is a button-push (or prompt) away.

I chug away at piano, rather than letting the MIDI play stuff.

Started as engineer, converted to manager, and now I'm back to engineer. AI brought me some joy back of "engineering". I feel it is way more easier now to scale yourself, essentially everyone acts a manager now.

I think this is just a transient phase and soon enough we'll miss this too.

I made a similar post a little bit ago. I've already held the funeral.

Use AI slop at work, handcraft software as a hobby. Funny how capitalism optimizes for crap.

Yeah that's kind of where I am too. I'm trying to take solace in the fact that I have more time to build weird gadgets with no commercial value.

so why did you work at a company as a employee or contractor? never understood these kinds of takes..

you should be thankful someone figured out how to capitalize your labor because you certainly were unable to do it on your own.

surely, you can show us how it is done?

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