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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

Hello all, I wrote this article to help students considering CS as a major.

My own son has just started university studying CS, so I have skin in this game.

I continue to believe in what I've said in this article despite being startled (like most people) by the advances in AI recently.

One thing that I have noticed since writing this article is that the most effective vibe coders are already excellent developers, which I think is in keeping with the themes I discuss here. While I do expect the amount of hand-written code to decline, I think that knowing how code (and technical systems) work is going to continue to be valuable and perhaps even more valuable. I have no crystal ball, but that's what I'm seeing right now.

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It’s good but I kinda disagree with them stuck issue. Getting stuck is frustrating and having an easy way to get unstuck seems good.

However, the skill of having to try many different things and have patience and deal with an unproductive day and sleep in stuff, being able to pull yourself out of a hole, bootstrap deeper understanding in times when you feel helpless…it’s character building and incredibly valuable.

I feel like AI will allow people to have less resolve and determination, like looking at the crossword answers.

Yes, but they're still going to encounter those moments, just at different points.

The same way we never stopped encountering "Wait, what the hell?" moments when we had the internet and could search for problems instead of digging through textbooks or --help, they'll just run into those blocking moments at a higher level of abstraction, then have to backtrace the problem down to the level they need to understand to resolve the issue. Curious people continue to be rewarded with a higher ceiling, but the floor to get something functional is brought down.

The alternative is that AI just deletes software engineering as a discipline and everything gets vibecoded, which still seems unlikely even if the improvements continue to accelerate.

So even if the improvements continue to accelerate, even when you get to a point when an agent not just codes but also designs, optimizes for complexity and maintainability, you don't think software engineering as a human discipline gets deleted?

I am in a similar position. My son is a talented high school programmer considering colleges. He has expressed Anti AI sentiment to me. This article gives us a useful lens and I appreciated it a lot.

Yeah. I have worked with people who have a very low threshold for struggling and reach out the moment something isn't obvious. They never learn anything. They can go for years and years never growing or improving in any way.

The problem is AI lowers all barriers to reaching out. Previously you'd have to ask a real person, which might be embarrassing. I do wonder if I would have struggled as much if I didn't have to. I look at what's happened to people's bodies when they no longer have to do physical labour and I wonder if the same thing will happen to their minds.

The struggle is necessary to grow, sure. But we're free to choose and upgrade our struggles. After calculators and then computers, struggle in math levelled up.

> I think that knowing how code (and technical systems) work is going to continue to be valuable and perhaps even more valuable.

I think the art of refactoring will be more valuable than ever.

I'm having an LLM free day today, going through a lot of generated code, de-duplicating and making the abstractions more usable. It's quite enjoyable and improves my understanding of the code significantly.

Man, I am so torn and this article doesn't help. But in a good way?

I'm a middle age guy who has no degree and taught myself to program during the pandemic. By now Ive created websites, built a game(well not finished but most of the mechanics), finished a ml pipeline project, and of course started so many side projects that may never get finished as is expected. But in this market I can't get hired because, well only on part, no degree.

I need to get out of my current career for mental health reasons and have decided to go back to school to get a degree and have chosen my secondary choice for a degree instead of going CS. Now I read this article and feel torn. I want to get to work coding and create something great, work with driven people and solve problems, but I also need income and a path forward so I've chosen another degree to pursue.

I'm torn because either outcome that occurs is bitter sweet for me. Either the market picks up and so many talented, bright minded, and younger engineers will get hired and go on to create amazing things, or the market will stay stale and so many will get jobs not doing what they love.

This is kind of a ramble at this point. I'm summation I love to code so I'll code, and hope that this article it correct and others can get hired quickly and the market turns.

Thank you for the article but what about students who truly have no connections? It seems like a bleak time for us, none in my family work in even a corporation that would need tech people and my friends are in similar boat.

Luckily I was able to complete an internship lately (implemented EEVDF scheduler for Redox OS) but even then, the amount of Rust Junior jobs are so rare that it is proving to not be of much help.

"friends" is not limited to people that you grew up with, or studied with, or people that your parents knew. They can also be contacts that you made by reaching out, in social circles or through shared interests or tecnhical workshops, etc.

I think the first thing to do is to recognize the need for forming connections and start working on the skills that foster those. Technical people tend to not be great at softer people skills & communication, so that's something you can start working on. I advise against just starting to reach out to people, that isn't effective usually, but to start working on the skills necessary and start looking for the situations you have access to that do foster connections.

Also, when you are on the other side, recognize that offering connections to unconnected people is a wonderful act of charity.

Thanks for these insights. They made me think of AI as what a mechanic is for your car. He knows more and is more capable than you, and he can save you a lot of time vs if you had to do the dirty work yourself.

However, the more you know yourself about car maintenance, the more you will trust his diagnosis, solutions and the fairness of the money he asks for it. More generally, the more you will trust him to act in your interest instead of only his (or someone else's).

The edge in the AI future will be ownership.

Did you tell him that one day, he can be the CEO of HTMX?

In all seriousness though, thanks for writing this, I found it helpful.

Out of school for awhile, but covering low-level topics, down to logic gates, assembly, and doing floating point math manually, is not something I _use_ every day, but was crucial both when programming in higher level languages, and now using AI tools to write code in higher level languages.

It feels like there will be a beefy "middle" where people can probably drop some of that context, and get a lot of productive things done with AI. But there will still be a need for people more deeply knowledgeable and educated. It's probably just not in the proportions we have today.

_Kind of_ like the boom of coding bootcamps. A lot of people got good work done going through a coding bootcamp, but didn't get the deep background that a CS major would.

Coding bootcamps didn't mean we don't need CS education, and neither will AI, I expect. But the numbers and jobs are definitely going to change.

Great point about the value of knowing the deep stuff.

Thank you for writing this article.

  1. my ignorance is massive so don't bet on my predictions. There's so much FUD. This is like the industrial revolution but on steroids. 
  2. I see the moat around software decreasing quickly. Therefore, I'm going to project that there will be fewer coders in software only companies (such as Adobe, SAS, or Intuit)
  3. It will be easier to support software so I see the need for more technical entrepreneurs. Software is going to be an amenity with services, hardware, or support. The code itself isn't going to be valuable like its current form.
  4. I would project there will be more programmers in the future, but not pure programmers. More like the 1970s programmers who had other professions but would create their own programs.

I'm not sure this is more significant than the industrial revolution, but it is certainly faster. I am withholding judgement until we start to see real world changes beyond symbol manipulation.

I agree there is little moat around code qua code now. I'm not sure that means there will be fewer coders, because the people in the best position to take advantage of this new technology are... coders.

I again agree that code qua code is becoming less valuable, but I think that ironically _understanding_ code (and systems) is going up in value. Complexity still grows super-linearly and so judicious technical decisions will need to be made.

I strongly agree with your last point and I am advocating for a "+CS" track here at Montana State, where non-CS majors can learn enough practical CS to be productive and then excel in their own major. I'm speculating a 3-4 class track with AI/vibe coding as part of it.

Dang, it's THE Carson Gosu? :D

Thank you for this article (and the agents.md)! It's not easy to give students a good answer to such questions.

> AI is a great TA

TA meaning...

Teaching Assistant. Fairly common jargon in academia, but yeah, the GP should have macroexpanded that.

Teaching Assistant

Thanks for your thoughts! Can you explain why in your model being able to read code will stay any more important for tomorrow's coders than it is for today's managers? Is it resting on the assumption that tomorrows models will be worse at that than tomorrows coders?

As someone who just started university studying CS as well, I really appreciate you writing this blog. I recently went into a bit of a p(doom) spiral worrying about CS, uni and maybe sort of an existential crisis and I had an discussion on HN with a more experienced person about it which went into similar topics[0]

Also, I wish for your son to have a good university experience and hope he makes great friendships and connections which help him throughout his life and I wish the best for his future and to enjoy the present as it happens :-D

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981023

My daughter likes coding and has a strong knack for it, but when she was applying to college, I advised her to lean towards EE. She can still study CS fundamentals and pursue it as a career or even in grad school, but engineering is hopefully a bit of a hedge where she can keep options open.

What would grug think about your article?

I think you’re underestimating how bad the job market is right now, everything else I kind of agree with. You should spend a few months applying to jobs (even if you don’t need one), just to see how dire it is out there. I’ve been working almost 20 years and the last 6-7 have been brutal job market but the last year has been extra-brutal. Another thing you may be discounting: your network connections don't go very far if most of them have retired or left the industry.

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