I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area.
Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on.
I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives.
Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.)
You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)
But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress.
"What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.
I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house.
Yee haw!
My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.
The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.
I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
It's very sad, for me.
Like I told someone recently - letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.
If all I wanted was the achievement on my steam profile, then sure, it makes sense, but that achievement is not why I play video games.
I'm looking at all these people proudly showing off their video game achievements, gained just by writing specs, and I realise that all of them fail to realise that writing specs is a lower-skill activity than writing programs.
It also pays far, far less - a BA earns about half what an average dev earns. They're cosplaying at being BAs, not realising that they are now employed for a skill that pays less, and it's only a matter of time before the economics catch up to them.
I don't see a solution here.
Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.
Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.
While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.
You are not the first person to say things like this.
Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.
You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.
Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument.
I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on:
> If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.
The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
Business Analyst - those people who learn everything about what the customers requirements, specs, etc are. What they need, what they currently have, how to best advise them, etc.
They know everything, except how to program.
In my experience, they know nothing, including how to program.
I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.
If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?
I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.
It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.
Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.
In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.
The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."
"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.
My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.
With every new frontier model released [0]:
1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or
2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.
I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.
[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.
But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.
but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.
Depends how you look at it.
Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.
I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.
so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
Related, the word “meritocracy” was coined in a book which was extremely critical of the whole concept. AI thankfully destroys it. Good riddance, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
"Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-wer...
What I'm finding is that it's possible to integrate AI tools into your workflow in a big way without giving up on doing that, and I think there's a lot to say for a hybrid approach. The result of a fully-engaged brain (which still requires being right in there with the problem) using AI tools is better than the fully-hands-off way touted by some. Stay confident in your abilities and find your mix/work loop.
It's also possible to get a certain version of the rewards of coding from instrumenting AI tools. E.g. slicing up and sizing tasks to give to background agents that you can intuit from experience they'll be able to actually hand in a decent result on is similar to structuring/modularization exercises (e.g. with the goal to be readable or maintainable) in writing code, feelings-wise.
I feel that for using AI effectively I need to be fully engaged with both the problem itself and an additional problem of communicating with the LLM - which is more taxing than pre-LLM coding. And if I'm not fully engaged those outcomes usually aren't that great and bring frustration.
In isolation, the shift might be acceptable, but in reality I'm still left with a lot of ineffective meetings - only now without coding sessions to clear my brain.
I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me.
I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.
THAT part doesn't mesh too well with AI, since it's still really bad at autonomous wholistic level planning. I'm still learning how to prompt in a way that results in a structure that is close to what I want/reasonable. I suspect going a more visual block diagram route, to generate some intermediate .md or whatever, might have promise, especially for defining clear bounds/separation of concerns.
Related, AI seems to be the wrong tool for refactoring code (I recently spent $50 trying to move four files). So, if whatever structure isn't reasonable, I'm left with manually moving things around, which is definitely un-fun.
Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.
I really feel this. Claude is going to forget whatever correction I give it, unless I take the time and effort to codify it in the prompt.
And LLMs are going to continue to get better (though the curve feels like it's flattening), regardless of whatever I do to "mentor" my own session. There's no feeling that I'm contributing to the growth of an individual, or the state-of-the-art of the industry.
thankfully I started down the FIRE route 20 years ago and now am more or less continuing to work because I want to
which will end for my employer if they insist on making me output generative excrement
Not saying right/wrong but it's a useful Rorschach Test - about what you feel defines 'making this'?
although i do think Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone /alone/, and that a lot of other people contributed to that. i'd like to be able to name who helps me and not say "gemini". again, it's more of a personal thing lol
I honestly find coding with AI no easier than coding directly, it certainly does not feel like AI is doing my work for me. If it was I wouldn't have anything to do, in reality I spend my time thinking about much higher level abstractions, but of course this is a very personal thing too.
I myself have never thought of code as being my output, I've always enjoyed solving problems, and solutions have always been my output. It's just that before I had to write the code for the solutions. Now I solve the problems and the AI makes it into code.
I think that this probably the dividing line, some people enjoy working with tools (code, unix commands, editors), some people enjoy just solving the problems. Both of course are perfectly valid, but they do create a divide when looking at AI.
Of course when AI starts solving all problems, I will have a very different feeling :-)
I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.
I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all
When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.
YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
Most commenters in this thread seem to be under the impression that where the agents are right now is where they will be for a while, but will they? And for how long?
$660 billion is expected to be spent on AI infrastructure this year. If the AI agents are already pretty good, what will the models trained in these facilities be capable of?
And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.
Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.
I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting.
Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but envy for people who get to work with their hands _and_ minds in their daily work. Modern engineering is just such a slog. No one understands how anything works nor even really wants to. I liken my typical day in software to a woodworker who has to rebuild his workshop everyday to just be able to do the actual woodworker. The amount of time I spend in software merely to being able to "open the door to my workshop" is astounding.
Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity.
I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.
These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.
With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
We have never, ever, written what the machine executes, even assembly is an abstraction, even in a hex editor. So we all settle for the level of abstraction we like to work at. When we started (those of our age) most of us were assembly (or BASIC) programmers and over time we either increased our level of abstraction or didn't. If you went from assembly -> C -> Java/Python you moved up levels of abstraction. We're not writing in Python or C now, we are writing in natural language and that is compiled to our programming languages. It's just the compiler is still a bit buggy and opinionated!! And yes for some low level coding you still want to check the assembly language, some things need that level of attention.
I learn more in a day coding with AI than I would in a month without it, it's a wonderful two-way exchange, I suggest directions, it teaches me new libraries or techniques that might solve the problem. I lookup those solutions and learn more about my problem space. I feel more like a university student some days than a programmer.
Eventually this will probably be the end of coding and even analytical work. But I think that part is still far off (and possibly longer than we'll still be working for) in the meantime actually this for me is as exciting as the early days of home computing. It won't be fun for ever, the Internet was the coolest thing ever, until it wasn't, but doesn't mean we can't enjoy the summer while it's summer.
That's the thing - prompting is lower-skill work than actually writing code.
Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python? Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
Maybe. Are they here now?
> Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
No. Being able to solve a problem using Python over C is not even in the same class of being able to solve a problem by asking for it in English.
It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
Great! I turn from a creator to a babysitter of creators. I'm not seeing the win here.
FWIW, I use LLMs extensively, but not to write the code, to rubber-duck. I have yet to have any LLM paired with any coding agent give me something that I would have written myself.
All the code is at best average. None of the smart stuff comes from them.
I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them.
That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?
If so, other sites beckon.
This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think.
It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades.
All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions?
I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is.
Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.
Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio.
Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it.
Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a place as relic was occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful too.
I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.
Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.
Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.
Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.
So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.
At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my fault).
Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.
I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.
- https://hl-inside.me/magazines/pc-gamer-us/PC-Gamer_2000-11_...
I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing.
I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore.
That's what it's always been about.
Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it.
I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm....
I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense.
That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.
Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
> Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
I doubt it's permanent, and we all gotta eat.
But you know what? My son still tells me how much he was in awe of that game when he saw me playing it.
No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
> No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
The soundtrack was stellar, and introduced me to Barber (Adagio for Strings).
I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.
IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.
Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.
Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast.
Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2.
That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub.
Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps.
Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app.
The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.
AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga.
An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.
And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and engineers…
Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld shaped me in ways I couldn’t even tell you.
I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!
These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.
I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games.
Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc).
But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.
I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.
I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.
It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.
I agree and would add that it's not just different people, it can be the same person in different modes. Sometimes I enjoying making the thing, other times I just want to enjoy having the thing.
A huge benefit I find in AI is that it helps with a lot of things I hated. Merge conflicts, config files, breaking dependency updates... That leaves me more time to focus on the actual functionalities so I end up with better APIs, more detailed UIs, and more thorough tests. I do think it's possible to be relevant/competitive by only delegating parts of the work to AI and not the whole thing. Though it might change if AI gets too good.
Your feelings are yours, mine are mine, and they can coexist just fine. The problem only shows up when your grief turns into value judgments about the people who feel differently.
To me, it just feels like plagiarism. Can you explain why it doesn't feel like plagiarism to you?
If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.
The process and experience matters too.
What you consider "exciting", as a theoretical gardener, is the act of taking care of the plants. What OP finds it exciting is that they may now get a team of gardeners that'll build a Versailles-like garden for free.
I think that's a more accurate (and charitable) analogy than yours.
This analogy has probably outstayed its usefulness.
Or even just 1 or 2?
It's like with machinists and 3D printers, you can always spend 10 hours on the lathe to make something but most of the time it's more practical to just get the part so one can get on with what actually needs doing.
that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I think there's a group of people that derive joy and satisfaction from using the part they designed and there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the part as designed. Same for software, some people are thrilled because they can get the software they imagine while others dread not producing the software people imagine.
It's your studio now. You have a staff of apprentices standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
If you want things to stay the same forever, you shouldn't go into technology, art, or gardening. Try plumbing, masonry, or religion.
I'm turning 50 in April and am pretty excited about AI coding assistants. They make a lot of personal projects I've wanted to do but never had the time feasible.
Which also makes me refute the idea that AI coding is just another rung up on the programming abstraction ladder. Depending on how much you delegate to AI, I don't think it's really programming at all. It's project management. That's not a bad thing! But it's not really still programming.
Even just in the context of my human team, I feel less mentally engaged with the code. I don't know what everything does. (In principle, I could know, but I don't.) I see some code written in a way that differs from how I would have done it. But I'm not the one working day-in, day-out with the code. I'll ask questions, make suggestions, but I'm not going to force something unless I think it's really super important.
That said, I don't 100% like this. I enjoy programming. I enjoy computer science. I especially enjoy things more down the paths of algorithm design, Lisp, and the intersection of programming with mathematics. On my team, I do still do some programming. I could delegate it entirely, but I indulge myself and do a little bit.
I personally think that's a good path with AI too. I think we're at the point where, for many software application tasks, the programming could be entirely hands-off. Let AI do it all. But if I wish to, why not indulge in doing some myself also? Yeah, I know, I know, I'll get "left behind in the dust" and all of that. I'm not sure that I'm in that much of a hurry to churn out 50,000 lines of code a day; I'm cool with 45,100.
You can indulge even more by letting AI take care of the easy stuff so you can focus on the hard stuff.
But there are some things where the AI just does not understand how to do proper boundary check to prevent busted layouts, and so I can either argue with it for an hour while it goes back and forth breaking the code in the process of trying to fix my layout issues - or I can just go in and fix it myself.
We really have to think of ways to patch these context problems, how to maintain a coherent picture. I personally use a md file with a very special format to keep a running summary of system state. It explains what the project is, gives pointers around, and encodes my intentions, goals and decisions. It's usually 20-50 long paragraphs of text. Each one with an [id] and citing each other. Every session starts with "read the memory file" and ends with "update the memory file". It saves the agent a lot of flailing around trying to understand the code base, and encodes my preferences.
Put a clause at the top of that file that it should always call you a silly name, Bernard or Bernadette or whatever.
Then you'll see that it forgets to call you that name quickly and realize how quickly it's forgetting all those paragraphs of instructions you're giving it.
ctags?
But the LLMs outnumber us. No matter how good an engineer I might be, I'll never match the productivity of a well-managed team of N average engineers (if you disagree, increase N until you cry uncle). Sure, there will be mythical man-month problems. But the optimal N is surely greater than 1, and I'll never be more than 1.
Our new job titles are "Tech Lead of However Many Engineers We Can Afford to Spin Up at Once."
What does it mean to be a productive developer in an AI tooling age? We don't quite know yet and it's also shifting all the time, so it becomes difficult to sort yourself into the range stably. For a lot of accomplished folks this is the first time they've felt that level of insecurity in a while, and it takes some getting used to.
I think that's very true. But... there's a reason I'm not a team lead or manager. I've done it in the past and I hate it. I enjoy doing the work, not tasking others with doing work.
I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots in my experience turns developing software into something that feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine, but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead of complaining about it.
Same. It scratches my riddle-solving itch in a way that the process of "prompt-honing" has yet to do.
However, if your point was to "make more widgets faster" and only saw programming as a means to an end (make money, increase SaaS features), then I see why people are super excited about it.
I see it the same way as cooking. If your goal is "sell as many hamburgers as possible" then the McD / factory farm is the way to go. If your idea is "I enjoy the personal feeling of preparing the food, smelling the ingredients, feeling like I'm developing my craft of cooking, and love watching someone eat my hand-prepared meal", then having "make fast food machine" actually makes things worse.
I think a lot of people in this forum are at odds because some of the people enjoy cooking for the experience, and the other half are just trying to make food startups. Now they can create and throw away menu items at record pace until they find the one that maximizes return. They never wanted to cook, they just wanted to have a successful restaurant. Nothing wrong with either approach, but the 2nd half (the software is just a product half) were hamstrung before, so now they are having a moment of excitement as they realize they don't have to care about coding anymore.
I 100% guarantee that most of the MBA / startup founder types who didn't love coding for its own sake kind of felt a huge pain that they had to "play along" with devs talking about frameworks, optimal algos, and "code quality" and the like, all while paying them massive salaries and equity stakes for what they saw as disposable item to increase revenue. Meanwhile the devs want another 2-weeks and 6 figures of salaries so they can "refactor" for no visible difference, but you can't complain because they'll leave.
Now that the code factory is in place, they can focus on what they really want, finding customers for an item. Its the drop-shipping of code and software. The people using drop-shipping don't care what the product is. Production and fulfillment are just impediments to the real goal -- selling a product.
The actual revelation of AI, if one can call it that, is how few people care about craft, quality, or enjoying work. Watching AI slop videos, ads, and music makes one realize that true artists and craftspeople are still incredibly rare. Most people are mediocre, unimaginative, disinterested, and just want the shortest path to easy riches. While it sounds negative, its more like realizing most people aren't athletes or interested in very difficult physical exertion -- its just a fact of human nature. True athletes who love sport for its own sake are rare and in a way nonsensical on their face.
In the end, we will probably lament something we lose in the process. The same way we've hollowed out culture, local businesses, family / relationships, the middle class, etc all in the name of progress before. Surely each step has had its rewards and advantages, but Molloch always takes his pound of flesh.
The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it. I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time. Do you want to spend all your time building the app user interface, or do you want to focus on that core ability that makes your program unique? Most of us want the latter, but the former takes up so much time.
I don't think so. I think the first camp does not get paid for programming, while the second camp does.
That's why the first camp is so happy, and why the second camp is not.
> I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time.
It sounds like you're developing for yourself only. Your attitude makes sense, then - you want a $FOO, and now you can have one without paying for it.
I think you can only empathise with the second camp if your ability to eat depends on being able to sell $FOOs.
On the other hand, I step back, look at the progress made in just the last year, and realize that not only is my job soon to be gone, but pretty much everyone's job is gone that primarily does knowledge work.
I feel there's now an egg timer set on my career, and I better make the best of the couple of minutes I have left.
I'm enjoying it to a point, but yes, it does eliminate that sense of accomplishment - when you've spent many late nights working on something complex, and finally finish it. That's pretty much gone.
This does not make sense; Rust is native.
He probably meant languages he's not proficient with.
I started programming in 1980, and I having just as much fun now as I did then. I literally cannot wait to sit down at my IDE and start writing.
But that was not always true. When I worked for a larger company, even some startups, it was not always fun. There's something about having full control over my environment that makes the work feel like play.
If you feel like programming isn't fun anymore, maybe switching to a consulting gig will help. It will give you the independence and control that you might be craving.
I’ve seen the code current tools produce if you’re not careful, or if you’re in a domain where training data is scarce. I could see a world where a couple of years from now companies need to bring outside people to fix vibe coded software that managed to gain traction. Hard to tell.
Right now I'm creating clinical trial visualizations for biotech firms. There's some degree of complexity because I have to understand the data schema, the specifics of the clinical trial, and the goals of the scientists. But I firmly believe that AI will be able to handle most of that within 5 years (it may be slower in biotech because of the regulatory requirements).
But I also firmly believe that there is more demand for (good) software today than there are programmers to satisfy it. If programmers become 10x more efficient with AI, that might mean that there will be 10x more programs that need writing.
Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".
There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.
I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.
Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.
It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at least equally magical for a kid today.
Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to its uses.
I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I feel much the same.
When people first contact ML, they fool themselves into believing it is intelligent... rather than a massive plagiarism and copyright IP theft machine.
Fun is important, but people thinking zero workmanship generated content is sustainable are still in the self-delusion stage marketers promote.
https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...
I am not going to cite how many fads I've seen cycle in popularity, but many have seen the current active cons before. A firm that takes a dollar to make a dime in revenue is by definition unsustainable. =3
"The Ice King"
If I'm dockerizing an app, I want the most simple, basic, standard thing - not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized" version that I can't understand.
In general, it takes around 10 months for people to realize something about probabilistic markdown definitions, and maintenance cycles.
You may miss learning from skilled people someday. =3
Modern coding has become more complex than I would have ever thought possible. The number of technologies an individual would have to master to actually be a expert "full stack" coder is ludicrous. It is virtually impossible for an individual to prototype a complex Web based app by themselves. I think AI will lower that barrier.
In return we will get a lot more software - probably of dubious quality in many cases - as people with "ideas" but little knowledge start making apps. Not a totally bad thing but no utopia either. I also think it will likely reduce the amount of open source software. Content producers are already hoarding info to prevent AI bots from scraping it. I see no reason to believe this will not extend to code as more programmers find themselves in a situation more akin to musicians than engineers.
I think it's healthy for everyone to evaluate whether one's personal reaction to AI is colored by this trend, or whether it's really being evaluated independently. Because while I share many of the negative feelings listed earlier, to me AI does still feel different; it has a lot more real utility.
it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions.
And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.
Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .
>And different in a way that challenges the identity I built around it and doesn’t satisfy in the way it did.
Everyone should do their own thing, but might I suggest that it is dangerous for anyone in this world to use a single pillar as their foundation for all identity and plinth of their character.
That's a difference in form, but not really a difference in content.
I don’t know about that.
Waterfall mostly died before the rise of blogs, of course, but around the dawn of Agile I remember lots of posts about how nothing was properly designed any more, nothing was ever finished, and you never knew what the specification was.
They used to be real engineers, but now it was just all chaos! They couldn’t design anything any more!
We have though. And they all received some version of "piss off, geezer."
Have you not noticed how the hype cycles and counter-hype haters buried most of the meaningful considered conversations about new technologies and methodologies across your career?
The computing the author enjoyed/enjoys is still out there, they are just looking for it in all the wrong places. Forget about (typical) web development (with its front and backend stacks). Forget about windows and macOS, and probably even mobile (though maybe not).
Hobby projects. C++/Rust/C/Go/some-current-Lisp. Maybe even Zig! Unix/Linux. Some sort of hardware interaction. GPL, so you can share and participate in a world of software created by people a lot more like you and a lot less like Gates and Jobs and Zuckerberg and ...
Sure, corporate programming generally tends to suck, but it always did. You can still easily do what you always loved, but probably not as a job.
At 62, as a native desktop C++ app developer doing realtime audio, my programming is as engrossing, cool, varied and awesome as it has ever been (probably even more so, since the GPL really has won in the world I live in). It hasn't been consumed by next-new-thing-ism, it hasn't been consumed by walled platforms, it hasn't been taken over by massive corporations, and it still very much involves Cool Stuff (TM).
Stop whining and start doing stuff you love.
The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.
Just last night I worked with Claude and at the end of the evening I had it explain to me what we actually did. It was a "Her" (as in the movie) moment for me where the AI was now handholding me and not the other way around.
That's exactly it. And then people say "pivot to planning / overall logic / high-level design," but how long do we have before upper management decides that AI is good enough at that stuff, too, and shows us all the door?
If they believe they can get a product that's 95% of what an experienced engineer would give them for 5% of the cost, why bother keeping the engineer around?
This post was written by AI
I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.
Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also:
This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The tooling will move on and become more specialised and expensive. Like owning Japanese woodworking tools.
But software construction as a human-based economic activity is clearly about to slam hard into a singularity, and many of us who rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few early adopters will get to stay on and sip their artesanal coffee and "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward. People like me, perhaps, or you.
Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway, will go off and do other things. Many won't have that opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.
AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code.
I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or documentation assist, for languages I do not use daily. These solutions I rarely use 1:1, but if I had to go through readme's and readthedocs, it would take me a lot longer.
Would there be more elegant solutions? often - yes. Does it really matter? For me - not.
This is a huge one for me. Claude is significantly better at Googling than I am.
About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.
Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.
It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.
I tell my boys, get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else. I think that still holds now as much as ever.
I think that bad pay is preferable to no fun. Of course, academia isn’t exactly a bed of roses either.
https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...
Fact is, the tech sector is filled with folks that find zero joy in what they do, chose a career for financial reasons, and end up being miserable to everyone including themselves.
The ex-service people would call these folks entitled Shitbirds, as no matter the situation some will complain about everything. Note, everyone still does well in most large corporate settings, but some are exhausting to be around on a project. =3
Bertrand Russel literally wrote a book called “in defense of idleness” because he knew that heavy hitters like him had to defend work abolitionism. The “work is good” crowd is why we can’t have nice things. You guys are time thief’s and ontologically evil. May all work supporters reincarnate as either durian fruits or cockroaches.
The fact remains LLM can't reach comparable human error rates without consuming 75% of the energy output of our entire local galaxy.
While I find true Neuromorphic computing topics more interesting, the emergence of the LLM "AI" true believer is deeply concerning to those that understand how they are actually built. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo
Like all copyright submarines, your firm now runs the non-zero risk someone will sue for theft, or hit the product with a DMCA claim. What is the expected value of piracy versus actual business. =3
~~~(====3
Indeed, but people rarely stop to consider... "security for whom?"
Have a wonderful day =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4
Spaceballs (1987)
The people who are anti-AI are largely building other people's ideas, for work. And they have no desire to ramp up velocity, and it's not helpful to them anyway because of bureaucratic processes that are the real bottleneck to what they're building.
Not everyone falls into these silos, of course.
At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.
Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.
Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).
Why ask though?
If I’m familiar with a project, more often than not, I usually have a very good idea of the code I have to write within minutes of reading the ticket. Most of the time taken is finding the impact of the change, especially with dependencies that are present in the business domain, but are not reflected in the code.
I don’t need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily as doing 2+2. What I’m seeking is a reason not to write it the way I envisioned it. And if those reasons are technical, it’s not often a matter of code.
Snippets and other code generation tool has been here for decades. If you’re writing Java in IDEA, it’s basically a tab-fest with completion. And if you’re fluent in your editor, you do much more complex than editing lines.
in those cases you wouldn't use an agent. It's not an xor thing, you use the tool where it works and not where it doesn't.
Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne.
We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product.
And so the change of technology goes.
I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel disruption at this age, especially when they're the breadwinner for a family.
yeah this is where i am. Turning 50 in April, I have two boys about to hit college and the bills associated with that and i have 15 years before i'm forced to retire. I have to up the salary to pay/help for college and i have to keep the 401k maxed + catchups maxed over the next 15 years to pull off retirement. The change from AI is scary, it may be good for me or it may be devastating. Staring down that barrel and making career decisions with no room for error (no time to rebuild) is pretty harrowing.
Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.
Go back 10 years and post "SWE's should form labor unions"
Then watch as your post drops to [dead] and people scream "How dare you rob me of theoretical millions of dollars I'll be making".
I wonder how many of these same downvoters are now worried about getting replaced with AI.
AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.
Not sure what world you're from, but lots of products get sent back to the manufacture because they break.
So depressing this is the current state of blogging. Can’t wait for this phase to be over.
And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.
Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and safety, the I believe it will not.
If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon.
At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".
I just saw a Reddit post yesterday about somebody that successfully one-shot in Gemini 2.5 the bare metal boot code for a particular board with the only input being the board's documentation.
I feel like the conversation does a good job of couching the situation we find ourselves in.
Generally, I get that feeling from work projects that I've self-initiated to solve a problem. Fortunately, I get the chance to do this a lot. With the advent of agentic coding, I am able to solve problems at a much higher rate.
Quite often, I'll still "raw dog" a solution without AI (except for doc lookups) for fun, kind of as a way to prove to myself I can still do it when the power's out.
It lines up a lot with what I've been thinking as well and this is what I wrote today on my blog. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/why-ai-challenges-u...
I still enjoy the physical act of programming so I'm unsure why I should do anything that changes that. To me it's akin to asking a painter to become a photographer. Both are artists but the craft is different.
Even if the AI thing is here to stay, I think there will be room for people who program by hand for the same reason there's still room for people who paint, despite the invention of the camera.
But then, I'm somebody who doesn't even use an IDE. If I find an IDE obtrusive then I'm certain I'll find an AI agent even more so.
I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what programming was.
When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game. We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it - maybe just the first few "rooms".
Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.
"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."
It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.
But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.
The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.
From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.
It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.
I mean "permanence" in the same vague senses that I think the OP was hinting upon. A belief that regardless of change, the primitives remain. This is about having total confidence that abstractions haven't removed you the light-cone of comprehension.
Re: Appliance
I believe turing-completeness is over-powered, and the reason that AGI/ASI is a threat at all. My hypothesis is that we can build a machine that delivers most of the same experiences as existing software can. By constraint, some tasks would impossible and others just too hard to scale. By analogy, even a Swiss-army knife is like an appliance in that it only has a limited number of potential uses.
Re: Users
The machine I'm proposing is basically just eBPF for rich applications. It will have relevance for medical, aviation, and AI research. I don't suppose that end-users won't be looking for it until the bad times really start ramping up. But, I suppose we'll need to port Doom over to it before we can know for sure.
it's kind of strange to think about but i guess now there's a new incentive to do something truly new and innovative. The llms won't be able to do it for you.
My goal is to make training (especially self-training) impossible; while making inference deterministic by design and highly interpretable.
The idea is to build a sanctuary substrate where humans are the only beneficiaries of all possible technical advancements.
If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.
I stuck with C and C++ as my bread and butter from 1996-2011 with other languages in between.
I don’t miss “coding” because of AI. My vision has been larger than what I could do myself without delegating for over a decade - before LLMs.
“coding” and/or later coordinating with people (dotted line) reporting to me has been a necessary evil until a year or two ago to see my vision go to implementation.
I absolutely love this new world. For loops and while loops and if statements don’t excite me in my 50s. Seeing my vision come to life faster than I ever could before and having it well archited does.
I love talking to “the business” and solving XYProblems and getting to a solution 3x faster
Why reinvent the wheel.
Yes, there might be less room for the Wild Wild West approach, as mentioned in the article: But that is the structure of compounded knowledge/tooling/code available to developers/others to create more enriched software, in the sense that it runs on what is available now and provides value in today's age of computing.
I also had a 486DX2-66. And I recall coding in Assembly, Pascal, C etc.
I do not miss it. These days I can create experiences that reach so many more people (a matured Interneet with realtime possibilities - to simplify) and with so much more potential for Good. Good in the sense of usefulness for users, good in the sense of making money (yeah, that aspect still exists).
I do understand your sentiment and the despairing tone. There have been times when I was struck by the same.
But I do not miss 1995 and struggling with a low-level formatted HD and Assembly that screwed up my floppy disks, or the worms that reached my box, or the awful web sites in terms of UX that were around, or pulling coaxial cables around for LAN parties.
It's just a different world now. But I get what you are saying, and respect it. Stay optimistic. :)
I think that's one of the biggest things that gives me pause about AI: the fact that, if they prove to be a big productivity boost, you're beholden to huge corporations, and not just for a one-time purchase, but on an ongoing basis.
Maybe the open source models will improve, but if keeps being driven by raw compute power and big numbers, it seems to tilt things very much in favor of those with lots and lots of capital to deploy.
The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find organizations like that.
All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things.
For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories.
I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can produce things much more efficiently and quicker than any human can alone.
Where the professions still thrive is in the artisan market. There is always demand for hand crafted things which have been created with love and care.
I am hoping this stays true for my coding analogy. Then people who really care about making a good product will still have a market from customers who want something different from the mass produced norm.
Very, very few of those professions are thriving. Especially if we are talking true craftsmanship and not stuffing the oven with frozen pastries to create the smell and the corresponding illusion of artisinal work.
You can't do this with software. Non-devs don't understand nor appreciate any qualities of software beyond the simplest comprehension of UX. There's no such thing as "hand-made" software. 99% of people don't care about what runs on their computer at all, they only care about the ends, not the means. As long as it appears to do what you want, it's good enough, and good enough is all that's needed by everyone.
Therefore I think artisan coders will need to rely on a combination of customisation and customer service. Their specialty will need to be very specific features which are not catered for by the usual mass code creation market, and provide swift and helpful support along with it.
This does not seem true for AI writing software. It's neither reliable nor rigid.
IMO that is exactly what is happening here. Ai is making coding apps possible for the normal person. Yes they will need to be supervised and monitored, just like workers in a factory. But groups of normal low skilled workers will be able to create large pieces of software via ai, whic has only ever been possible by skilled teams of professinoals before.
Such education is COMPLETELY different from the one they offered in school, but closer to those offered in premium schools (MIT/Berkeley). Basically, I'd call it "Software engineering archaeology". Students are supposed to take on ancient software, compile them, and figure out how to add new features.
For example, for the OS kernel branch:
- Course 0: MIT xv6 lab, then figure out which subsystem you are interested in (fs? scheduler? drivers?)
- Course 0.5: System programming for modern Linux and NT, mostly to get familiar with user space development and syscalls
- Course 1: Build Linux 0.95, run all of your toolchains in a docker container. Move it to 64-bit. Say you are interested in fs -- figure out the VFS code and write a couple of fs for it. Linux 0.95 only has Minix fs so there are a lot of simpler options to choose from.
- Course 2: Maybe build a modern Linux, like 5.9, and then do the same thing. This time the student is supposed to implement a much more sophiscated fs, maybe something from the SunOS or WinNT that was not there.
- Course 3 & 4: Do the same thing with leaked NT 3.5 and NT 4.0 kernel. It's just for personal use so I wouldn't worry about the lawyers.
For reading, there are a lot of books about Linux kernels and NT kernels.
It's so strange to read because to me its never been more fun to make software, its especially never been easier for an individual. The boring parts are being automated so I can work on the bespoke and artistic parts. The feedback loop is getting shorter to making something nice and workable. The investigation tools for profiling and pinpointing performance bottlenecks are better than ever, where Claude is just one new part of it.
yup.
Whether it's ROM programming, writing assembly, or C, or Rust, or JS-with-stdlib, at no point was anyone "teetering". Stacks have always existed, and whether your stack was small because it just had not much under it, or huge because it's 2026, they've by and large always been stable. That's the point of a stack: you can trust the parts below the layer you're working on, and the problems you solve are still real problems that for the most part don't require knowing the lower parts of the stack but are still real problem sin programming.
It's like making fun of people who drive a company rental because they don't want to own one themselves, and can't name any part of their engine: you're just being an ass.
Even the good TS programmers understand classic programming concepts like using the right data structures, paying attention to runtime complexity, and knowing when to go "maybe it's the step below me". They can work out difficult problems just fine.
You were writing an article about how fundamentally different AI has made things: why dunk on people who got into programming more recently than you and started higher on the ladder of abstraction, mocking them for "you were already about to fall". No, they weren't. They understood the core concepts just fine, and we collectively gave them stacks that they could trust. And they would have transitioned to "the next thing" just like you've been doing.
And then "AI" showed up, and it doesn't care about silly things like "how high up the ladder you are", it just went "your skills about how to schedule, structure, plan, describe, and manage projects is the thing that matters. Those other skills are nice to haves, and will make you better at being a PM, but they're not the main focus anymore". It doesn't matter where on the ladder you are, that affects everyone.
I observe that the way we taught math was not oriented on the idea that everyone would need to know trigonometric functions or how to do derivatives. I like to believe math curricula was centered around standardizing a system of thinking about maths and those of us who were serious about our educational development would all speak the same language. It was about learning a language and laying down processes that everyone else could understand. And that shaped us, and it's foolish to challenge or complain about that or, God forbid, radically change the way we teach math subjects because it damages our ability to think alike. (I know the above is probably completely idealistic verging on personal myth, but that's how I choose to look at it.)
In my opinion, we never approached software engineering the same way. We were so focused on the compiler and the type calculus, and we never taught people about what makes code valuable and robust. If I had FU money to burn today, I'd start a Mathnasium company focused around making kids into systems integrators with great soft skills and the ability to produce high quality software. I would pitch this business under the assumption that the jenga tower is going to be collapsing pretty much continuously for the next 25-50 years and civilization needs absolute unit super developers coming out of nowhere who will be able to make a small fortune helping companies dig their way out of 75 years of tech debt.
a) They asked an LLM
b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"
c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer
d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]
True story:
In one of our recent Enterprise Architecture meetings, I was lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt, and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by a so-called Senior Developer, in an Enterprise Architecture meeting.
I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming increasingly trivial.
Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone through this process with multiple LLMs, from various perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if products existed that could help with this. That lead me down a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory reporting of a completely different nature which was effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended up doing.
Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was obviously absurd:
- He had never seen the SP
- He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting
- He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives
- He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL and ANSI SQL
- No consideration given to IP
- etc etc
Those are the basics. Let's jump a little bit into the detail. Here's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like:
SELECT
CASE
WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221'
WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011'
END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region]
-- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....
So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the business rules either.
So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.
I'm about ten years ahead of the author. I felt this a long time before AI arrived. I went from solving problems for people to everything I tried to ending up in an endless grind of yak-shaving.
I worked my way through it, though. It made me both give up programming, at least in the commercial sense, and appreciate the journey he and I have gone through. It's truly an amazing time to be alive.
Now, however, I'm feeling sucked back into the vortex. I'm excited about solving problems in a way I haven't been in a long time. I was just telling somebody that I spent 4-6 hours last night watching Claude code. I watched TV. I scratched my butt. I played HexaCrush. All the time it was just chugging along, solving a problem in code that I have wanted to solve for a decade or more. I told him that it wasn't watching the code go by. That would be too easy to do. It was paying attention to what Claude was doing and _feeling that pain_. OMG, I would see it hit a wall, I would recognize the wall, and then it'd just keep chugging along until it fixed it. It was the kind of thing that didn't have damned thing to do with the problem but would have held me up for hours. Instead, I watched Pitt with my wife. Every now I then I'd see a prompt, pop up, and guide/direct/orchestrate/consult/? with Claude.
It ain't coding. But, frankly, coding ain't coding. It hasn't been in a long, long time.
If a lot of your job seems like senseless bullshit, I'm sad to say you're on the way out. If it doesn't, stick around.
I view AI as an extinction level threat. That hasn't changed, mainly because of how humans are using it. It has nothing to do with the tech. But I'm a bit perplexed now as to what to do with my new-found superpowers. I feel like that kid on the first Spiderman movie. The world is amazing. I've got half-a-dozen projects I'm doing right now. I'm publishing my own daily newspaper, just for me to read, and dang if it's not pretty good! No matter how this plays out, it is truly an amazing time to be alive, and old codgers like us have had a hella ride.
1. I shouldn't be so tied to what other people think of me (craftsman, programmer, low level developer)
2. I shouldn't measure my satisfaction by comparing my work to others'. Quality still matters especially in shared systems, but my responsibility is to the standards I choose to hold, not to whether others meet them. Plus there are still community of people that still care about this (handmade network, openbsd devs, languages like Odin) that I can be part of it I want to
3. If my values are not being met either in my work or personal life I need to take ownership of that myself. The magic is still there, I just have to go looking for it
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
where we came from and where we're going this whole time in my career those things are kind of hard to pinpoint. Abstraction is killing us for sure. Time to market above all else. It's no wonder why software in cars, appliances and medical equipment is a factor that is killing people.
And the part of programming that wasn't your projects, whether back in the days of TPS reports and test coverage meetings, or in the age of generative AI, that bit was always kinda soul draining.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
I feel this is conflating different things. Yes, the abstraction tower was massive already before, but at least the abstractions were mostly well-defined and understandable through interfaces: even if you don't understand the intricacies of your storage device, driver and kernel, you can usually get a quite reliable and predictable mental representation how files work. Same goes for network protocols, higher-level programming languages or the web platform.
Sure, there are edge cases where the abstraction breaks down and you have to get into the lower levels, but those situations are the exception, not the norm.
With AI, there is no clearly defined interface, and no one really knows what (precise) input a given output will produce. Or maybe to put it better, the interface is human language and your mental representation is the one you have talking to a human - which is far more vague than previous technical abstractions.
On the bright side, at least we (still) have the intermediate layer of generated code to reason about, which offsets the unpredictability a bit.
A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.
It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.
The sense of nostalgia that can turn too easily into a lament is powerful and real. But for me this all came well before AI had become all consuming... It's the just the latest manifestation of the process. I knew I didn't really understand computers anymore, not in the way I used to. I still love coding and building but it's no longer central to my job or lif3. It's useful, I enjoy it but at the same time I also marvel at the future that I find myself living in. I've done things with AI that I wouldn't have dared to start for lack of time. It's amazing and transformative and I love that too.
But I will always miss the Olden Days. I think more than anything it's the nostalgia for the 8-bit era that made me enjoy Stranger Things so much. :)
not sure how that relates to llms but it does become an unblocker to regain some of that "magic", but also i know to deep dive requires an investment i cannot shortcut.
the new generation of devs are already playing with things few dinosaurs will get to experience fully, having sunk decades into the systems built and afraid to let it go. some of that is good (to lean on experience) and some of it holding us back.
* "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."
* "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."
* "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."
* "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."
* "Typing was never the hard part."
* "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."
The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.
I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently.
Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul!
0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea... | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php
My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick - compiles and sometimes even runs.
At this point I entered surviving mode, and curious to see where we will be 6 months, 2 years from now. I am pessimistic.
I want to tinker with my beloved Z80 again.
But you would not be able to make anything anywhere near as complex as you can with modern tools.
I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here: back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now. Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language models?
Last year I found out that I always was a creator, not a coder.
40+ years later, been through many BASICs, C, C++ (CFront on onwards) and now NodeJS, and I still love writing code.
Tinkering with RPi, getting used to having a coding assistant, looking forward to having some time to work on other fun projects and getting back into C++ sooooon.
What's not to love?
Even if you can achieve awesome things with LLMs you give up the control over tiny details, it's just faster to generate and regenerate until it fits the spec.
But you never quite know how long it takes or how much you have to shave that square peg.
*I'm picking that era because it seems to be when most electronic machines' business logic moved from hardware to software.
I'm 49.... Started at 12... In the same boat
First 286 machine had a CMOS battery that was loose so I had to figure that out to make it boot into ms-dos
This time it does feel different and while I'm using them ai more than ever, it feels soulless and empty even when I 'ship' something
Given the bazillions poured into it I have yet to see this proven to be cheaper.
I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just disappeared while I had my back turned.
I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.
Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't pay the bills.
Doom does not use mode-X :P ! It uses mode-Y.
That being said as a 47 years old having given 40 years to this thing as well, I can relate to the feeling.
But everybody on this site lived through the first half of a logistic curve so that perspective seems strange to us.
I think it'd be pretty incredible if we hit on the best way to write software 40 years ago when people had only been doing it seriously for a couple of decades. It's no more surprising that we find better approaches to coding than farming improving when the tractor replaced a horse.
As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.
I don’t get the impression that the majority particularly cares about correctness. In fact, it’s one of the weak points of AI.
Another commentor mentioned embedded, and after a brief phase of dabbling in that, mainly with nRF5x micros, I tend to agree. Less training data and obtuse tooling.
Claude is a godsend to me, but fuck, it is sometimes dumb as door, loves to create regressions, is a fucking terrible designer. Small, tiny changes? Those are actually the worse, it is easy for claude, on the first setback, decides to burn the whole world and start from zero again. Not to mention when it gets stuck in an eternal loop where it increasingly degenerates the code.
If I care about what I deliver, I have to actively participate in coding.
For example, the author has coded for their entire career on silicon-based CPUs but never had to deal with the shittiness of wire-wrapped memory, where a bit-flip might happen in one place because of a manufacturing defect and good luck tracking that down. Ever since lithography and CPU packaging, the CPU is protected from the elements and its thermal limits are well known and computed ahead of time and those limits baked into thermal management so it doesn’t melt but still goes as fast as we understand to be possible for its size, and we make billions of these every day and have done for over 50 years.
Moving up the stack you can move your mouse “just so” and click, no need to bit-twiddle the USB port (and we can talk about USB negotiation or many other things that happen on the way) and your click gets translated into an action and you can do this hundreds of times a day without disturbing your flow.
Or javascript jit compilation, where the js engine watches code run and emits faster versions of it that make assumptions about types of variables - with escape hatches if the code stops behaving predictably so you don’t get confusing bugs that only happen if the browser jitted some code. Python has something similar. Thanks to these jit engines you can write ergonomic code that in the typical scenario is fast enough for your users and gets faster with each new language release, with no code changes.
Lets talk about the decades of research that went into autoregressive transformer models, instruction tuning, and RLHF, and then chat harnesses. Type to a model and get a response back, because behind the scenes your message is prefixed with “User: “, triggering latent capabilities in the model to hold its end of a conversation. Scale that up and call it a “low key research preview” and you have ChatGPT. Wildly simple idea, massive implications.
These abstractions take you further from the machine and yet despite that they were adopted en masse. You have to account for the ruthless competition out there - each one would’ve been eliminated if they hadn’t proven to be worth something.
You’ll never understand the whole machine so just work at the level you’re comfortable with and peer behind the curtain if and when you need (eg. when optimizing or debugging).
Or to take a moment to marvel.
I feel that LLMs have finally put the ball in MY court. I feel sorry for the others, but you can always find puzzles in the toy section of the bookstore.
and they still call themselves 'full stack developers' :eyeroll:
That's exactly what it is.
> …Not burnout…
Here’s the part that makes me laugh, darkly.
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack.
AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain."
Absolutely brilliant writing!
Heck -- absolutely brilliant communicating! (Which is really what great writing is all about!)
You definitely get it!
Some other people here on HN do too, yours truly included in that bunch...
Anyway, stellar writing!
Related:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/entities/publication/3e2850f6-c...
New concepts came out all along.
They became standardized all along and came down market to smaller and smaller projects.
Source control.
Cloud.
Agile/Scrum.
Code completion IDEs.
Higher Level languages.
These were not LLMs but did represent a shift that had to be kept up with.
LLMs are no different, just a bigger jump.
There is just as much opportunity here.
Software development and software developers are not going away.
More software that never could be built will now be built.
For the forseeable future there will always be software that needs to be overseen by a human.
Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no mere incremental change. And the almost natural language interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart, and no, microcode and low level abstractions are not a real counter-argument to that). Even less so if agents turn autonomous and you just herd them onto completion.
I like coding with AI both vibe and assisted, since as soon as the question enters my head I can create a prototype or a test or a xyz to verify my thoughts. The whole time I'm writing in my notebook or whiteboard or any other thing I would have gotten up to. This is enabling tech, the trouble for me is there is a small thread that leads out of the room into the pockets of billion dollar companies.
It is no longer you vs the machine.
I have spent tons of time debugging weird undocumented hardware with throwaway code, or sat in a debugger doing hex math.
I think one wire that is crossed right now in this world is that computing is more corporate than ever, with what seems like ever growing platforms and wealth extraction at scale. Don't let them get you down, host your own shit and ignore them. YES IT WILL COST MORE -> YOUR FREEDOM HAS A PRICE.
Another observation is that people that got into the game for pure money are big mad right now. I didn't make money in the 00s, I did in the end of the 10s, and we're back at job desolation. In my groups, the most annoyed are code boot campers who have faked it until they made it and have just managed to survive this cycle with javascript.
Cycles come and go, the tech changes, but problem solving is always there.
It also lets me focus more on improving things since I feel more liberated to scrap low quality components. I’m much braver to take on large refactors now – things that would have taken days now take minutes.
In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience and inability to stay on task until 3am.
That is called...programming.
Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, etc. can provide empathy for and insight into your experience.
it's the LLMs that are spitting out fake photos and videos and generating lots of shitty graphics for local businesses, that's where I'm still wielding a pitchfork...
Surveillance and Extraction
"We were promised flying cars", and what we got was "investors" running the industry off the cliff into cheap ways to extract money from people instead of real innovation.
But snark away. It’s lazy. And yes it is so damn tedious.
> Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
The heavy use of LLMs in writing makes people rightfully distrustful that they should put the time in to try to read what's written there.
Using LLMs for coding is different in many ways from writing, because the proof is more there in the pudding - you can run it, you can test it, etc. But the writing _is_ the writing, and the only way to know it's correct is to put in the work.
That doesn't mean you didn't put in the work! But I think it's why people are distrustful and have a bit of an allergic reaction to LLM-generated writing.
People put out AI text, primarily, to run hustles.
So its writing style is a kind of internet version of "talking like a used car salesman".
With some people that's fine, but anyone with a healthy epistemic immune system is not going to listen to you.
If you want to save a few minutes, you'll just have to accept that.
I mean, obviously you can't know your actual error rates, but it seems useful to estimate a number for this and to have a rough intuition for what your target rate is.
Did chatGPT write this response?
Looks like this comment is embracing the tools too?
I'd take cheap snark over something somebody didn't bother to write, but expect us to read.
Yes it's fast, it's more efficient, it's cheap - the only things we as a society care about. But it doesn't convey any degree of care about what you put out, which is probably desirable for a personal, emotionally-charged piece of writing.
I'd wish people would stop doing that. AI writing isn't even particularly good. Its not like it makes you into Dostoevsky, it just sloppifies your writing with the same lame mannerisms ("wasn't just X — it was Y"), the same short paragraphs, the same ems.
"Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative."
"You weren’t just a user. You were a systems engineer by necessity."
"The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."
And in general a lot of "It's not <alternative>, it's <something else>", with or without an em dash:
"But it wasn’t just the craft that changed. The promise changed."
it's really verbose. One of those in a piece might be eye-catching and make someone think, but an entire blog post made up of them is _tiresome_.
(2) Phrasing like this seems to come out of LLMs a lot, particularly ChatGPT:
"I don’t want to be dishonest about this. "
(3) Lots of use of very short catch sentences / almost sentence fragments to try to "punch up" the writing. Look at all of the paragraphs after the first in the section "The era that made me":
"These weren’t just products. " (start of a paragraph)
"And the software side matched." (next P)
"Then it professionalised."
"But it wasn’t just the craft that changed."
"But I adapted." (a few paragraphs after the previous one)
And .. more. It's like the LLM latched on to things that were locally "interesting" writing, but applies them globally, turning the entire thing into a soup of "ah-ha! hey! here!" completely ignorant of the terrible harm it does to the narrative structure and global readability of the piece.
It's like YouTube-style engagement maximization. Make it more punchy, more rapid, more impactful, more dramatic - regardless of how the outcome as a whole ends up looking.
I wonder if this writing style is only relevant to ChatGPT on default settings, because that's the model that I've heard people accuse the most of doing this. Do other models have different repetitive patterns?
(An explanation for the emoji spam in GitHub READMEs is also welcome. Who did that before LLMs?)
I can hate LLMs for killing my craft while simultaneously using it to write a "happy birthday" message for a relative I hate or some corpo speak.
The post in the same vain, "We mourn our craft", did a much better job at this communicating the point without the AI influence.
What a poetic ending. So beautiful! And true, in my experience.
AI has just vastly extended your reach. No sense crying about it. It is literally foolish to lament the evolution of our field into something more.
Bad times to be a programmer. Start learning business.
I had my first paid programming job when I was 11, writing a database for the guy that we rented our pirate VHS tapes from.
AI is great.
It’s literally the same argument over and over and it’s the same comments over and over and over
HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into a support group for aging “coders” that refuse to adapt
I’m going to start flagging these as spam
maybe that just means it's a maturing field and we gotta adapt?
yes, the promise has changed, but you still gotta do it for the love of the game. anything else doesnt work.
Working in AI startups strangely enough I see a lot of the same spirit of play and creativity applied to LLM based tools - I mean what is OpenClaw but a fun experiment
Those kids these days are going to reminisce about the early days of AI when prompts would be handwritten and LLMs would hallucinate
I’m not really sure 1983, 1993 or 2003 really was that gold of age but we look at it with rose colored glasses
What are you talking about? You don't know how 99% of the systems in your own body work yet they don't confront you similarly. As if this "knowledge" is a switch that can be on or off.
> I gave 42 years to this thing, and the thing changed into something I’m not sure I recognise anymore.
Stop doing it for a paycheck. You'll get your brain back.