I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(
I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(
Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)
> It is an art.
I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.
On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.
> On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.
I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial?
How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.
There's a middle ground here that you're not considering (at least in the small amount of text). Vibe coders will spit out a lot of nonsense because they don't have the skills (or choose not) to tweak the output of their agents. A well seasoned developer using tools like Claude Code on such a codebase can remediate a lot more quickly at this point than someone not using any AI. The current best practices are akin to thinking like a mathematician with regards to calculator use, rather than like a student trying to just pass a class. Working in small chunks and understanding the output at every step is the best approach in some situations.
That's very true. The LLM can be an accelerator for the remediator, too, with the value-add coming from "actually knowing what they're doing", much as before.
The f is gas town?
> How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.
There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made.
There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all, to be implemented however, will be the key deliverable.
I have had several projects that look like this already in the VoIP world, and it's been very gainful. However, my industry probably does not compare fairly to the common denominator of CRUD apps in common tech stacks; some of it is specialised enough that the LLMs drop to GPT-2 type levels of utility (and hallucination! -- that's been particularly lucrative).
Anyway, the problem to be solved in vibe coding remediation often has little to do with the code itself, which we can all agree can be generated in essentially infinite amounts at a pace that is, for all intents and purposes, almost instantaneous. If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.
The general business problem to be solved is how to make this consumable to the business as a whole, which still moves at the speed of human. I am fond of a metaphor I heard somewhere: you can't just plug a firehose into your house's plumbing and expect a fire hydrant's worth of water pressure out of your kitchen faucet.
In the same way, removing the barriers to writing 300,000 lines isn't the same as removing the barriers to operationalising, adopting and owning 300,000 lines in a way that can be a realistic input into a real-world product or service. I'm not talking about the really airy-fairy appeals to maintainability or reliability one sometimes hears (although, those are very real concerns), but rather, how to get one's arms around the 300,000 lines from a product direction perspective, except by prompting one's way into even more slop.
I think that's where the challenges will be, and if you understand that challenge, especially in industry- and domain-specific ways (always critical for moats), I think there's a brisk livelihood to be made here in the foreseeable future. I make a living from adding deep specialist knowledge to projects executed by people who have no idea what they're doing, and LLMs haven't materially altered that reality in any way. Giving people who have no idea what they're doing a way to express that cluelessness in tremendous amounts of code, quickly, doesn't really solve the problem, although it certainly alters the texture of the problem.
Lastly, it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? The lack of moat around it was a problem long before LLMs. I, for example, can't imagine making a comfortable living in it outside of SV engineer inflation; it just doesn't pay remotely enough in most other places. Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating. Underappreciated specialist personalities will certainly see a return in a flight-to-quality environment.
> it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy?
Like 80% of jobs outside the USA are either local or outsourced CRUD web applications. Many people live quite well thanks to exchange rates. I wonder what's gonna happen if/when those jobs disappear.
I've read your whole reply and agree with most of it; what I don't agree with (or don't understand) is below:
> If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.
My experience as a consultant to business is that they only ever bring in consultants when they need a fix and are in a hurry. No client of mine ever phoned me up to say "Hey, there, have you any timeslots next week to advise on the best way to do $FOO?", it's always "Hey there, we need to get out an urgent fix to this crashing/broken system/process - can we chat during your next free slot?".
> Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating.
I dunno about this - depends on the specialisation.
They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.
Someone with deep knowledge of the insurance industry? Nope - they'll look for a f/timer. Someone with deep knowledge of payment processing? No consultant, they'll get a f/timer.
> My experience as a consultant to business is that they only ever bring in consultants when they need a fix and are in a hurry.
No, that's fair, and I think you're right about that. But refactoring 300,000 lines 'real quick' isn't going to happen, regardless of that. :)
> They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.
I implicitly had narrow technical specialisations in mind, albeit including ones that intersect with things like "insurance industry workflows".
Do you not fear that future/advanced AI will be able to look at a vibe-coded codebase and make sensible refactors itself?
That's my worry. Might be put off a few years, but still...
But its already the present.
For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.
In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.
I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.
Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.
Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.
> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.
I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.
If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.
The amount of software needed and the amount being written are off many orders of magnitude. It has been that way since software's inception and I don't see it changing anytime soon. AI tools are like having a jr dev to do your grunt work. Soon it will be like a senior dev. Then like a dev team. I would love to have an entire dev team to do my work. It doesn't change the fact that I still have plenty of work for them to do. I'm not worried AI will take my job I will just be doing bigger jobs.
> Do you not fear that future/advanced AI will be able to look at a vibe-coded codebase and make sensible refactors itself?
This is a possibility in very well-trodden areas of tech, where the stack and the application are both banal to the point of being infinitely well-represented in the training.
As far as anything with any kind of moat whatsoever? Here, I'm not too concerned.
I am no longer sure thats the case. I had it chew through a gnarly problem with my own custom webrtc implementation on a esp32 SOC. It did not rely on any existing documentation as this stuff is quite obscure - it relied on me pointing to specs for webrtc, specs for esp32 SDK, and quite some prompting. But it solved the problems I was dreading to solve manually in a matter of a 2hr session. Thats for a hobby project, we are now starting to experiment using this in the enterprise, on obscure and horrible to work with platforms (such as some industry specific salesforce packages). I think claude can work effectively with existing code, specs on things that would never made it to stackoverflow before.
That might be true for WebRTC...
Yes, I immediately see the need for the opposite - perfect, accurate, proven bug free software. As long as there is AI there will be AI slop.
Well, there is no perfect, accurate, proven bug free software even before AI. Maybe the problem is not AI but economical incentives and lack of care.
> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do.
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
There is definitely tribalism. I think a lot of the negativity is people who recognize the long term goals of these companies, not just to tech workers. Right now, these models are a threat to people who worked hard and invested their time, while it lets inexperienced or lazy people appear more competent. I think that less experienced developers (or people who don't care anymore or maybe ever) see what an LLM can do and immediately believe it will solve all their problems. That if you are not embracing this with full force you are going to be left behind.
You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides.
Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech.
Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression.
This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?
I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better.
Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
Why do people assume what currently available is the ceiling, especially after the last 2-3 years of explosive growth?
Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?
> Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?
What are you calling "growth"? Adoption, or LLM progress? LLM progress has objectively slowed down, and for rather obvious reasons. The leaps from GPT-2 to GPT-4 can't be reprised forever.
It will get better, but the rate at which it does may not continue to be exponential. Past performance is not indicative of future results. While the agents models seem to continue to improve, I think LLMs as a whole have started seeing less and less benefits from the current scaling approaches.
I think what we currently have is pretty close to the ceiling for LLMs. But with the amount of money being spent there might be a new breakthrough (not llm)
It must depend on the person. I’ve been coding for all my life but have never been GOOD. I thoroughly enjoy coding, despite being frustrated many times.
Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing.
For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.
You could read the syntax and see what it logically did. But you likely don't always know why it did something, and you definitely don't know why another way wasn't chosen (maybe that way would have better aligned with your long term goals)
At least, they can still be much faster and cheaper.
feel the same, but I moved up. create full products and profit from them. you have a great taste if you know what's behind
>It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do
They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
> They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI.
But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
>That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though.
It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year.
I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
Once you out NOW, it's impossible to go back to entry/mod level programing jobs. :( Downshifting to some shitty minimum wage job is BRUTAL
Hear hear. It too shall pass. They'll get tired, they'll grind the same apps 500 times and leave.
Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.
Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work.
It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.
I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
Don't care about the critics. What you're doing is what people were doing in the 80s with their new PCs and tools that democratized this kind of development, like Basic and DBase.
Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that and will end up getting unemployed anyway in the next few years.
> excel sheets
Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning up now vs. the Excel code that was being spun up before, but they rhyme.
100% correct. Wonderful and we will still use it for most use cases. But for stuff where it is just not needed or should be automated, we can now make some amazing tools. (Just like the VBA coders of old.)
I think the parent is talking about the people who post to LinkedIn that "SWE as a profession is dead" non-stop. I fully agree with you that it massively lowered the cost to create, but I'd argue that the people who's saying that SWE is dead wouldn't be able to go past the complexity barrier that most of us are accustomed to handling. I think the real winners would be the ones with domain expertise but didn't have the capacity to code (just like OP and you).
Correct. I think "real" software requires real development and architecture.
And to be honest, even the tiny apps I'm doing I wouldn't have been able to do without some background in how frontend / backend should work, what a relational database is, etc. (I was an unskilled technical PM in the dotcom boom in the 2000s so at least know my way around a database a little. I know what these parts of tech CAN do, but I didn't have the skills to make them do it myself.)
Yes, you're not who the GP was talking about ;-)
>an explosion of software in small and midsize companies
For me, that is nightmare fuel. We already have too much software! And it's all one framework or host app version update away from failure.
But this nightmare is ALREADY true, except that software is a spreadsheet. Or a piece of paper on someone's desk. Or an email that someone is supposed to send every day.... Yes it's an absolute nightmare to maintain if you built a fortune 500 off of it. But for a 100 person company that is 95% blue collar workers, this is fine. And better.
It's a nice demonstration of the Jevons Paradox in action.
Curious about why the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or stuff not documented, was fixed only when vibe code was available. Was it just cost?
Time and thus cost. Early in my career I would look across a fairly large company at processes being ran on spreadsheets and see if it would be worth the time to create software to address and if those processes should be standardized. We barely scratched the surface with all the possible custom software opportunities for this company.
Cost and managerial overhead. We don't have a dev on staff. Even if we did, there is lots of managerial overhead to explain "the problem" and then iterate to a solution with a dev. Now you can just build the damn solution yourself!
A miracle! Tell us more! What kind of apps? How has it helped revenue?
Two examples:
1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day
2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 hours per week to do this in a crappy spreadsheet. Now I have it in a perfect database much more frequently. Dev time: 4 hours.
We are attacking little problems all across the business now.
A MIRACLE!!!!
Awesome! Fully tested? QA'd? No false positives etc?
I wouldn't want to hassle customers who have fully paid up accounts
Everything is still touched by human - AI is just giving suggestions to humans to speed them up. Can get them 80-90% there.
I think also you need to compare it to what was already there. No QA on the humans. Done off the side of their desk with no oversite, process, or checking. Huge amounts of manual errors.
The new solution just needs to be better than the old one, it doesn't need to be perfect.
(But I 100% agree that I wouldn't let AI live against customers. It is helping us build automations faster, and doing a "little" thinking on recommendation rules that would be very hard to implement without something highly structured, which would be frankly impossible in our environment.)
> I think also you need to compare it to what was already there
No. The bar is "miracle" and can cure cancer etc and can replace all developers etc. The bar is much higher than existing manual processes. It absolutely needs to be perfection to match the lofty claims
Miracle was meant here "figuratively", esp for non tech people this wording seems plausible from their perspective, because they can now do that without dev support
Nobody told them?!?
I guess Vibe coding cleanup firms and offensive security researchers are plotting to find bugs costing firms millions of dollars worth of bugs or one creating a dreadful data breach.
The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.
yep, how do we define AI as a replacement for search engine, and templating engine, and inference engine (do X in Y)?
is there a term for that?
AI at our fingertips, accessible and useful, that's just a tool, that's not redefining us as an industry and denying people's jobs – that's an asset. (I used an em dash to prove I am not AI, as apparently double dash is now a sign of AI text!)*
(*) case in point, the situation is _TIRING_.
Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot.
Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious.
"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop!
There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)
With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)
I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem.
In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!
There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.
How do I get started with FPGAs? Coming from backend/ops/sysadmin
I jumped mid-career, and there were a few places I started before diving into live hardware projects (which is the only way to go from student to practitioner).
FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/
Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page
Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects
I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!
> I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though.
I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans.
Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
Not as long as you think.
https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...
have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not .
And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
Might be never or if the software is not used at all.
The perfect and secure software is none.
>The perfect and secure software is none.
Well, at least not connected to the internet?
I don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.
I feel the same way. The only way I found that lets me cope with this is by having 1-2 personal projects, closed source, with me as the only user, where I slowly build things the way I enjoy, and where the outcome is useful software that doesn't try to monetise at the expense of the end user.
Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it.
A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.
AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself).
I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
I think deskilling is an underrated concern. Programming among the competent is a mind-body experience and a matter of motor memory and habits of mind, and LLMs make you extraordinarily lazy.
No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation.
Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.
yup. the things i disliked most about programming were hyped up bullshit and losing autonomy.
These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both.
I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic.
The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.
I quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day.
One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.
> artisanal code
That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
[dead]
[dead]