Posted by napolux 16 hours ago
This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
It's been entirely worth it for me and I cannot imagine my life without kids. But it's a deeply personal choice and I am not buying or selling the idea. I would just say nobody is ever ready and the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational. But not wanting them because of how it might change your own life is a completely valid reason to not have kids.
Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.
Where I am I’m alone. Don’t underestimate the value of community.
At this point I’ve realized I need to cast all other ambitions aside and work on getting some out of the way land that I own.
If AI automated entry-level tasks from today, that just means "entry-level" means something different now. It doesn't mean entry-level ceases to exist. Entey-level as we know it, but not entry-level in general.
This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.
The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
You're maintaining a large, professional codebase? You definitely shouldn't be vibe coding. The fact that some people are is a genuine problem. You want a simple app that you and your friends will use for a few weeks and throw away? Sure, you can probably vibe code something in 2 hours instead of paying for a SaaS. Both have their place.
Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.
Actually, most software either is garbage or goes to waste at some point too. Maybe that's too negative. Maybe one could call it rot or becoming obsolete or obscure.
I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.
I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?
I was referring specifically to this point, which, IMHO, is a fallacy:
>>> There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
There is no way to use the word "infinite" in this context, even if qualified, that is representative of reality.
The demand for paid software is decreasing cause these AI companies are saying "Oh dont buy that SAAS product because you can build it yourself now"
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.
Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.
Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website. This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects. Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store.
What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.
Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
Though I get that these days people tend to use “strawman” for anything they see as a bad argument, so you could be right in your assessment. Would be nice to have clarification on what they mean.
Good point.
> I think an accusation of straw-manning is in part a accusation of another's intent (or bad faith - not engaging with the argument).
There I partially disagree. Straw-manning is not engaging with the argument but it can be done accidentally. As in, one may genuinely misunderstand the nuance in an argument and respond to a straw man by mistake. Bad faith does require bad intent.
"Writing code is no longer needed for the most part."
It was a great post and I don't disagree with him. But it's an example of why it isn't necessarily a strawman anymore, because it is being claimed/realized by more than just vibecoders and hobbyists.
> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
* the README was clearly not written by an LLM nor aided
* he still uses GPLv2 (not 3) as the license for his works
Dunno why the author thinks an AI-enhanced junior can match the "output"of a whole team unless he means in generating lines of code, which is to say tech debt.
Being able to put a lot of words on screen is not the accomplishment in programming. It usually means you've gone completely out of your depth.
I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.
The next step was for me to write a cron job that would reapply the chattr +1 and rewrite the file once in 5 minutes. Sort of an enforcer. I used Claude (web) to write this and cut/pasted it just because I didn't want to bother with bash syntax that I learned and forgot several times.
I then wanted something stronger and looked at publicly available things like pluckeye but they didn't really work the way I wanted. So I tried to write a quick version using Claude (web) and started running it (October 2025). It solved my problem for me.
I wanted a program to use aider on and I started with this. Every time, I needed a feature (e.g. temporary unblocks, prevent tampering and uninstalling, blocking in the browser, violation tracking etc.), I wrote out what I wanted and had the agent do it. OVer the months, it grew to around 4k lines (single file).
Around December, I moved to Claude code from aider and continued doing this. The big task I gave it was to refactor the code into smaller files so that I could manage context better. IT did this well and added tests too. (late December 2025).
I added a helper script to update URLs to block from various sources. Vibe-coded too. Worked fine.
Then, I found it hogging memory because of some crude mistakes I vibe-coded early on fixed that. Cost me around $2 to do so. (Jan 2026).
Then I added support to lock the screen when I crossed a violation threshold. This required some Xlib code to be written. I'm sure I could have written it but it's not really worth it. I know what to do and doing it by hand wouldn't really teach me anything except the innards of a few libraries. I added that.
So, in short, this is something that's 98% AI coded but it genuinely solves a problem for me and has helped me change my behaviour in front of a computer. There are no companies that my research revealed that offer this as a service for Linux. I know what to do but don't have the time write and debug it. With AI, my problem was solved and I have something which is quite valuable to me.
So, while I agree with you that it isn't an "automation tool", the speed and depth which it brings to the environment has opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. That's the real value and the window through which I'm exploring the whole thing.
What has worked for me is treating it like an enthusiastic intern with his foot always on the accelerator pedal. I need to steer and manage the brakes otherwise, it'll code itself off a cliff and take my software with it. The most workable thing is a pair programmer. For trivial changes and repeatedly "trying stuff out", you don't need to babysit. For larger pieces, it's good to make each change small and review what it's trying.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
It seems it only took until about 2023 or so
It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches.
It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
Then I have some non-trivial side projects where I don’t really care about the code quality, and I’m just letting it run. If I dare look at the code, there’s a bunch of repetition. It rarely gets stuff right the first time, but that’s fine, because it’ll correct it when I tell it it doesn’t work right. Probably full of security holes, code is nasty, but it doesn’t matter for the use-cases I want. I have produced pieces of software here that are actively making my life better, and it’s been mostly unsupervised.
Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.
The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making.
With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.
The perverse incentives being that tech debt is non-obvious & therefore really easy to avoid responsibility for.
Meanwhile, velocity is highly obvious & usually tired directly to personal & team performance metrics.
The only way I see to resolve this is strict enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle.
But when even people working at Anthropic are talking about running multiple agents in parallel, I get the idea that CTO's are not taking this seriously.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.
Worse. The AI doesn't share any responsibility.
They're still doing it.
the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s.
ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look at... id say, even as someone who is a big fan of linux, if i were given a 30 year old obscure software stack that did nothing but work, i would be very hesitant to touch it too!
I find this one hard to believe. Software is already massively present in all these industries and has already replaced jobs. The last step is complete automation (ie drone tractors that can load up at a hub, go to the field and spray all by themselves) but the bottleneck for this isn't "we need more code", it's real-world issues that I don't see AI help solving (political, notably)
We are going to need to de-risk our software dependencies, and Germany is going to need to use computers.
Germany is going to be crazy, I think.
The Gewerkschaft tactics to resist AI is what I’m really interested in seeing.
Engineers > developers > coders.
It's also an 'skip intro' button for the friction that comes with learning.
You're getting a bug? just ask the thing rather than spending time figuring it out. You don't know how to start a project from scratch? ask for scaffolding. Your first boss asks for a ticket? Better not to screw up, hand it to the machine just to be safe.
If those temptations are avoided you can progress, but I'm not sure that lots of people will succeed. Furthermore, will people be afforded that space to be slow, when their colleagues are going at 5x?
Modern life offers little hope. We're all using uber eats to avoid the friction of cooking, tinder to avoid the awkwardness of a club, and so on. Frictionless tends to win.
It takes extra discipline and willpower to force yourself do the painful thing, if there is a less painful way to do it.
The usual trade-off of a well paid software development job is lack of job security and always learning - the skill set is always changing in contrast with other jobs.
My suggestion, stop chase trends and start to hear from mature software developers to get better perspective on what's best to invest on.
And why the mantra is always true?
You can find stable job (slow moving company) doing basic software development and just learn something new every 4 years and then change companies.
Or never change company and be the default expert, because everyone else is changing jobs, get job security, work less hours and have time within your job to uplift your skills.
Keep chasing latest high paid jobs/trends by sacrificing off time.
What's the best option for you? Only you know, it's depends on your own goals.
If you didn't like working with computers, then you (and another gazillion people who choose it for the $$$) probably made the wrong choice.
But totally depends on what you wanted to get out of it. If you wanted to make $$$ and you are making it, what is the problem? That is assuming you have fun outside of work.
But if you wanted to be the best at what you do, then you gotta love what you are doing. May be there are people who have super human discipline. But for normal people, loving what they goes a long way towards that end.
This doesn't match what I have seen in other industries. Many auto mechanics I know drive old Buicks or Ford's with the 4.6l v8 because the cars are reliable and the last thing they want to do on a day off is have to work on their own car. I know a few people in other trades like plumbers, electricians, and chefs and the pattern holds pretty well for them as well.
You can enjoy working with computers and also enjoy not working in your personal time.
This type of argument can hold for any profession and yet we aren't seeing this pattern much in other white-collar professions. Professors, doctors, economists, mechanical engineers, ... it seems like pretty much everybody made the wrong choice then?
I think this is a wrong way to look at it. OP says that he invested a lot of time into becoming proficient in something that today appears to be very close to part extinction.
I think that the question is legit, and he's likely not the only person asking oneself this question.
My take on the question is ability to adapt and learn new skills. Some will succeed some will fail but staying in status-quo position will certainly more likely lead to a failure rather than the success.
I wonder what the best decision would have been. What job is AI immune and has a stable 40 hour week, no overtime, with decent pay. Teacher? Nursing?
> Am I supposed to want to code all the time?
Yes.
> When can I pursue hobbies,
Your hobby should be coding fun apps for yourself
> a social life, etc.
You social life should be hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.
And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that.
I'm not saying y'all should be doing that now, I'm just saying, that is in fact how it used to be.
Well that depends heavily on how you define successful. Successful in life? I would tend to disagree, unless you believe that career is the only thing that counts. But even when career is concerned: the most successful people I know went on from being developer to some high end management role. The skills that brought them there definitely did not come from hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.
If all they did was code all the time, write code for fun and interacted mostly with other similar people, they probably wouldn't be the first choice for these projects.
The ones who ace their careers are for the most people that are fun, driven, or psychos, all social traits that make you good in a political game.
Spending lots of time with other socially awkward types talking about hard math problems or whatever will get you nowhere outside of some SF fantasy startup movie.
I'd say it's especially important for the more nerdy (myself included) to be more outgoing, and do other stuff like sales or presentations, design/marketing og workshops - that will make you exceptional because you then got the "whole package" and undestand the process and other people.
Fuck. That.
I worked at a faang, successful people weren't people that did engineering, it was people who did politics.
The most successful people were the ones that joined at the same time as the current VP.
Your hobbies need to be fun, to you. Not support your career. If its just there to support your career, its unpaid career development, not a hobby. Should people not code in their free time? thats not for me to decide. If they enjoy it, and its not hurting anyone, then be my guest.
Engineers are generally useless at understanding whats going on in the real world, they are also quite bad at communicating.
do. fun. things.