Posted by signa11 13 hours ago
Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code, writing trivial unit/ui tests.
And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
LLMs truly took the worst of this trade, and left all the enjoyable things (which they will be unable to do until AGI = for a long time if ever).
Me? I enjoy that stuff for what it is. Reviewing code is definitely not the truly enjoyable thing. Writing code, expressing my logic in code. That is enjoyable to me.
We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.
There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.
It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.
It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.
The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.
I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.
/yes I know a coding language is 100% better at expressing algorithmical logic, but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate. machines do that way better/
Well... sure it's more efficient (although in some cities and certain routes it's not; same with coding and LLMs). But some of us just love riding the bicycle and enjoying the nature, you know. Perhaps even strengthening our muscles as we do it, as a healthy side effect.
Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.
I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.
Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.
1. Review what it writes as it writes it
2. Give it a smaller, more focused, scope to make changes
Or, keep vibing but then don't get mad about it.
Sadly, at my current company, this doesn't seem to be acceptable practice.
Skill issue.
If you are lucky, your question have a good representation in the training material and the randomness is on your side..
But the LLM won't tell you that, so until you test your luck by taking the answer from LLM and using it, you never know..
But then, the AI company would have run off with your token payments...
If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code, then you’re not a programmer, you’re a software architect.
Middle managers have to supervise people, otherwise they are not managers.
I love these parts. But in my experience, LLMs break much of that.
Planning/architecting? Great. So far, I haven't found any agent that actually follows the plans set out, though. They get something wrong, and it snowballs from here.
Directing a team, steering and giving advice? Absolutely. Some of my greatest achievements involve mentoring. But human teams learn from their mistakes, grow up and contribute insights. Agents don't.
Reviewing code? Well, maybe not so much fun, but it's usually a good way to understand what's going on, and to share experience. Except with agents, you need to spend most of your brainpower seeing through the misleading comments and documentation and choices and sycophancy, and the agent never learns from its mistakes.
Designing interfaces and APIs? Absolutely. Yet every time I look at code modified by my agent, I see that the contracts (internal or public) have been broken by the latest edits.
In my experience, LLMs can be very useful, for refactorings and as learning and review assistants, and sometimes as replacement for missing documentation. But codegen is the worst way to use them.
It really does seem like the target audience of LLM users are people who never learned to use Vim.
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs.
Why would anyone pay you to work for them if you aren't willing to do these things? This is the entire job.
[0] Okay, I am going to comment on it some more: For me, it also depends on whether I’m “forced” to do the code writing (or reading) because I just want the resulting output or need to modify the program to my wishes; or whether I want to do it because it fulfills me, is interesting, teaches me something new, etc. Both can be true for one person at different times/in different contexts.
I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.
What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.
And these will be gone, too, a couple months later. Or possibly even at the same time.
People other than you, I guess. I think your first chunk is a bit of an unfavorable perspective, but still I would take that over the second every time.
But it's clear that many people feel otherwise. Software engineering has many classes of tasks and the difference in opinions about AI seem to exist because different people like different aspects of it.
But filling in the blanks can still involve a lot of grindy, time consuming work where you iterate through collections, build parameters for other APIs, check invariants etc. All of that stuff is boring to me.
What I'm trying to say is that most coding tasks require "senior level thinking" and "intern level thinking". The latter can sometimes be the majority of the work and I don't want to do that anymore.
Me! I do!
> And who likes planning, architecting, directing a team, steering and giving advice, reviewing code, designing interfaces and APIs. Coding became more mentally exciting.
I'd rather eat rusty barbed wire. I'd avoid your middle manager hellscape even if if doubled my salary, I swear!
I, for one, liked it. I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer because, for all the downsides, I actually enjoyed working with code so closely. It really allowed me to learn and know the code that I wrote.
Whenever I'm using LLMs for code generation, the one huge downside I notice, is that even if I review everything line by line, I don't get the same "I know precisely how it works, because I wrote it" feeling.
I really wonder what the implications of this will be. For instance, if the young devs who are just entering the field will actually be able to write code on their own? Or maybe it will truly not be needed a few years from now?
Mmm..almost everyone who loves programming. If I hated typing code, I would not been a programmer, because it used to involve a lot of typing.
Or else you did it for $$$. But then don't assume every one who programs hates typing code.
I come out of it intellectually stimulated, with a sense of achievement and improvement and increased understanding; with also a bit of human connection, and creativity. And of course I also get a working program, so I feel productive too.
If you don't understand this you never enjoyed programming per se. It's fine, people like different things. But I think you might be mistaken calling whatever your job is "coding" or "the trade" because I get the impression it just isn't.
Based on your post, you never liked programming in the first place. You liked having software. Typing the code in, reading the documentation, all that stuff is programming.
It doesn't exist yet, but you could easily create it.
Hackers.
I was with you on your second list until this part. It feels like a poison pill rider that's added to a bill in Congress, because I've always found code review to be the single most soul-sucking aspect of the job.
I'll grant that may be at least partially due to poor practices at the places I've worked, but semi-regularly having large PRs that take hours to comb through and where you either rubber-stamp it or look like the bad guy (because you're retarding release velocity) has never been particularly fulfilling.
I use AI like StackOverflow on steroids. And like using stackoverflow, I do it in a browser and I don't let the LLM touch my code.
I, personally, love programming more than ever!
But an LLM will generate you two completely different things today and tomorrow. Heck, even if you stash its changes and redo the same prompt.
They are NOT comparable at all.
Just that comparing LLM to a compiler is nonsense. Because one is deterministic and the more using it, the better the quality will get.
In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.
I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.
Writing code is like trying to build a house without powertools. Could you do it? Sure. But no one ever will, for most values of no one.
I won't argue that the web is more 'capturable' by LLMs, though. It was maybe slightly out of reach by a large cohort of developers who wouldn't have considered themselves "UI people" (or who scoffed at it for various reasons), but now is well within vibe-territory.
Thank you.
You know, it is called "soft" for a reason...
If LLMs could be relied upon to produce a good result every time, then they would be like power tools. But they can't, so they aren't. Nobody would use a cordless drill that has a 10% chance of the drill bit suddenly moving several inches to the left of where you were aiming.
Power tools cannot "produce any house in hours"
I guess just blow my brains out? Just.. Thanks for trying man, but you picked the wrong thing to specialize in, now you're completely redundant and worthless to society. Here's your cyanide pill?
God damn I'm so bitter about all of this. I was doing so well for a bit now I feel like I've completely wasted my life.
This is exactly the value of a person in all capitalistic systems. If we want to change this we need widespread socialism / UBI. Maybe Georgism.
The fact that you're a good friend or partner to someone definitely has value, but not something anyone cares about.
Right now I'm just at a loss. I've never wanted to be anything other than a programmer before.
We'll already see the hype to start cooling down. If you're okay with cleaning up messes you need not be so pessimistic.
https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...
Assuming the code is produced to serve human needs there will be humans in the loop somewhere. Not nearly as many as before and not in the same roles but they will be there
The advent of the Spinning Jenny, water frame and power loom (etc.) changed textile manufacturing for good and made the end result so cheap that it is now seen as disposable. There are still some people in the loop controlling the machines but not nearly as many as before and also not really the same people since it takes a different skill set to keep a textile production line running than it takes to spin and weave.
The same is true for the advent of the phototypesetting machine (Linotype etc.) and the offset press which irreversibly changed print production. There are still people in the loop but not nearly as many and with a different skill set.
Now what about the "Coding Johnny"?
Generative models are now doing the same to coders, irreversibly changing the software production process. There will be far fewer people involved and those people will have a different skill set. Software will become disposable, more like RNA then DNA, if the specifications change the Coding Johnny will churn out a new version.
The difference is scale. Letting LLMs go out of hand is like the movie Fantasia. Sure people can make a mess on their own but with LLMs can do so much worse in such a short amount of time.
> Generative models are now doing the same to coders
Programming involves quite a bit more than just typing. However, typing the code does help with understanding. Once we stop understanding code because it's just generated AI slop good luck fixing the mess.
Now that even Anthropic and OpenAI called for slowing down. It's obvious that we're past peak hype and realization of the cost of LLMs will set in.
> This is the game changer.
> This is not communication. It’s a tool output.
Not saying I'm 100% sure, but those seemed slightly sus to me
I just pray open weight wins at the end and people actually utilize their ai and own their ai.
