It's still ok to enjoy programming

The problem is, baking something and sharing it with others brings people together, there's smalltalk, catching up, other human stuff. Which in the end is kinda the point of it.

Like your post says, with programming, it's mostly just a race to what achieves the goal, with the exception of demoscene and retro programming, I guess. I started learning ARM assembly so I could make a lisp implementation in it. It will be useless, no one will use it, and an AI could bang one out in a few minutes, but overcoming that struggle to understand things in different ways has to be the goal with hobby programmers like myself, I guess.

I'd say the post deals _strictly_ with the former. LLM code generation absolutely changes community dynamics, what other projects are published, etc.

I feel similarly blessed nowadays. I did try to play the fame game with my Github projects but I could never find a problem that enough people cared for to get any kind of traction. Or maybe I really just suck at marketing. Either way, I find myself still fulfilled when doing my personal projects. They are not "side hustles" or a "home lab" or a "software factory". They're really just small projects that solve a problem for me. A lot of it also has to do with my very specific decade-old daily personal driver running Linux; my reticence to guarantee support for Mac and Windows (beyond what Node or Python ships by default) could not be helping my case.

And that's fine! Software with an audience of 1 but really fits in seamlessly with my lifestyle. Plus, if I want to change something, I can do so with zero consideration for other platforms. The reason why I wanted to learn to program in the first place is because I wanted the computer to do what I want it to do. Bend to my will ye golem of bits!

• I run (well, I did and will again when my current medical issues are finally sorted out!). There is no way I would ever compete and make anything of it, so it is all for me and occasionally (when not going out solo) a social aspect.

• I like to visit places. Nice bits of countryside, different countries/cities, museums, and other such. I often combine it with the running. None of this is going to affect anyone else at all, except on the few occasions it is a group adventure.

I can still enjoy techie tinkering in the same manner, it just being for me. TBH other hobbies (the running, playing with 3D printing though that does have an aspect of doing things for others, etc.) have left little time for that in recent years, even before AI. I'm a bit of (OK, a lot of…) an AI Luddite, I'm refusing to touch it even though that might be career suicide in the not too distant future, but other people using it isn't going to completely remove my enjoyment of any of my hobbies.

Net - hobbyist programming will change, but not necessarily go away. It will morph into “what doesn’t this linear algebra machine see or know?”

[0] https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

Yes, thats the majority of humanity.

>Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

So your hobby was getting adulation and respect or writing software? Only one of those has changed.

This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

Never thought Justin Searls would say that. So I reread the whole comment over and over again, and it clicked.

I liked building and making stuff work. I also didn't mind and often enjoyed coordinating with (good) clients, managers, or other engineers. I didn't love being a manager and requested a few years ago to go back to an IC role.

That said, I think I didn't like being a manager because of the turnaround time and/or quality of people I managed (partially due to my blind spots in managerial skills, at least in some cases). I improved but it wasn't worth the headache for me at the time.

With agents, I feel some of that pain again, but it also fixes some of the problems I had with it; relatively consistent quality and I find that I can lower my bar of communication with an LLM (I'm not writing in public to a real colleague) while simultaneously getting a lot more out of it, and it tends to not misconstrue what I've written.

I keep going back and forth between loving it and pining for being an old fashioned IC.

All that said, I really enjoy the puzzle of programming, in ways that I couldn't really always do at work -- "it's good enough", etc... I've done it in free time this year but it's hard not to view it as a waste of time now.

Not sure where I'm going with this besides expressing my current thoughts and somewhat agreement. /rant

Now that you phrase it that way.. I think I'm very glad to have transitioned from 'programmer' or 'dev' to 'big-tech software engineer'. The jobs are very different. I had no idea what I was in for. SWE is much less fun. All meetings and alignments and docs. But I think that's what my job would have been forced to become with AI anyway, so at least it prepared me for this new world.

As many people here and on Reddit can attest, I am one of these loud voices.

I actually see programming as all three: a hobby, fun and a profession. And AI itself is... neither. It's not enjoyable because you have to understand everything anyway if you want to do a decent job, no matter if for hobby or for work. The only thing AI can do is save you time when you have no starting point at all - i.e. reconnaissance in pentesting.

True, but dealing with agents is still easier than dealing with people (at least for introverted personalities). That being said, you still need to deal with other people's army of agents.

I see it similar to programming, before it was kind of a craft, many crafts are not paid very well, I know that woodworking can be very fulfilling but Ikea exists and noone pays you 1000€ for a simple table. But programming was a well paid craft because people are bad at thinking in general and not everyone can do the thinking good. Now we externalize the thinking and hope it will just work somehow... But the point is..that is a different job. Others already said it, suddenly you are a manager and not a craftsperson anymore. No more tinkering.

About the hobby stuff, I hate that the unannoited ones slop there way into _my_ hobby space, pollute everything with one shots that get abandoned in a few hours and drown everything with their half baked brain childs without polish that all look and feel so same-ish, the "map of something something" projects I have seen that were missing any kind of error validation or check of completness is astonishing.

Sure, we can develop familiarity with tools and build cool stuff, but this is no different than knowing how to configure your washing machine (IMO). You could, of course, build a software-equivalent to a laundromat or a professional laundry service, but how many of those are needed?

Don't get me wrong: I think automation is cool and all, in washing and software development both. But if the profession of me and much of the labor force depended on handwashing skills, I'd love to see the displacement being taken more seriously.

Experiencing this led me to feel burnout. It's horrible. I now value thinking and the ability to think much more. Not that I didn't before, but I mean I have a whole new appreciation for it and a whole new disdain for Claude slop where someone could have otherwise done a better job.

However, the real value is in complex, non-trivial, and above all novel code. This has been true for a long time, and it's just as true in open source as it is in industry or academia. Here, agents are far less useful. In fact, the only people I've seen have any kind of success using agents on these kinds of "serious" projects are people who are already serious programmers. They already know how to design and test stuff, they already know how to supervise junior developers, they already have an intuition for which aspects of the project the can safely delegate to a less experienced developer. So they're able to use agents as a "better autocomplete" in their own code, or use it to flesh out the non-essential and more routine aspects of the project, or even just delegate the agents to the role of code reviewer.

Here's the thing though. The less experienced ones, the people who don't already have those skills, they do get burned when they "stick the fork in the socket," as you put it, or in other words when they try to use agents to take on projects they don't fully understand... but they don't learn anything! The ones I've seen, anyway. Relying on agents insulates you from the code, which also prevents you from building a mental model of what's going on under the hood, which in turn makes it impossible to learn anything at all. They just keep yelling at the agents, telling them to fix stuff even though each fix introduces yet another regression in an endless loop... they don't know how to dig themselves out of the hole they've dug. And after all, what is the solution? To spend five years down in the code mines, paying your dues as a junior dev, reading and typing and thinking about mere code for the requisite 10,000 hours? Nobody has the time or inclination for that.

Agents, in other words, break the learning loop. You can't learn to program, and therefore can't learn to design or architect software, not really, if you're using agents. I am unfortunately coming to the sad conclusion that the last programmer has already been born; if you didn't have 5+ years of experience and a pretty good handle on the more advanced aspects of programming (such as software architecture, design patterns, optimization, debugging, etc.) before agentic programming became a thing, then I don't see how you ever will.

It'll be like COBOL programmers - the industry will shrink from the top-down, with the first to go being the new college graduates looking to enter the workforce. Inexperienced devs have always been given less interesting projects, but they stuck it out because they were learning valuable skills, building experience, making the economically rational decision to invest in their own career. But anyone entering the market today will never get out of that trench - anyone that actually needs a real programmer for a serious project will hire someone with decades of experience - there will be plenty of supply. And the projects on offer for junior devs won't teach them how to program, only to supervise agents. As a knock-on effect, smart young people already see the writing on the wall and are pivoting to other majors, which just reinforces the trend. This might cause problems in a few decades when all the real programmers start to retire, but when has the market ever considered long term consequences?

There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.

You’d have to be pretty unbelievably stellar to produce code 200x better than Opus. I can get a lot of business value out of not-great $20/mo coding. The people writing our checks do not care about the same things we care about.

And I say this as someone who is very upset about what this stuff is doing to my career and hobby.

On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.

I would recommend "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit for an insightful and entertaining overview of just how much of software "engineering" is based on "truths" that we don't question.

Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.

Yeah and this is what pisses me off about the software factory deniers. Without the software factory to guide the agent and reject its code, how exactly is it supposed to do better than an experienced developer who already internalized the company workflows? All the Agent sees is its context window, it's not a fully formed human that can learn the workflow over time.

If I guide the Agent file by file and function by function, then review and reject the code, the code quality becomes reasonably good, but when I let it do whatever it wants, the code quality reaches all time lows and it just compounds on itself.

I also noticed that the code quality heavily depends on the underlying software ecosystem with Javascript often having the worst code quality because it presumably got trained on minified code as well.

Agent harnesses do not solve software development in a hands off way. You still have to baby sit them. Every single time I use an auto review based workflow (aka vibe coding) it just doesn't work.

"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"

"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"

"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"

There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.

Most programmers probably don’t care about programming. There has been a never ending stream of libraries and frameworks to allow programmers to do less of it.

But it’s not stopping. It’s not slowing down. I don’t have to like it, but I’m not going to have any impact on the transition.

These skills are all less valuable today, btw, along with roughly anything that would have allowed someone to thrive economically pre-2025 in spite of occasional accusations of high-functioning autism.

The issue is not that programming is getting automated. The issue is that the only skills that retain value are in low supply among programmers - and every other career you've considered retraining for.

Great time to be in sales.

Even in something as heavily automated and mass produced as clothing, there's still a market for smaller scale, higher quality products.

So AI is kind of just bringing that to its logical conclusion.

The more I use AI at work the less I have to "think myself", which should mean I have more mental capacity outside of work, right? That isn't the case. Because the task I "hand over" to Claude (I never really hand stuff over, but I usually work together with Claude to help me understand problems) doesn't magically disappear from my cognitive load.

So when I leave work now compared to 5 years ago. I have done more stuff, but my cognitive load is higher and it is harder to unwind than it was 5 years ago. Which makes me more tired. I wonder if is this the general experience? Or am I doing something different.

One difference I can see is if I was already a grandmaster in my field, and AI was literally only doing stuff that I already know exactly how works, then I would have less anxiety.

I think it could be argued this is exactly what programming _is_.

The "I haven't written or read code in a year" experience is not universal.

And I also have roughly the same approach for my own projects. I use LLMs to brainstorm design, algorithms, data structures, maybe have it spit out small building blocks in isolation, but I'm still very much in control and owning every line.

For companies in this bubble creative destruction is the order of the day and this manifests in me-too behavior from executives coupled with breathless enthusiasm for new technologies. It can often be excessive from the POV of an outsider looking in but not embracing the new thing fast enough could be the difference between filing Chapter 11 or having a trillion dollar market cap for these firms. All of this could occur within the span of 6 months.

Companies/Organizations outside this bubble don't face the same pressures (at least in a compressed timeframe) so they lag a little bit in responding to trends. But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming.

It makes sense though, US workers have less protections and rights than across the pond so they have to bow in fear to their managers, who themselves have the typical Silicone Valley brainrot, and since we're currently at the cusp of a massive bubble pop they need to try their hardest to justify the infinites amount of money being spent on the scam

Now, I don't mean art as in pictures. Rather, I mean science is objectively correct or incorrect, while art is not. So things like does your code work is a science, and things like your design is an art. In regards to science, AI will do the same things as you, because there's only one "truth". However, in regards to art, it would never do the same things that you do.

One of my favorite games is Tunic. If the developer had tried to one-shot Tunic with an AI, it wouldn't have been Tunic. Maybe it would have been a good game, maybe it would have had a lot of similar ideas. But they wouldn't have been the exact same ideas. Tunic itself would have been forever lost.

So what am I trying to say? Find parts of programming where the path not taken matters. Then it doesn't matter if Claude could one-shot it, because it's one shot will be different than what you do.

Unfortunately, this doesn't fix all of programming. The more science-y parts of programming such as reverse engineering do get affected by AI. But to give you an idea, I'm building a programming language. I toyed with the idea of using LLMs. When I decided not to, I had a problem - my language had become too complex to do it without AI. So I sat down and scrapped the entire thing. Now I have a new programming language that's even better. If I had one shot it with Claude, I wouldn't have had this language. So in the end, doing it by hand mattered.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

I worry about burnout.

Outside of LinkedIn Lunatics and social media engagement bait, I agree that nobody is saying you can't enjoy programming.

Of course we can all still enjoy programming. I still do some personal projects manually. It's fun and it also keeps my skills sharp.

It also makes you realize how much non-optimal stuff slips into entirely AI written codebases if you're not paying attention to the code. I can push on Opus 5.5 or Astra all day and get output that works, but when I get into the code and start processing it myself I ask a lot of questions that result in "You're absolutely right!" responses followed by having the LLM clean up what it did.

The sad part is knowing that the golden window or programming job enjoyment has closed. We had a relatively small window where software jobs paid extremely well to do work we enjoyed. My happiest career memories were working with small teams at startups where we would sit in a room together and be focused on coding for hours.

I'm sad for a second reason: The years before AI took over, my jobs had been trending away from that focused coding time for other reasons. The trend in the industry was to stuff companies full of roles like product owner, scrum master, cross-functional project managers, and other roles. These are highly valuable in small quantities with the right people in place, but at some point it got out of control. Most of the companies I was with felt like a constant circus of meetings and debates over what to build, with little time left for that focused coding work anyway. I still cringe when I remember a meeting with a CTO who explained his target ratios for engineers to designers to product managers to engineering managers to project managers where we realized software engineers were becoming a small minority on the software engineering teams. I disliked it at the time, but now I'm extra sad that my last window of possible focused paid-to-code time was spent mostly in meetings and Slack debates.

My problem is it doesn't even do that. LLMs still aren't good at writing code (despite the hype) and you have to review everything they produce, which takes just as long as writing it myself would. But the industry is falling all over itself to use them to write code, doing a worse job than humans would. It's extremely frustrating.

If anything, I enjoy programming more now with AI assistance, not vibe-coding. The depth and breadth of my work has increased greatly (yes, I still read and write a lot of code and documents, that the agents build on); I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Projects that would have seemed too daunting now seem feasible to tackle. I could even get started on implementing my dream language, or a knowledge management system for agents, or ... the possibilities are endless.

Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference. There is no one breathing down my neck to use more AI where it does not make sense, or to use AI this way or that. I am in the driver's seat, and I only delegate to AI what I need it for, and what it is good at. There is still much that is required of me that the AI cannot do, not anytime soon.

Ever since AI reached a certain level of quality, I haven't been able to stop (vibe) coding. I've discovered that I really enjoy designing and building products, more than tinkering; occasionally, I come across algorithms or other technical details that I find interesting, and I switch to manual mode.

At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that.

Cynically, this could be seen as plumbing, but there's an art to designing efficient and usable products, that I personally enjoy very much.

I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.

And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).

And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!

Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:

  "Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
  around the starship shell.
  "Why, of course!" she laughed.
  "Then why do you do it?"
  "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
  for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
  on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
  I helped build that.
  The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
  that it was you who actually did it."
  
  "Hmm," he said.
  "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
  where a few other construction workers were standing, 
  pointing inside the model and talking.
  "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
  "Yes," he agreed.
  The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
  swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
  He smiled. "I suppose not."
  "You suppose correctly," the woman said.
  "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."

Edit: I really don't understand the down votes, what did I say that's do bad?

Now I can work on much larger and much more challenging projects where I care more about the end result than learning little details.

Something has certainly been lost, but I’ve at least gained something else in return. I can also do use an empirical approach now, like testing whether a big change would be beneficial without having to map it out and try to estimate the effect. This has made what I try to work on more research-like than engineering-like; I’m trying to figure out if something is possible rather than how to best implement something I know is possible.

I still worry that soon there won’t be any way to contribute economically, that the machine will eventually be better at everything, but this is a much broader problem than just software or even engineering.

AI excelling beyond a human at writing code is not an objective truth.

I would say even without AI, a manager telling a developer what to code or how to code, will never be better than that engineer themselves being the driver and the developer.

For me personally, quality code has a strong human component. Only I know what's best for the code, based on:

1. my deep understanding of the long history of the organization and of its mission and concepts 2. my intricate personal relationships with the users and the other developers 3. all of my hundreds of unique, personal experiences troubleshooting problems, which are always a combination of code and interpersonal relationships, the open source community, and opposing stakeholders.

Until AI becomes AGI (and that's a big if) and you can train it on 43 years of experience, it will just be an approximation of a true person's holistic engineering pedigree. It will always be asymptotic to true competence. It will always be second-best, even with a human driver.

It is an amazing time to be alive, scary and uncertain, but amazing nonetheless :)

By far my biggest use at the moment is just getting all the software I use to function as I want it too.

It may be obvious to conclude that good programmers are good reviewers but I think all variations exist. I wonder how many people don't like their jobs anymore because they don't like reviewing code written by AI.

I have always been the opposite, despite mostly having IC roles in my career. Still, I don't enjoy the change, mostly because the UX of this tooling is absolutely miserable when you need to do anything serious with it. I am past the point where I thought it was user error and think it's just fundamentally baked into the ecosystem to be annoying to work with. At least in most management situations, the employee isn't going to gaslight you, question every tiny decision you make (or worse, subvert ones it finds more 'favorable' for itself) or just make up wild, easily disprovable bullshit in a constant stream of verbal fecal matter. I've worked with maybe one person that came remotely close to that and they were easily ignored. This stuff's persistent and unavoidable.

I am getting a lot more done, but I am a lot more tired.

Who is forcing you to use AI?

I love solving problems, programming was always about that for me. The sucky part was always "I know the solution and written it out, now I need to use a text editor to actually make it work like that", and the fun part was always figuring out how to solve the problem, making sure it actually does solve it in real-life, and once it's been implemented, iterating on it until it gives people some sort of pleasure to use.

Most of the other passionate programmers I've met in life have thought about programming the same way, all of us favored approaches with less code, not more, because typing sucks and is slow, and more code means more bugs. I haven't met any of you "I love typing special characters into a computer" people in real-life, and I'm wondering where I could, because clearly it isn't just you who feel like this, seems there is a somewhat large section of programmers who enjoyed the typing experience more than the problem solving part of programming.

What's always been clear, is that people get into programming for different reasons, and some of those reasons might no longer lead to the lucky life of working with what you love and get paid handsomely for it, which sounds terribly sucky and scary, and I do feel for the people that now have to face this.

A very large number of us fell in love with coding before we were taught - we self-taught, through magazine type-ins, early intro textbooks in school libraries, or perhaps the odd tutorial while trying to mess about with a myspace or geocities page.

That generation coded for fun. The itch that is scratched is the problem being solved, the cool little trick, the code golf or the figuring something out, or the new thing you just learned.

It just so happens, the market paid quite well for those skills, so we all got to do some version of this for a compensation package that could embarrass us talking about it at a family dinner with our parents.

And then, another generation arrived who saw that the career was well paid and that was the itch that got scratched. Except, for them, it didn't seem much like fun because what's fun about fixing bugs and figuring out class hierarchies and reading API or SDK docs?

I don't wish to generalise, but honestly: when was the last time you saw a programmer who started to learn it all at college or later, be really giddy about their work? They're here to get paid and to get the job done, they never really got into this gig for "fun", it just seemed a better option than becoming a lawyer or going to medical school.

I worked in one company where the divide was hilarious: older types hacking Ruby in vi/emacs on mechanical keyboards and wanting to code advent of code at lunch vs younger types who thought hoodies weren't workwear, "engineered" Java services in huge IDEs that they wanted to autocomplete everything, everywhere, and spending lunch talking earnestly about whether BTC was an investable asset class. OK, you do you, everyone can be whatever they want to be, but I know which one is more fun for me.

The real tension arrives when the industry - expecting us all to be super geeks having fun all the time - implicitly expects us to show up at interview with a) side projects and b) knowledge of cutting edge tech that we weren't exposed to at work.

The "hackers" (for want of a better word), will have side projects. The "engineers" (for want of a better word), will prioritise other things at the weekend like, I don't know, going to golf clubs or pilates classes. The hackers will play with tech more than the engineers in their own time, because it's fun, and push boundaries of their own knowledge.

About 10 years ago, there was active push back. "I shouldn't be expected to have side projects to interview at X", appears on social media. Sure, I can see that, spending time with your children does seem important, but, like, there's a lot of hackers who have kids and side projects, and well, are you saying they shouldn't be able to do this as a hobby as well? Or that you feel there's some lack of inclusion because you hate building software and they don't, and they might interview better than you? Well, OK... I guess...

Then, GenAI enters the chat. The engineers see promise - productivity rises per hour while the boring bit (figuring out how to build software), melts into the background and they can spend more time talking to people. The hackers don't like talking to people quite so much and see the fun bit melting away as a real problem. But also, this is the cutting edge stuff that they now need to understand a lot more as part of their hobby. And it's horrible.

And then at work, the mandates come down from leadership. Token maxing, leaderboards and monitoring of AI output, questions about why you're going about it the "slow way", when our competitors are not. For a whole bunch of people, that's a really, really sad decline.

Imagine if you were so into your motorcycle you had figured out how to get paid very well riding it professionally - perhaps as a courier for body organs or something - and then somebody turned up and said "nope, you're going to operate this automated delivery drone from now on, where you just type in the address and it does all that navigating and getting things where they need to be, and you don't. Oh, and by the way, motorcycles are boring and stupid and you shouldn't really ride them at the weekend either because drones are better and if you keep on going on about how much you like your motorcycle, we're going to judge you, OK?".

You'd feel pretty rotten, and mourn the loss of a corner of your life that gives you joy a little. Every minute you played with your bike (perhaps in secret!), you'd be thinking "should I not be keeping up with this drone stuff?", just as you had done the last X years of your career when a new advancement came you wanted to be on top of, except this advancement takes away the fun.

I say all this as somebody who studied software engineering, and who described himself professionally as an engineer for many years, but in habit, in reality, spent almost every day from the age of 11 hacking.

The pressure to use AI everywhere, to "keep up" with it all, it's horrid. I know people who want to just quit and go become farmers, because at least then they're not exposed to something they loved since their teenage years being destroyed by middle managers who resent them.

For many of us, this era feels like laying to rest a history of over 70 years. And it's sad.

So, some of us are going to huddle together around our memories and keep going, and AI can sod off (at least in our downtime), and we're going to remind each other of the fun and it being OK to hand crank solutions again for the joy of it.

Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.

Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.

And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.

0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?

And that's OK.

That said, it's true that all the default decisions it initially took were not good. I had to keep insisting that the solution should scale linearly with number of workers. With every additional feature or adjustment, it kept adding shared processing bottlenecks, even though it required less than 20% extra code to keep it embarrassingly parallel. And that's with my entire codebase designed to be embarrassingly parallel from the ground up.

I think there's definitely a weakness there. That said, I think this industry tends to shun embarrassingly parallel solutions; equating it to overengineering. Personally, I find embarrassingly parallel solutions more elegant and robust especially in terms of state management. Doesn't require that much additional work. Everyone seems to be on board with Functional Programming which also helps to manage state more reliably (and often helps make code embarrassingly parallel) but my impression is that just aiming for parallelism gives you the same key benefits as FP. Allowing modules to hold state isn't the problem. The problem is that state has to be handled carefully. FP is kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, IMO.

https://dontpastetheai.com/

https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read

A more concerning option is that he does see the value, but the temptation of the zero-effort-machine is too strong.

Learning to put in enough effort for engineering takes - took - years of education, where double digit percentages failed each year. Some of us barely made it through the filter. I have no confidence I would if I encountered it as a youth today.

How do you know that? Do you read AI code? I heard (DHH, Uncle Bob, my own co-workers) that reading the code is no longer an economically viable activity. And if you are not reading the code, how would you know what it looks like.

I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.

It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.

That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.

A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.

Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.

It's a great future.

So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.

I think someone here occasionally opens ChatGPT web, free version of course, and copy-pastes some fragments. They claim it is still very, very far off from being useful. At first I was feeling sorry, but now I feel awesome.

It’s amazing. It’s like living in a museum and the pay is great too. I always wanted to leave tbh but now I’m heavily reconsidering riding this one out..

For me programming was never only about creating the thing but also about becoming better at design and problem solving. So I'm still doing things mostly by hand to get these benefits. I'll use the LLM as a brainstorm partner.

It's like when I'm trying to learn a foreign language. Asking the AI for a translation of a paragraph is the easy shortcut but you know it's not going to help in the long run. It's better to manually look in the dictionary or look for real-world usage, or even ask the AI to explain the grammar, the effort itself is what helps crystallize the knowledge.

This approach won't be intuitive for the next generation. But LLMs can definitely be used to teach you how to do things instead of doing the things for you. We need to educate people about how to use them a way that make them better rather than simply delegate thinking.

Its something I've noticed in many folks. You'd say something like "well sure, did you try using a different model" and you will be met with screeching. Its almost as if they've shut off facts and made up their minds.

An example: a year back I wanted to show that AI doesn't hallucinate that much.

Here's like a 20 comment long conversation with a person who believed that ChatGPT hallucinates easily. It took them a long time to prove it - they used toy examples and it did't work because they'd never used the thinking version. Then they had to resort to esoteric examples in the benchmark which still didn't work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693707

We get it, you’re vegan, but your agenda is extremely off-topic in this case, to the point of being flamebait.

Or if you prefer "have you tried the new iPhone, it's much better than the HP iPAQ".

The future of software is very clearly: business people state what they need, in business language. Agents handle architecting, planning, implementation, testing, and verification of software that fills those needs. Business people QA the final result.

That's not where things are now, at least not yet. But the writing is on the wall for "software" as a profession. You've got a few years yet. Work on getting promoted or starting a business of your own.

Was this a common thing? I don't know which bubble is more common, but personally I can't recall ever working with someone who couldn't explain what they did (just copy paste?), except for maybe configurations.

In my experience, people most definitely understand less of the technical implementation now vs before. Heck, not only technical, I've seen presentations from business where the presenter clearly vibed their deck and don't understand the content.

But I would prefer to have a job.

People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.

https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...

Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.

Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.

In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.

Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?

If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"

They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??

really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.