I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories

However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.

Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.

Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.

    I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate 
    feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along 
    with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't 
    alone in that feeling.

I have very mixed feelings.

- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow

- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy

- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).

- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.

- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us

Obviously this is not true for every SWE. A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI. I see people that struggle because they've identified with the writing code part a lot and that's gone now that the machine is doing it, I bet that's hard.

We had our work stolen and they're squeezing us with it, all for garbage, what in the world are you talking about.

Well, no, for a lot of us, there really is no other side. Slop farming is not software engineering and it never will be; scribbling some Markdown that begs agents to omit bugs is not equivalent to using high-level languages with thoughtful abstractions to directly define program behavior. I didn't want to be a manager when I worked in the industry and I certainly don't want to be one now. Moreover, it's downright offensive for a purported expert to defer their expertise to a SAAS black box.

On the bright side, we will probably (eventually) self-segregate into communities that code however they want and leave the other side the fuck alone.

In my case I had prior experience with tech support and I saw lots of people struggling to use computers and it's interfaces.

So my joy comes equally from coding or seeing people relieved that their problems were solved.

With that mindset that I'm able to fly with Claude or codex.

And even doing my comp sci more than a decade ago many professors told that I should worry more about the outcomes and what problems I'm solving, instead of building this life game around coding only. So I'm grateful for them.

Maybe that can help other people getting out of this dread feeling whenever they are using A?

My frustrations changed, nonetheless, with AI. When it forgets cases that the LLM session and I forgot to cover, that for me is pretty obvious if I had or gave more time to evaluate and review things.

This week I realized that running a separate session and asking dumb questions about the plans and recent pull requests helps grounding again.

I certainly did not come to computing to be a manager, in fact I already had that role and freely downgraded myself.

I don't know if it helps, but they should know that for every one of them that experiences this grief, it brings joy to ten other people that are now able to do things (make vibe-coded programs) that used to be out of reach for them.

I never cared about the social aspects of it other than releasing the odd plugin I developed.

My social life is entirely offline.

Speak for yourself.

I love writing code. But I also love solving problems. AI allows me to solve problems in different ways. And I am totally enjoying that as well. If someone got into this SWE only to code, yes, they may not love where things are today and appear to be going in the future.

Those of us who refuse to use that stolen labor are loosing our jobs, fast.

But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.

Or during a sales meeting, an experienced engineer can have a quick prototype done to show the client.

For me it's about losing much of the entire career, because companies will come to expect AI-level work that I can't/won't provide.

> Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.

IMO This assumes that one views programming as more than just a job/career, but not everyone does so.

> Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control.

For some, this is actually relieving. Sometimes we want to be more ignorant, sometimes it makes us happier.

- Eric Hoffer

And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).

The chilling bit is that the machines are doing just fine on the understanding programs front (up to and including decompiling them from machine code).

I think this is a crucial point. The AI era seems to bring out two distinct movements in people: Those that always saw the human as a necessary bottle-neck, and those that actively sought and enjoyed interacting with another human brain.

Now, what you're describing is really about the "culture of convenience". People prefer Expedia to human travel agents because it reduces friction (of interacting with people). Same goes for Uber, Waymo and so on. Good piece on it - https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/cult-of-convenience-9.7371392

"right now the future does seem bright"

This reads like "Fuck you, I've got mine." Who cares about those wage workers anyway, right?

It doesn't seem like the SWE labor market has been shedding anywhere near that order of magnitude of jobs (there are about 1.7 million SWEs in the USA alone) or that companies going heavy into AI are boosting revenue significantly.

I think all things considered we're only getting a single digit percentage total productivity increase.

At most places I've worked, the "designing and writing code" part (basically the part that LLMs can do) was maybe 5-15% of the calendar time it took to actually get the software out into the market. The remaining 85-95% of the time was spent on squishy people-things like aligning stakeholders, getting executive buy-in, working with x-functional teams, getting priorities aligned so one team wasn't done in 30 minutes while the other team took 30 days, doing security reviews, doing privacy reviews, doing legal reviews, doing QA and verification, lining up marketing, educating salespeople, waiting for people to get back from vacation, waiting for people to get back from sick leave, waiting for people to respond to their E-mails, waiting for people to click "approved" on various internal review sites, doing final reviews with executives so they know what their company is doing. These other things take up the vast majority of the time it takes to release a feature. LLMs are only speeding up the relatively tiny 'code writing' part.

I know nothing of Blender but in the FreeCAD community there was a little disagreement about use of AI and it has taken some time to find a policy most people don't mind (one of the original authors stepped back from maintaining because he disagrees with this policy). Plus they have also traditionally had quite a long release cycle.

Nevertheless, FreeCAD is much more capable than it was just few years ago (largely through slogged human effort in the main) and the velocity of change is very evidently increasing with AI.

However, CAD applications are quite a difficult example to pick, because bRep kernels are hard, FreeCAD is not in control of theirs (it's OpenCascade, also used by PrusaSlicer/Orca Slicer for STEP conversion), etc.

AFAIK OpenCascade's development has picked up recently; whether they are using AI I don't know, but I expect they are not accepting AI commits from outside sources.

This might be a problem in itself. I find myself unable to have the time to even investigate new software because even newer software with even more features comes around a week later. I bookmark so many Show HNs that I'm impressed by and only ever go back to a rare few.

But geometry kernels are severely difficult work, the maths is hard, the calculations are hard, efficiency is hard, and also policy is hard; decisions around topological naming, around the correctness of fillets (which major CAD packages do not agree on), etc.

They are among the most difficult things people have ever done with computers, which is why there are only about four of them, and they do actually put assembling large distributed platforms in the shade.

Now, will LLMs be able to help with that maths? I hope so.

Re: VSTs, I don't know much about them. The pace of development of AUv3 plugins seems to have increased, though.

From what I can see, it’s just a bunch of defaults pre-installed on top of Linux. Some of the defaults they use like Proton is far more complex and impressive than their entire distro , and that was built before agents.

"ChatGPT, list the files in this directory. use ls"

vs

"ChatGPT, list the files in this directory. no utility exists but here's a hexdump of the hard drive"

the AI might muddle through with option #2, but #1 is way more efficient

The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.

All of this stuff is so new, and we're supposed to hand wave away quality and maintainability?

If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.

No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.

A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.

That is not what's happened at all. That's the entire point of the discussion. The robots aren't as good as humans, they can't follow specs or instuctions as well, and their output is markedly worse than human output in a lot of ways.

The only difference is that the robots are faster and don't need rest. And we're discovering now that that is not good enough.

(1) We help you

(2) We undercut you

(3) You go out of business

(4) Your buddies go out of business as well

(5) Prices start rising

Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.

You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.

History shows that when a slope appears, regulation steps in, technology evolves to solve the problem, or the culture shifts to reinterpret the tool.

In almost every case, the feared bottom of the slope was never reached because humans constantly built ramps or bridges along the way.

My personal opinion is that all hell breaks loose due to continuity issues, time and money waste (excessive token spend to simulate competency), and a general air of malaise to the point where problems are tolerated far longer than necessary because "the bot will get to it eventually."

This is also the way I wrote programs when I barely knew how to program btw and I got stuff done then.

Think about doing carpentry by nailing planks together in roughly the pattern you want, rather than meticulously drawing and then cutting outlines - which I have also done. The first iteration (of that carpentry project) fell apart the moment I tried to use it and was a miserable experience because I still had to complete the task with the pieces, and didn't have the opportunity to go back to fix it. The second iteration, which still just took a couple of days to build, was much stronger and was awesome. It can be fun and get results that are obviously acceptable because they are what the AI would have output anyway.

Actually, just for curiosity, I just asked ChatGPT how to make the thing I made, and ironically it's doing a big design up front process where it wants to know all sorts of parameters first before it will tell me anything. So my "AI mode" was more direct than an actual AI! It also wanted me to buy a welding machine even though the thing can be made just fine, better even, out of wood. Maybe that's that new product advertisement feature.

That's where we're headed but I'd say the smart teams will have that 'caretaker guy' use judgment to know when and when not to apply AI. That describes one of my businesses perfectly [1].

[1] https://lattice.engineering

In some respects maybe in others less so.

So in my situation I am using a client for a system and am using a very specific part of it even though there is a lot of other complicated code in other parts of the client. A LLM is good enough to maintain the code path I am using and of course any changes are triggered / watched over by me. In this situation I am comfortable letting LLMs do most of the code. I would be less enthused if that was outside of my control and the code changes were more often and faster.

That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.

As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.

But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.

I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.

Ah... maybe I misstated my question. There are people who are stopping working on FOSS projects because that's no longer fun. But what I meant to focus on is people who say they are still creating software, using AI, and therefore miss coding. And the fact that there are people who say they wouldn't use a vibe-coded project.

If those are overlapping groups, there would seem to be an inconsistency, but maybe it's resolved as I mentioned in the first paragraph of this comment.

I'm still interested in anyone's thoughts.

The idea that advertisers and malware merchants are good stewards of the browser or email or social media needs to end. Especially when said tech leaders hold deeply anti-human beliefs.

When I signed up for AWS conference in Sydney this year, they listed out all the courses by codes in a vibe-coded React component. It didn't have any search function, so I had to manually scroll through it multiple times to pick my courses. The whole conference was AI-first.

AI is not as good as a team of developers. I don't know if it ever will be, but it definitely isn't today. AI is actually quite terrible at what it does. But it doesn't need to be better than that. Because the point of enterprise isn't to make good software.

Do you realize it won't last long at such rate?

But also it has a bolted on type system.

I dont mind burning tokens on code that is well typed.

Just like I dont mind burning tokens on TDD.

That's not quite practiced by those who preach "the genie is out of the bottle, and we invested too much to allow him go back, so adapt or die".

I'm not sure why he isn't rich enough to walk away.

https://davidcel.is/articles/the-dhh-problem